The Blogster was reminded of John G. Rowland, the disgraced former governor, this afternoon, while looking at the cuts that Gov. Jodi Rell has recommended to lawmakers who need to come up with $39 million to keep the Low Income Home Heating Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) afloat. Almost every biennial budget Rowland presented to lawmakers included closing a train line, like the Danbury and Waterbury lines, to save a few theoretical million dollars. Of course lawmakers never adopted the suggestions. Rell, who last week celebrated herself with new rail cars for the New Haven line, including one with the vanity name “Gov. M. Jodi Rell,” just issued a pre-Thanksgiving list of improbables (rail line closing to save $5 million) to nearly impossible ($582,000 in annual constituent mail for lawmakers; $877,500 in lawmaker expense stipends), to borderline hypocritical (cutting $1.37 from criminal-justice improvements adopted in the wake of the 2007 Cheshire triple murder).
She also suggested:
* reducing Tweed-New Haven Airport’s budget by a million bucks
* cutting $1 million from the Dept of Children and Families homeless-youth program
* cutting $2 million from arts grants
* saving 10 percent of the school-bus budget for $4.7 million
* saving $4 million in so-callednon-public transportation in towns
Don’t forget Friday is a furlough day, so don’t expect state employees to be sitting there waiting for your call.
If you think this is harsh wait until they have to find 100 times this amount to balance the 2011-12 budget, oh wait they’ll just raise taxes or create new ones.