No one's home as pathetic session ends

Maybe what’s most remarkable about the new state budget is that it took so long, three months, to put together so little. The budget spends a bit more than the last budget, makes no serious changes in spending policy, and covers the awful decline in state revenue by borrowing more than 5 percent of expenditures, raiding the state pension fund again, emptying dedicated funds, taxing electricity and covering hundreds of millions of dollars of recurring costs with one-time federal “stimulus� funds.

The budget is thus a colossal abdication, something any drug addict could have accomplished in 10 minutes before shooting up and nodding off.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell, nominally a Republican, and the leaders of the General Assembly’s Democratic majority call it a balanced budget that preserves financial aid to municipalities. But borrowing so much for current expenses is hardly “balanced.� And maintaining state aid to municipalities is no virtue either, since most of that aid is used only to exempt school employee unions from contract concessions.

Maybe the governor and the Democrats can be forgiven a bit for the electricity tax. A monthly surcharge on electrical bills, imposed years ago to compensate utilities for divesting power plants as ordered by state law, is expiring, and the new tax will take only about a third of the expiring surcharge. Electricity costs should still go down.

But business cites Connecticut’s high electricity costs as a major discouragement, and the public interest in continuing to reduce those costs remains infinitely greater than the public interest in sustaining inflated public employee compensation, like the $260,000 salaries being paid to each of two presidents of Southern Connecticut State University, the old one having been fired but kept on the payroll, the new one having been a crony of the state university system’s chancellor. Neither the governor nor the Legislature took notice of this extravagant patronage.

The Senate Republican minority leader, John McKinney, R-Fairfield, notes the obvious things missing from the budget: privatizations, union concessions and agency consolidations. While this session of the Legislature was, by constitutional mandate, a shorter one, the lack of questioning of policy premises and habit was still appalling.

While, for example, the governor and Legislative leaders could argue over whether some judges she wanted to appoint were needed when the courts were economizing by closing facilities, they could not ask whether the state needs all the laws it has. Indeed, the Legislature passed and the governor likely will sign dozens of new laws, some of which will give rise to new causes of action in the overburdened courts.

The failure to try to economize by questioning a few premises amid a near-depression is the responsibility of everyone at the Capitol, but it is mostly the governor’s responsibility. Rather than agreeing with the Democrats to borrow 5 percent of spending and to take budget gimmickry to new lows, the governor could have used her veto to insist that the Legislature face reality and require some sacrifice from the government class so that things might get better. Instead they now are certain to get worse.

Since it would take a long time for the Legislature’s Democratic majority, in thrall to special interests, to begin to perceive a public interest, the governor would have had to be ready to govern indefinitely by executive order without a budget. That would have been work. Instead she joined the Democrats in default, leaving her successor a legacy of disaster.

Nobody is home at the Capitol. The scarier the state’s financial situation got, the more the governor and legislators busied themselves with trivia and sanctimonious posturing.

After a student was killed in a school bus crash, legislators loudly lamented the lack of seat belts on school buses and held a hearing on a bill to require their installation, even as everyone knew that the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for retrofitting old buses or buying new ones with belts couldn’t be appropriated. In the end, legislators congratulated themselves for reducing the sales tax on municipal purchases of buses with belts, buses that, without big new state appropriations, will probably never be bought in the first place. Then they dedicated the law to the student who was killed. Pathetic and insulting.

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