Ken Dixon's Blog-O-Rama

Wednesday April 16, 2008.
So amid all the hoopla and feigned surprise yesterday over the suddenly escalating price of planned improvements to the New Haven Rail Yard, did any lawmaker do some basic arithmetic?
2008 minus two equals 2006, the year that the Rell administration got word that the $300-million project was going to double in cost.
Of course, it would have been really big news if the amount had shrunk, as opposed to inflated, but that’s not the point. Gee, wasn’t 2006 a gubernatorial election year?
Can’t you imagine Gov. Jodi Rell’s people ordering the DOT to keep a lid on it, scared silly that New Haven Mayor John DeStefano could surf the issue into the Governor’s Residence?
Chris Cooper, Rell’s Capitol spokesman, told Blog-o-rama on Wednesday that OPM Secretary Bob Genuario simply did not accept the higher number. Genuario, otherwise known as Rell’s budget chief, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he assigned OPM personnel to DOT to see if the number could go down. Be that as it may, Blog-o-rama points out the Rell administration’s near-obsessive tendency to play proprietary information close to the vest, and can thus envision a cynical election-year effort to bury the bad news.
Speaker of the House Jim Amann, D-Milford, said in a Wednesday interview that “It’s feasible” that the governor hid the information.
But Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield, who like Amann, House Majority Leader Chris Donovan and Senate President Don Williams attended a 40-minute meeting with Rell, disputed Amann’s hypothesis of political intrigue.
“I don’t know that anybody ever suggested that or that there was evidence of that,” McKinney said, recalling that the initial $300 million was a “rough estimate” based on two-year-old projections. “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” McKinney said. “A lot of it is DOT, some of it in the Legislature for not asking more questions, but I don’t think anyone suggested that anyone was hiding the ball because of elections.”
Lawmakers are looking at the need to bond an additional $250 million, on top of the original $300 million, to get the rail yard project off the ground.