Journal Inquirer > No more 'sacred cows' but still a lot of mooing

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No more 'sacred cows' but still a lot of mooing
By Chris Powell

Published: Saturday, November 28, 2009 1:14 AM EST

Municipal officials throughout Connecticut are waxing indignant that, amid state government's worsening insolvency, an exploding state budget deficit, Governor Rell has proposed reducing state financial grants to towns by 3 percent. If the grants are cut, cities and towns will have to reopen their budgets and raise property taxes again or cut spending.Yes, state government could hardly be more incompetent than it has been here. The governor and General Assembly could not enact a budget on schedule and then the Democratic budget the governor allowed to become law without her signature was a fraud, built on ridiculously excessive revenue and savings estimates. But the complaints of the municipal officials suggest that they haven't been paying attention. For anyone reading the newspaper dispatches from the state Capitol knew that the budget was phony and would catch up with cities and towns eventually.

Throughout the year the governor, a Republican, pretended that municipal governments could be insulated from state government's financial strains. She insisted that state grants should be maintained at current levels. Town officials were only too happy to pretend along with her. But the other day the truth was admitted officially, as state budget director Robert L. Genuario announced, "There cannot be any more sacred cows." State grants to cities and towns, Genurario said, inevitably are tied to state government's own financial situation, and as that situation worsens, municipalities have to expect to feel it.Of course Genuario thus suggested that the Rell administration and the legislature had been protecting sacred cows all along. And those sacred cows have been easy to see: particularly municipal employee unions, whose members consume, via their compensation, the bulk of the state grants now in question. Particularly sacred have been members of teacher unions, who, throughout the state, have been boasting among themselves of the political influence that has earned them immunity to even modest concessions like those obtained by the governor from the state employee unions.

But the grants to towns won't be the most painful cuts proposed by the governor. She also proposes to reduce state payments for welfare patients in nursing homes and hospitals, for school health clinics, and for general medical and dental care for the poor.To implement spending cuts, the governor said she would summon the General Assembly into special session on Dec. 15. Democratic leaders at first acted stunned, as if they hadn't realized their budget was phony. The first few Democrats who found their voices started talking about raising taxes on the rich again, which had just been done already, the one part of the budget that was not phony. This is how Democrats talk when there is little public support for raising taxes generally just to maintain a defective status quo.Former Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, quickly postured along these lines. Malloy urged that the poorest and neediest be spared from spending cuts, while declining to identify any recipient of public funds who might not be so poor and needy.The governor proposed appointing a committee of legislators and municipal officials to review state grants and identify state mandates on municipalities that might be suspended to save money. But the most expensive mandate is binding arbitration of contracts for public employee unions, the most fearsome special interest, and few elected officials have the courage to go there, even as most municipalities have just appropriated again for raises and benefit increases.Indeed, compensation for public employees in Connecticut might be reduced by 35 percent or more before the compensation for similar work in the private economy would start drawing many away. As the columnist Mark Steyn wrote recently, "A snapshot of America in the 21st century would show a motivated, can-do small businessman working around the clock until he's 78 to pay for a government worker who retires at 52 with pension and other benefits the private-sector schmuck could never dream of. That's why big government produces no economies of scale. The bigger the government, the more everything it does costs."In these circumstances Connecticut's only hope may be the old revolutionary slogan, "The worse, the better." Down to their last dollars, eventually Connecticut's elected officials and the people who elect them will decide explicitly that there are a few public purposes more important than the contentment of public employees. It's just a matter of how many years and how much degradation it will take.

-----Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer