Jonathan Kantrowitz

Guest post by Greenwich resident Sean Goldrick:

The economy is suffering, budgets are under pressure, and Greenwich enjoys no immunity to the downturn. Hard times mean that Greenwich cannot afford to pass up any source of funds. Yet Greenwich first selectman Peter Tesei did just that, dropping the ball repeatedly on the town’s requests for federal assistance, and ultimately costing Greenwich tens of millions of dollars in federal aid it should have received.

Not only was Mr. Tesei the last first selectman and mayor in the fourth congressional district to apply for federal stimulus funds, he was also the last municipal executive in the entire state to submit a funding request. Hard against the deadline to apply for stimulus funding, Mr. Tesei’s foot-dragging precipitated a last-minute meeting with congressman-elect Jim Himes on Christmas Eve to submit the town’s request.

Mr. Tesei interpreted the criteria for stimulus projects so narrowly that he brought to the meeting a proposal totaling only $17 million. In contrast, the city of Bridgeport, with twice the population of Greenwich, had already applied for $868 million in stimulus funding. Stamford, with close to double Greenwich’s population, had formally requested $414 million. Westport, with half our town’s population, asked for approximately $100 million.

Further, instead of engaging in a collaborative effort to maximize Greenwich’s share of the stimulus, Mr. Tesei declined to include selectman Lin Lavery in planning for the request, and did not invite her to attend that critical meeting to finalize Greenwich’s application. Neither did Mr. Tesei engage any of the town’s department heads to help develop Greenwich’s stimulus proposal.

Only at the insistence of Planning & Zoning member Frank Farricker, whom Mr. Tesei did invite to the meeting, was Ms. Lavery brought in, and only at the last minute. Mr. Farricker and Ms. Lavery were instrumental in dramatically boosting Greenwich’s request for stimulus funds from the original $17 million to $84 million.

Yet after submitting the town’s request, Mr. Tesei dropped the ball again. Instead of aggressively and regularly following up with our congressional delegation to advocate for Greenwich’s request, Mr. Tesei made no efforts to push for stimulus funds in Washington.

In contrast, Stamford mayor Dan Malloy, Bridgeport mayor Bill Finch, and other town first selectmen frequently traveled to Washington to push for their towns’ funding requests and coordinate strategy with Congressman Himes. Moreover, Mr. Tesei refused to take or return calls from Congressman Himes’ staffers who attempted to contact him regarding federal funding requests.

Largely due to Mr. Tesei’s lack of planning and follow-up, Greenwich was awarded only $4 million from the stimulus bill. By contrast, Bridgeport was awarded $116 million, Stamford is receiving $100 million, and Westport $20 million. Each received between 20%-25% of their initial requests. Greenwich received less than 4% of its total request. Had Greenwich received an amount comparable to that granted to other towns and cities in this region relative to its population, Greenwich would have received between $40 million and $50 million.

At the recent Riverside Association debate, Ms. Lavery pointed out that Mr. Tesei should have appointed a town employee to work full-time coordinating and preparing the town’s stimulus request. Mr. Tesei claimed that he did appoint an employee to do just that- town administrator John Crary. But Mr. Crary is responsible for all town administrative functions, and suggesting that he was working full-time to locate and obtain federal funding is simply not credible.

Mr. Tesei also failed to properly apply for a $1.5 million federal earmark for the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a feasibility study to identify measures to prevent flooding on the Byram River. The town submitted a request to Congressman Himes in March, who immediately submitted it for consideration by the House Energy and Water Subcommittee. But Mr. Tesei did not submit the plan to Connecticut’s senators for consideration in the Senate as he should have, nor did he attempt to follow up with them. As a result, when Save Our Shores’ Jo Conboy followed up on the status of the earmark request in May and realized that the plan had not been submitted to the Senate, she attempted to do so, but was told that the deadline had passed. Mr. Tesei’s failure to properly apply for and follow up on the request resulted in its being dropped from consideration and the $1.5 million lost to the town.

Mr. Tesei’s egregious failure to properly apply and advocate for federal assistance cost this town tens of millions of dollars. Greenwich taxpayers certainly deserved better.

–
Sean Goldrick

Early Connections is the primary source of intervention and care for infants and toddlers with special needs, including children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), in local communities across Connecticut. The program recently experienced a significant loss in certified teachers as a result of the Retirement Incentive Program.

Earlier in the year, admissions were halted during discussions between the unions in the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC) and the Administration.

The Department of Developmental Services (DDS) re-opened admissions to Early Connections in late August, reaffirming its role as a primary source of early education services for children with developmental delays, including Autism. But as a result of the cost savings agreement negotiated in May between public service workers and Governor Rell, nearly a third of DDS’ school teachers have since retired, and many of those in Early Connections are veteran educators with twenty or more years of service.

Early Connections is a huge help to local kindergarten to twelfth-grade districts around the state. By ensuring that children come to school ready to learn, our teachers help to close the achievement gap and propel kids into an educational environment.

DDS needs to ensure that Early Connections is made a high priority now that the Governor has called for resumption of admissions. Without the services it provides, local school districts will bear a heavy financial burden when children with developmental delays or Autism who could not access quality early intervention are enrolled.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) has introduced a bill to immediately freeze credit card interest rates on existing balances.

The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act enacted in May prevents arbitrary interest rate, fee and finance charge increases on a customer’s existing balance. Unfortunately, credit card companies have been jacking up rates in a last ditch effort to squeeze customers before all of the bill’s provisions can take effect.

“We worked long and hard to enact the safeguards included in the Credit CARD Act,” said Dodd, who had introduced the bill in 2004, 2005 and 2008 before successfully passing it this spring. “And no sooner had it been signed into law, but credit card companies were looking for ways to get around the protections this Congress and the American people demanded. This bill would end those abuses and further protect customers today.”

“At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, jacked up rates can quickly create crushing debt. People need to be responsible with their money, but they shouldn’t be taken to the cleaners by outrageous rates.”

In April, Chairman Dodd and Senator Schumer sent a letter to the heads of the Federal Reserve, OTS, and NCUA calling on them to implement an emergency freeze on interest rates tied to existing balance on credit cards.

For those accounts that have already seen rate increases, the Credit CARD Act requires credit card companies to review every account that has seen an interest rate increase since January 1, 2009 and reduce rates where warranted. Dodd sent a letter to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the heads of key regulatory agencies in July directing them to let credit card companies know that they will be held accountable for rate increases. He also called on the Federal Reserve to provide clear, robust requirements for the reviews and called on the agencies enforcing those regulations to hold the credit card companies strictly accountable for conducting thorough reviews and decreasing rates.

A new Commonwealth Fund report analyzes the similarities, differences, potential impacts, and costs of current bills passed by the five committees of jurisdiction in the United States Congress: Finance Committee and Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committees in the Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways and Means, Education and Labor, and Energy and Commerce committees.

According to the report, The Comprehensive Congressional Health Reform Bills of 2009: A Look at Health Insurance, Delivery System, and Financing Provisions, all of the bills include provisions that:

• seek to expand and improve health care coverage by building on the strongest aspects of the United States’ mixed public-private system—employer-sponsored insurance and Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program—while reorganizing and regulating the individual and small group insurance markets;
• establish requirements for insurers to offer coverage to all Americans who apply and prohibit them from denying coverage or charging more based on people’s health;
• create a new health insurance exchange or exchanges;
• set an essential benefit standard for health insurance;
• provide subsidies to help people afford insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs;
• require all individuals to have health insurance;
• have employers share responsibility for financing coverage;
• improve health care quality and outcomes while controlling costs;
• invest in primary care and provide more funding for prevention and wellness; and
• test innovative provider payment methods.

So, there is an awful lot of good things in ALL the bills – add in a strong public option and away we go.

NO RESPONSE FROM RELL’S OFFICE REGARDING STATE DEMS’ FOIA REQUEST
FOIA

Regulations Require Receipt Acknowledgment Within 4 Business Days; Today is Business Day 7

Democratic State Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo released the following statement after the New London Day today wrote that there appears to have been more than one focus group to test the Governor’s budget message, as well as another email trail disproving Governor M. Jodi Rell’s account of the timeline and details regarding the now-infamous poll. The Connecticut Democratic State Party hand-delivered two Freedom of Information Act requests on Tuesday, October 13, 2009. Both requests, to Governor Rell’s office, as well as the Office of Policy and Management, requested the same information, including, but not limited to transcripts, video and audio that may exist from the focus group. OPM responded and acknowledged the request within the prescribed 4-business day period; Governor Rell’s office has not.

“It’s about as surprising as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west that there is another story adding to the long list of questions Governor M. Jodi Rell must answer to the people of Connecticut,” said Democratic State Party Chair Nancy DiNardo. “Now it seems as though there may have been more than just one focus group conducted to test the Governor’s budget message, and we’re left with another email trail that disproves the story she has been peddling regarding the poll with which Professor Dautrich had been involved. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Governor Rell is not being truthful. She and her spokespeople have made it clear that they will not comment on the situation and she’s neglected to respond to our Freedom of Information Act request within the four businesses days she’s given to acknowledge receipt.

The stunning disregard for sunlight and transparency this Administration has is truly unbelievable, especially after Jodi Rell promised to clean up the office after Governor Rowland left it dirty and open to the highest bidder. No doubt the Governor’s office will claim the letter was lost in the mail, they couldn’t figure out how to use Microsoft Word, or some other silly excuse to try and explain why they’ve – once again – made getting information from their office more difficult than it should be. Connecticut residents deserve more from their state’s CEO.”

The reference to the Mocrosoft Word excuse is in light of the Microsoft Outlook excuse previously given:

Moody e-mails had been withheld from a reporter inadvertantly because the governor’s staff had not correctly used the “Find” function in the Outlook e-mail program when complying with The Day’s records request.

We overuse our medical technology, because it is available:

Patients who die in the hospital in the United States are almost five times as likely to have spent part of their last hospital stay in the ICU than patients in England. What’s more, over the age of 85, ICU usage among terminal patients is eight times higher in the U.S. than in England, according to new research from Columbia University that compared the two countries’ use of intensive care services during final hospitalizations.

Their findings were published in the November 1 issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society.

England has one-sixth the number of intensive care beds available per capita that are available in the U.S. Furthermore, medical decisions in England are generally considered to be the direct responsibility of the physician, rather than that of the patient or the patient’s surrogate decision-maker(s) as it is in the U.S.

While these findings highlight important differences within the two countries’ use of intensive care services, the research was not designed to determine the direct impact of these differences. Past surveys have suggested that the majority of people would prefer not to die in the hospital, but given that so many do, questions about use of intensive interventions remain.

Furthermore, future research must further investigate not just the origins, but the implications of these differences. “Faced with a provocative finding of cross-national difference, the scientific community faces a choice between at least two paths,” wrote Theodore Iwashyna, M.D., Ph.D., and Julia Lynch, Ph.D., in an editorial in the same issue of the journal. “One path leads to carefully unpacking the origins of this difference and teaching us something generally true about how critical care systems develop. The other path leads into the hospitals, using observational data to imagine new ways to organize care and generate the equipoise necessary for careful interventional studies of such interventions. The first path helps us shape national policy levers. The latter path helps us redesign care organizations to bring change to patients. Both are necessary.”

For all the talk that the recession is over, the unemployment rate, now at 9.8% is continuing to rise, and will do so for quite a while. The actual rate of un/under employment is at 17%, but even those employed are feeling a real pinch:

A net 263,000 jobs were eliminated in September, pushing the jobless rate (9.8%) to a 26-year high…

And those figures tell only part of the story.

For example, those who had jobs last month worked an average of only 33 hours a week, a record low.

And in addition to the 15.1 million people counted as officially unemployed, 9.2 million workers last month were working only part time because their employers had scaled back their hours or they simply could not find full-time jobs, the Labor Department reported.

Adding those two groups together, along with other categories such as people so discouraged that they have quit looking for jobs, produces a rate of unemployment plus underemployment, which stood at 17% in September.

These numbers are far higher than the Obama administration expected when the stimulus package was introduced, and reduced because of centrist demands.

Robert Reich tells the truth:

The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

As Paul Krugman points out the original stimulus package was only half as much as it should have been, given what was known then. as unemployment exceeds earlier projections, so much more stimulus is needed now.

If Afghanistan doesn’t prove Obama’s undoing, unemployment might.

A new study by a highly respected German group, WBGU, offers a dire picture of the future, as described in a Nation article, reprinted at Common Dreams:

WBGU goes a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world’s governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020–i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years.