Political Capitol

As noted in previous blog posts, the Democratic-majority General Assembly and Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell are technically supposed to reach a deal on a new, two-year budget by July 1, the start of the 2009-10 fiscal year.

And that’s being generous. Really a deal should be reached by the end of the regular session on June 3.

And yet so far neither side can agree on the size of the deficit – $6 billion? $8.7 billion? More? Less? Something in-between? – or even on how to dig the state out of the red in the current, 2008-09 fiscal year.

During a press conference today I asked Sen. President Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn and House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, if they could say today there would be a deal by July 1.

I thought at least one might say it’s looking pretty unlikely, but neither took the bait.

“I don’t think it does anybody any good to say ‘we’ll be here in the summer and fall’,” Williams said.

But some other high-ranking Democrats have more readily acknowledged this is looking more and more like a long budget season.

House Majority Leader Denise Merrill, D-Mansfield, immediate past co-chairman of the legislature’s appropriations committee, told me recently: “Frankly, I think we’re going to be here quite a while trying to sort all this out.”

“Even though the budget comes out in early April, who knows when we get an agreement with the Governor and all parties. This will take a while,” Merrill said.

My money’s on Merrill.

Remember the $1.6 billion worth of appropriated but unspent funds legislative Democrats hoped they could use to help off-set at least $220 million worth of the current fiscal year’s deficit?

Turns out they need a little more time.

In a letter this afternoon to Senate President Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn and House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, the co-chairs of the legislature’s Appropriations Committee said they will not have a list of potential transfers from the targeted accounts to the general fund ready by tomorrow’s (March 25) deadline.

They blame a slow response from some state agencies (particularly the Department of Social Services, which is often criticized by the Democrats) and a lack of cooperation from Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s budget office.

The two appropriations co-chairs – Sen. Toni Harp, D-New Haven and Rep. John Geragosian, D-New Britain – now want until April 6 to conclude their money hunt.

And, they add, despite comments from Rell and her budget staff to the contrary, “we fully expect to achieve the $220 million goal.”

 UPDATE: Rell’s office was quick to respond last night. I had already called it a day but her spokesman, Christopher Cooper, left a message that he visited the press room and showed some of my colleagues e-mails proving the administration offered assistance to Hart and Geragosian.

He said their release was “rife with errors, line after line.”

I feel the need to mention it WAS the Governor’s office that a few weeks ago issued a press release announcing staff had determined there wasn’t $220 million in savings to be found – much to the Dems’ chagrin. That doesn’t strike me as particularly cooperative.

But you’ve also got to wonder if perhaps Rell was right and the Dems are stalling for time here and pointing fingers because the savings isn’t as readily identifiable as they thought.

I’ll say it again. If the Governor and the Democrats can’t agree on finding $220 million in savings, I can’t imagine we’re going to have a budget that addresses the estimated, $8 billion deficit in time for the start of the new fiscal year July 1. I bet this budget season stretches at least into late summer if not potentially early fall.

Apparently Ross Garber.

He’s the Shipman & Goodwin attorney out of Hartford helping insurance giant AIG figure out how to address the subpoenas Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the legislature’s Banks Committee sent out Friday.

Blumenthal and the committee ordered the company’s CEO and 13 employees from Fairfield County to testify Thursday about those controversial bonus payments.

I spoke very briefly today with Garber and he’s the same guy who was counsel to ex-Governor John Rowland during the scandal that drove him from office a few years back.

Garber’s biography on the Shipman & Goodwin website paints him as a kind of Blumenthal arch-nemesis, noting very high up that he “regularly represents clients in investigations by the Connecticut Attorney General and other state regulators.”

It doesn’t mention how many of those face-offs Garber has won. Hopefully for AIG, he’s no Hamilton Burger.

On Friday afternoon Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, a co-chairman of the legislature’s Banks Committee, issued subpoenas to 13 lower Fairfield County residents they believed worked for AIG and shared in some of the controversial bonuses awarded through the federal bailout.

They want the group to show up in Hartford Thursday to testify about the bonuses.

Not long afterward the higher-ups at The Advocate published the names and home towns listed in the press release both in a story I wrote and in a separate on-line database.

And not long after that I got this e-mail: “It is irresponsible of the Advocate to list the names and cities of those who received bonuses in the face of the lynch mob mentality that’s prevailing in this country at the moment. The paper has compromised these mens’ safety and that of their families. Shame on The Advocate. If anything should happen to them, the fault would be yours.”

I’ve got to admit the e-mail gave me some pause and I was thinking about it all weekend.

On the one hand I disagree that we and we alone compromised anyone’s safety. Subpoenas are public documents so folks interested in obtaining info on those 13 individuals could approach Blumenthal’s office for a copy.

Also Blumenthal and Duff claimed they actually obtained the names from media accounts. I don’t think The Advocate EVER ran a story prior to Friday listing all 13 people, so that means there are plenty of other news organizations that played a role in digging up the personal data and making it public.

I could also easily say that Blumenthal/Duff could have requested the media NOT publish the names in the subpoenas for safety reasons, but they made no such effort.

And the Working Families Party had scheduled its bus tour protest of the AIG homes prior to Friday, so obviously they had gotten their hands on some of these names/addresses without the help of The Advocate.

I think the issue here is what journalistic value is there to shining a spotlight on these 13 individuals and potentially endangering their safety? And to be honest, I’m not sure.

On the one hand the bonuses were paid by taxpayers, and one could argue it’s our mission to serve the public and let residents know who benefited from these pay-outs.

And newspapers and reporters are not into keeping things to themselves. It’s the nature of the business to make information available to the public. We’re more about questioning and uncovering than shielding.

But on the other hand is it responsible of the media to fan the flames of a mini class war and paint big old targets on around a dozen people who are not criminals and in most cases probably thought they were just reaping the benefits of the jobs they’d signed up to do?

In discussing this over the weekend with a usually level-headed, good-hearted acquaintance – who, I should add, does not earn a ton of money – their response was essentially: “These families can afford to hire private security if they need to. They should have known better than to accept the bonuses.”

I don’t know what the answer is.

I suspect that if I write any more stories about the subpoenas this week, my bosses will want to continue publishing the names of those being summoned to Hartford. I’ll be surprised if they don’t.

And I do know that, God forbid something happened to any of these individuals, I would try and reason my guilt away. I’d say my bosses made the call on publishing the names and home towns. I’d say that the entire media would be to blame, not any one reporter or paper. I’d probably even point the finger at Blumenthal and Duff.

But I have to say I’d still feel guilty.

… in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if today’s revelations about what the state Department of Environmental Protection knew about Travis the chimp could … hurt? cloud? … Commissioner Gina McCarthy’s recent nomination to be an assistant administrator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

We’d already written that the DEP had a permitting process in place since 2004 for exotic animals but exempted Travis, the Stamford chimp that made national headlines for the tragic mauling of a family friend.

Today McCarthy, as reported by CT Post/Advocate reporter Ken Dixon, issued a letter to lawmakers explaining a state DEP biologist warned the agency last October that Travis, who was shot to death by police, could present a danger if threatened.

“At the end of the memo she rather prophetically stated that this situation was an accident waiting to happen. And it did,” McCarthy said. “While the biologist had some understanding of primate behavior, she struggled with how to address this particular situation given her awareness of the owner’s strong attachment to Travis and the lack of clarity in the law.”

McCarthy went on to state the DEP could have been “more aggressive” in response to staff concerns but “we chose not to enter into what we believed would be a battle to take custody of a local celebrity.”

There’s a lot more in the article from McCarthy about how the DEP struggled over whether and how to address Travis.

Again, I may come off like a moron for even THINKING this rises to such a level that it would somehow impact McCarthy’s nomination. BUT the chimp mauling was national – even international – news and now the victim’s family has lawyered-up and is starting to file lawsuits.

Last September the legislature’s Democratic majority proposed auditing the budget of the Department of Social Services – the largest in state government – in the hopes of finding cost-savings that could be used to trim Connecticut’s growing deficit.

The Dems, long-convinced DSS is run inefficiently, were so sure of the proposal that their leadership decided to spend around $80,000 out of their personal budget contigency funds – called “slush funds” by some critics – to move the project forward.

Earlier this week I spoke briefly to Sen. Toni Harp, D-New Haven, co-chairman of the Appropriations Committee, about the audit, which is being overseen by Comptroller Nancy Wyman’s office.

Wyman’s office has been mum on the matter but I understand a draft has been making the rounds at the capitol. The Appropriations Committee is expected, along with the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, to propose a two-year budget in early April. I figured the DSS audit’s results would play heavily into the Democrats’ spending plan.

Harp said she had viewed the draft but her description of the audit’s findings has me thinking it’s not even close to what the Dems were expecting.

“It’s not going to inform this (budget) process much at all,” Harp said. “It gave us some ideas but didn’t find anything remarkable.”

She said the audit uncovered some cost savings but not to the extent the Democrats had hoped.

I’m wondering if they even found enough to recoup the costs of the audit.

Guess we’ll find out in a few weeks what $80,000 buys when the final report is supposed to be released by Wyman.

UPDATE: Derek Slap, spokesman for the Senate Democrats, sent me this e-mail today:

“The audit results, which are still being finalized, offer a real potential for savings for Connecticut taxpayers. We look forward to working with the Rell administration to achieve those savings.”

Also Sen. Harp is apparently being sent on a long trip that will just happen to coincide with the Democrats’ press conference touting the success of the audit…

(Kidding. Kidding. Although I’ll be interested to see, if there is a press conference, what she’ll have to say then.)

Just got a press release a little while ago that the Working Families Party has scheduled “a fun, goofy AIG protest” for Saturday that entails chartering a bus to take activists on tours of some employee homes in lower Fairfield County.

“Then we’ll be finishing the tour with a rally at the AIG Financial Products offices (in Wilton),” reads the release.

I don’t know. There’s something about this that just seems a bit … off to me, like it’s inviting potential threats or harm to these people.

I’m in no way, shape or form commenting on the fairness of the bonuses or whether these folks should or shouldn’t turn them back in. And I know that newspapers, including our own chain, have been trying to track down where these folks live since this is all going on in our publication area.

But … bus tours? I don’t know. What if the Catholic Bishops last week decided to organize bus visits to the homes of Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford and Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven to protest the Catholic parish finance bill? Would that have struck some folks as going too far?

Just wondering.

I wrote a story for tomorrow’s paper about an effort to phase-out the use of plastic and paper bags in state stores by charging a 5-cent tax on them.

The goal is to encourage shoppers to start bringing their own reusable bags to the stores.

I spoke briefly about the bill with freshman Rep. Fred Camillo, R-Greenwich, a member of the environmental committee, who has some reservations about the proposal.

His comments didn’t make it into the story, but one argument he made was that many residents, himself included, already try to re-use their plastic shopping bags. They use them as liners in small garbage cans or, Camillo added, to clean up after their dogs.

Camillo said some people have told him to use a newspaper but let’s just say he has not found that as effective or sanitary.

Gotta admit he has a point. How do you pick up the dog poop if there are no more plastic bags?

Many politicians are experts at shoveling it, but in this case will they be able to figure out how we pick it up?