It’s Saturday night at 11 o’clock and the Blogster has been reminded that in the hubbub of Friday’s House vote to send its eminently veto-friendly budget on to Gov. Jodi Rell for her imminent action, he forgot to give Democratic Stamford Mayor Dan Malloy some space to chime in.
Before we print the statement, let’s read it. Hmm. First off, Democrats admitted it was $263 million in deficit. During the debates in the House and Senate, they also conceded that they didn’t include the Special Transportation Fund (the better part of $2 billion) or the language to actually implement the budget. Those items, they said with straight faces, would come after the governor signed the package. You might like to be reminded at this point that the bill to decriminalize marijuana did not even get debated in the Senate this year, let alone passed in both chambers.
Anyway, here’s the statement from Malloy, who lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 2006 to New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, whom Rell squashed like a bug:
“It’s promising that a balanced two year budget has been put forth by the Legislature, and I commend the Democrats on getting this done. While agreeing on a budget is never easy, their jobs were made exponentially harder during this cycle by two things: first, a Governor who refused to perform her constitutional duty by putting forward a balanced budget at the beginning of the legislative session, and two, the worst economy this generation of Americans has ever faced.
“This is unfortunately more than can be said for Gov. Rell – who, to this day, has still not produced a balanced budget – an incredible dereliction of duty on her part.
“For Gov. Rell to attack the Democratic budget as being ‘neither balanced nor remotely realistic’ is just ridiculous. Gov. Rell proposed a ‘budget’ – and I use that term loosely – in February that she knew was out of balance by more than $2 billion, and there’s a video that proves she knew it was out of balance. It was, therefore, by definition unrealistic.
“Gov. Rell’s Alice-in-Wonderland statement then goes on to say the Democratic budget ‘…squanders a golden opportunity to reshape and reduce the size of state government.’ This from a Governor who, through mismanagement and inattention, has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, and who imposed a hiring freeze that somehow allowed almost 1,000 new state employees to be hired.
“There’s one piece of the Governor’s statement with which I agree: she says that ‘all state budgets should be blueprints for the future.’ She’s 100% right. Unfortunately, the budget she proposed months ago was a blueprint for a future in which a state would exist in perpetual fiscal crisis, with mounting debt, continued job loss, and with its most vulnerable citizens, including children, being left out in the cold.
“Governor, you’ve been sent a balanced budget. You’ve already said you’re going to veto it. Perhaps now you’ll stop issuing irresponsible statements, you’ll stop lecturing other people to do your job for you, you’ll produce a balanced budget of your own, and you’ll negotiate a compromise with the Legislature the way 49 other governors do.”