Opinion

Chris Powell: Malloy hard to top for boldness, unpopularity

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Photo: Register Citizen File Photo Photo: Register Citizen File Photo Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Chris Powell: Malloy hard to top for boldness, unpopularity 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

State House Republican Minority Leader Themis Klarides remarked this week that to solve Connecticut’s catastrophic budget problems, elected officials must be bold and risk becoming unpopular. But that injunction already defines Governor Malloy over the last several months.

Of course boldness and unpopularity don’t necessarily make the governor right, but he has proposed a budget slashing state financial aid to most school districts and requiring towns to pay a third of the costs of teacher pensions, proposals that have struck most state and municipal elected officials as bold and unpopular enough for several lifetimes. And while Republican leaders have proposed a few policy changes that could save much money with state employees over the long term, they would do little to balance the next state budget — and, unlike the governor, a Democrat, the Republicans have not proposed a budget of their own.

A week ago the governor was bold in another respect. He declared that the Sheff v. O’Neill approach to school integration cannot and should not be sustained, having caused the state to spend $3 billion in the name of integrating Hartford’s schools while achieving only nominal integration for fewer than half the city’s students. Having just proposed a budget that can’t even preserve the status quo, the governor doesn’t have another dollar for faux integration, much less another billion. He also recognizes that serious integration can be achieved only through racial assignment of students to and exclusion from schools, which federal courts would forbid.

While the governor’s declaration about the Sheff business was bold only because it acknowledged the obvious, which is seldom done in state politics, it still sent a constituency of his party into conniptions, increasing his unpopularity.

Not everything coming out of the Malloy administration lately has been bold and true.

Defending the administration’s proposal to require towns to contribute to the teacher pension fund, budget director Ben Barnes this week questioned why state government should bear all the fund’s costs when pensions are determined partly by how much towns choose to pay their teachers. But Barnes was only pretending not to know the answer.

Barnes knows full well, first, that for decades state policy has been to shift municipal costs to state government in the name of easing municipal property taxes, which are more regressive, less geared to income, than state taxes. Second, he knows that burying teacher pension costs in the state budget has liberated benefits from local scrutiny, where Republicans often get in the way, moving them to the legislature, where Democrats always rule and aim to please the teacher unions, their party’s biggest component.

When even a Democratic administration tires of operating the state for the benefit of the unions, times are changing — that is, becoming catastrophic financially. But no Democrat can state this plainly.

While Barnes was merely disingenuous this week, the governor got demagogic as he proclaimed success for the CTFastrak bus system, the bus highway between Hartford and New Britain. Malloy dismissed critics of the system as wealthy country club members who, because they don’t ride buses, don’t realize that some people do.

In fact, Republican criticism of the bus system lately has been entirely a matter of the administration’s long refusal to disclose its operating costs and whether its supposedly strong ridership is largely a matter of transfers from other routes in the state-operated bus system in the Hartford area.

The system can’t be evaluated without this information, and the governor’s concealing it is more arrogant than bold.

Chris Powell is the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.