Ken Dixon's Blog-O-Rama

Thursday April 17, 2008

Gov. Jodi Rell, at the end of an otherwise low-key “avail” with Capitol reporters this morning, got huffy when Blog-o-rama quoted from yesterday’s item from Speaker of the House Jim Amann, who said “It’s feasible” that the governor’s re-election team hid the bad news on the escalating cost of the New Haven Rail Yard project during the 2006 gubernatorial election.
Blog-o-rama: “The speaker of the House yesterday, coming out of your office, said quote it’s feasible that in 2006 the bad news about the train yard was kept from the public in some kind of cynical election-related ploy. Do you want to comment on that?”
Rell: “No, I wouldn’t comment on that,” she said.”I would just tell you that I’m surprised that he would say such a thing. And if you know Bob Genuario (secretary of the Office of Policy and Management) he would probably be equally upset with something like that. But I would tell you that in 2006 Bob worked with the DOT in trying to bring those numbers down in 2006 and 2007.”
Another reporter: When did you first know this project was way over budget?”
Rell: “January.”
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats today – taking a day off from micromanaging their shrinking majority caucus – unearthed some video footage of Rell, dating from a month after her 2006 gubernatorial landslide, as a high-ranking state DOT official gave her the word on an $800 million cost projection for the New Haven rail yard project, up from the original $300 million.
No, the scene was not at a Bosnian airport.

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.

Tuesday April 15, 2008
With the arrival of the 2008 Legislative Guides, listing various committees, rules and lists of lawmakers, it became very obvious to Blog-o-rama that the House Democratic caucus has never been more bloated with leadership titles.
In fact, there are more House Democrats with lofty titles such as assistant majority leader or whip (there are 30 of those), than there are members of the Republican-minority caucus.
This probably wouldn’t matter, except they’re making at least $4.500 a year above the rank-and-file base salary of $28,000. The eleven deputy speakers and deputy majority leaders make another couple grand a year more than the assistants.
To be fair – and Blog-o-rama hates being fair – equivalent minority leaders get the same pay, which your state taxes, due tonight at midnight, underwrite.
The Blogster wouldn’t have noticed this, except the House Democrats’ title run into a second page of the Legislative Guide.
So let’s see how far this incestuous patronage – and that’s what it is – since the 1995 session.
That version of the guide, found in the archive here in the Capitol Press Room, had 13 Senate majority Republicans in leadership positions while Democrats had 11 such titles.
Over on the House side of 1995, there were 21, including exactly one majority whip, the late Richard Tulisano.
There were 15 high falutin titles on the House GOP side.Today, there are a dozen House majority whips, deputy whips and assistant whips.
Over on the House GOP side, there are 21 leadership titles. In the lofty Senate, today Democrats have 23 titles, which coincides exactly with the number of senators in their caucus. So NO ONE is making the rank-and-file minimum.
On the Senate GOP side, there are 12 higher-paid titles.
But the startling thing is there are more House Democrats with titles, 45, than the entire House GOP caucus, the “Fightin’ 44.” Call it legislative-salary inflation. Shouldn’t their hat sizes have increased along with their self esteem, over the last 13 years?
Shouldn’t we have at least gotten better government for our money?
Oh yeah, let’s check back to the 1995 budget. It was $9 billion, exactly half the current budget.

Monday April 14, 2008

Well, Connecticut may have had its moment as a low-tax, movie-making destination, now that New York State last week passed legislation similar to the location-friendly, tax-soft laws that have given people like Speaker of the House Jim Amann the license to call us “Hollywood East.”
Asked to respond to the Empire State’s new law last week, Amann said it doesn’t mean there will be fewer films shot here.
“But I think, business wise, I think we’re going to see Connecticut will continue to grow, because we’re not just concentrating on tax credits,” Amann said, adding that more-recent laws pending this session would enhance.infrastructure and music projects and focus additional funding for colleges and universities.
“We’ve done a great job,” Amann said. “New York is now reacting and now we have to see what happens over the next 6 to 18 months to see if our big initiative now is losing ground, gaining ground or we’ll see what has to come next,” Amann told a couple of reporters last week. “I think it’s exciting to have that kind of competition.”
Amann said he never really thought of New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island as competition, but maybe the region can work together against places like Washington State and Louisiana for the movie-making market.”I never saw the other states as competition,” he said of our neighbors. “I thought why aren’t we involved in this? That’s why we made ours the best and the first to be around. At this point now, when we get a dialogue with the different legislators from the different states that I mentioned, then we can truly be competitive with the other top-10 states.”

Thursday April 10, 2008

And Blog-o-rama returns to the Capitol after a few days counting robins and gauging slush slides amid the expansive confines and the pines of birches (and the murmur of the pines) in Maine’s Carrabassett Valley.
Having missed the big Capitol ethics meltdown of Wednesday (all you need to know is the only folks who have it right are minority Republicans – but not the governor – who want to strip the pensions of people like Johnny Johnola Rowland, but it’s not going to happen this year) after Senate President Don Williams said a nearly secret watered-down version was a fait accompli, Blog-o-rama felt a twinge of diligence and followed Gov. Jodi Rell down to Milford for her big celebration over New York’s rejection of the Broadwater LNG platform.
Why Milford, when the platform would be built way up the coast, 10 miles off Guilford? It can’t be because Guilford has a Democratic first selectman while Milford Mayor Jim Richetelli is a Republican?
Well, maybe.
Blog-o-rama liked the site because it was a gorgeous day, Milford’s in the Connecticut Post readership area and the perfect visual aid was virtually ignored by so many supposedly PR savvy pols like the governor, Attorney General Dick Blumenthal and Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz.
Right behind the governor’s portable podium, where the sound system failed miserably three minutes into the newser, sending TV and radio guys scurrying to plop their microphones in front of the governor, sat Charles Island.
Charles Island is maybe three quarters of a mile from Silver Sands. The reef heading out there is a sure bet for summer lifeguard rescues, when knuckleheads get stuck our there while the tide races back in.
A smart PR person in any of the aforementioned ambitious-pols camps, could have concocted a line about how the island would look about the same size as the evil, floating LNG terminal, a terrorist target four football fields long and about 80 feet high.
The trees on Charles Island probably aren’t 80 feet tall and the atoll (THERE’S a synonym for you) is probably longer than 400 yards. Rell, during a Q and A after the newser, couldn’t envision it and Blumenthal, chatting before the event couldn’t see it either, but Sen. Len Fasano, who actually did alot of fact-finding work over three years heading Rell’s LNG Task Force (plus he played football at Yale, so he knows what 100 yards looks like) could see the geographical symbolism.

Friday April 4, 2008

The session ends at midnight May 7. There are still literally thousands of bills that remain in the legislative pipeline. The House and Senate did about 150 minutes work yesterday before adjourning at about 5 p.m. for the annual intra-Capitol charity basketball tournament.
So when are they going to get down to a full day of actual business? Well, most Capitol lobbyists don’t care because they’re in the business of KILLING legislation, so time is their unpaid coworker.
For those who actually want to accomplish something this session, time is growing short.
And lawmakers are still kind of freaked out about going to actual voters for small campaign contributions, so there’s mounting pressure to come to a budget agreement before the end of the session, allowing them the whole summer to go hat in hand and leverage cash from the Citizens Election Fund.
Everything is set up for majority Democratics to heft a big, old waterlemon of bills on May Day, with only a week to figure out how to fit it into a bud vase.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

It’s noon and Blog-o-rama just hung up after a surprise call from a famous Civil War battlefield, where Jim Murphy, former News 12 Connecticut reporter, is faking antiques in the basement woodshop of his Gettysburg goat farm.
Jim and his wife Judith, a college communications officer, are totally into the Lady Huskies hoops team and are justly proud of this year’s version of the squad, which actually GRADUATES players.
They watch the games on streaming video, so that’s pretty hardcore.
“Considering the way the state has taken to Maya Moore,” Murph says of the freshman All American, “affection has reached the state of idolatry. I expect a ballot proposition this fall that would change her name to ‘My Amour.’”

Wednesday April 2, 2008

It’s 10:30 and about 20 under-dressed kids from Brien McMahon High School in Norwalk are fighting the fierce, cold spring gale to retain whatever hasn’t blown away from the Capitol lawn, past the horseback sun-splashed statue of General Lafayette and down Washington Avenue.
It’s one of the weirder news-conference scenes we’ve had here in recent years.
The plan was to kick off National Child Abuse Month by staking down 9,422 brown-paper lunch bags to commemorate each child abused in Connecticut last year.
So the school’s Senators Community Foundation decided to use bags to illustrate instances of abuse, which occur every 41 minutes.
The students started staking the bags at 7:30 and thousands of the mercifully biodegradable lunch sacks must have blown away by now.
They are skewered on long lines along the ground, but still the northwest wind is making the lines lift and rattle while bags are ripping off regularly. They’re blown by the wind across Capitol Avenue, then past the Revolutionary War hero’s statue and southeast down Washington Avenue.
“We wanted a nice sunny day and we got it,” said an optimistic Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk to reporters. “We didn’t ask about the wind. We just wanted to make sure we got a sunny day.”
Of the statewide incidents over the last year, 1,342 kids were abused in Fairfield County and 246 were abused in Norwalk.
Blog-o-rama think it’s appropriate that the bags were blowing away from the demonstration, since 90 percent of male felons lost in the state prison system were abused as kids; and 50 percent of the violent female prisoners.
Ruhana Da Silva, an 18-year-old senior said the point is to remind people to do something against child abuse.
“Many people do not realize that somewhere in Connecticut a child is abused as they watch their favorite one-hour show on television, that two children will be abused during the UConn women’s basketball game,” she said.
House Minority Leader Larry Cafero, R-Norwalk, whose district includes the high school said: “You know there’s an old saying that says ‘ a man never stands so tall than when he stoops to help a child’ and I think we could add to that that a man never sinks so low tghan when he abuses a child,” Cafero said.
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