Political Capitol

Earlier this year Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell proposed a 10 percent increase on rail and bus fares by October to help the state cope with the budget crisis.

That proposal was lambasted by commuter advocates and the legislature’s Democratic majority who pledged to avoid it in whatever two-year budget they passed.

But during last minute budget wrangling at the end of August Democrats shifted around funds (they claim at Rell’s request) which all but ensured a fare increase if the money was not somehow restored during this week’s special session.

The special session is being held to essentially iron out and vote on the language that actually implements the budget passed in the early morning hours of Sept. 1.

“It was recognized that without increasing fares … there would be a revenue shortfall,” Rep. David Scribner, R-Brookfield, ranking Republican on the Transportation Committee, told me tonight. “It was agreed we would take care of that shortfall when we did the implementer process … I don’t think it was clear to many what the final solution was going to be.”

The Democrats’ decided to hike dozens of Department of Motor Vehicles fees to gain about $50 million over two years. Since Rell in an earlier budget proposal had also recommended higher DMV fees, they figured she would still be okay with the idea.

So, for example, the cost of a six year, non-commercial driver’s license is changing from $66 to $78.

But in a letter issued today to legislative leaders, Rell wrote “I will not sign a bill that does contain such increases. Although I have been willing to support fee increases in the past, and indeed I have even proposed some fee increases, I have never been willing to support fee increases and tax increases as contained in the budget.”

Democrats went ahead and passed the fees around 10:35 p.m. tonight. The Senate is likely to take up and pass the fees tomorrow.

Rep. Christopher Perone, D-Norwalk, a Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee vice-chairman, said from what he understood some of the DMV fees had not been increased in years and were due for a change. Perone accused Rell of backtracking on her initial support for the increases.

“She proposed them and now she doesn’t like it,” Perone said.

Scribner told me he is not a fan of forcing bus and train riders to pay higher fares. But, he argued, is it fair to shift the costs to DMV patrons?

“Although I’m a strong proponent of encouraging mass transit use people all over the state are going to be subjected to these fee increases and may have no access to rail services,” Scribner said.

House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero, R-Norwalk, during the debate over the DMV fees said Democrats could have instead tried to make additional cuts in the budget to avoid train/bus fare hikes rather than “raising every motor vehicle fee that existed to mankind.”

UPDATE: It’s just after 4 p.m. on Thursday and the DMV fee hikes just passed the Senate mostly along party lines.

Sens. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, a vice-chairman of the Transportation Committee and Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford, voted for it. Lower Fairfield County’s three Republican Senators – Toni Boucher, R-Wilton, L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich and Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield – voted “no.”

Frantz in an interview with The Advocate earlier this month said he wanted to work to avoid the train/bus fare hikes.

“Given the state of the economic cycle and the fact that transportation is already expensive, I would go easy on any fare increases or postpone them entirely,” Frantz said at the time.

But during today’s debate in the Senate he took issue with raising the costs of doing business with the DMV to do it. Noting the fee hikes impact dozens of licenses, including operating a hearse, Frantz noted: “The cost of dying has just gone up.”

In a brief interview afterward, Norwalk’s Robert Genuario, the Governor’s budget chief, said Rell does not want to see train and bus riders pay more but she also did not want to see the Democrats raise DMV fees.

“Balance the budget with cuts. Balance the budget with reductions,” Genuario said.

A few minutes later I discussed the same topic with Sen. Eileen Daily, D-Westbrook, chairman of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee.

I asked her why it is fairer to soak DMV customers, some of whom do not regularly use public transportation, rather than raise the costs for those who use it.

Daily said maybe the higher DMV fees will provide an incentive for some to commute on trains and buses. But she also added the Democrats earlier this year proposed budgets that would have instead imposed income tax increases on higher earners but Rell (and, I might add, some Democrats from lower Fairfield County) balked.

“I don’t like financing our budget that way but the budget compromise left us no choice,” Daily said.

Look at the Connecticut General Assembly’s website. It clearly states the House of Representatives was supposed to be in session at 3 p.m. this afternoon.

But of course, that really means “God knows when they’ll convene, but it will be after 3 p.m.”

It’s been nearly a month since the Democratic-majority passed a two-year budget, and yet, at 7: 30 this evening, the General Assembly is still working out and drafting the details for tonight’s vote on the so-called implementers.

“I got here at 4:30 p.m. I’m mad at myself. I should have known better,” Rep. Gerald Fox, D-Stamford, grumbled a little while ago.

But that’s how it goes. The legislature is never going to start anything on time, and members know that, but they can’t risk being late. Maybe they show up a good hour or so past the scheduled start of the session, but that’s about as far as they are willing to risk it.

“I don’t want to stand around for 14 hours waiting for someone to write something,” Rep. Terry Backer, D-Stratford, told Fox.

Ah, but you will Terry, you will. As long as you keep running for office and getting elected, you’re on House Time.

Earlier this week The Hartford Courant reported that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, despite warnings from her attorneys it could not be done, went ahead earlier this month and threatened to veto portions of the budget the legislature’s Democratic-majority passed in the early morning hours of Sept. 1.

Rell publicly backed down only after Attorney General Richard Blumenthal ruled she did not have the authority to exercise her so-called line item veto power under those circumstances.

In response to The Courant story and subsequent media coverage Rell press aide Donna Tommelleo said Rell had “sought and received the opinion of many attorneys” and “frankly, the lawyers were divided.”

The administration has not named those attorneys leading some skeptics to question whether it’s all just a bunch of spin and Rell was simply caught red-handed making a political maneuver by The Courant.

Yesterday the liberal My Left Nutmeg blog challenged Rell to give out the names of the attorneys she spoke to.

I happened to bump into the Governor just a little after 2 p.m. this afternoon as she headed into the capitol and figured “okay My Left Nutmeg. What the hell. It’s a valid question and I’m game.”

And before anyone jumps on me for taking my news direction from a political blog, let me remind you that reporters get good ideas for stories from politically astute readers and the general public all the time, so chill out.

So I quickly asked the Governor if she would produce the names.

Her response? She could but would prefer not to put those individuals on the spot.

The state House of Representatives is scheduled to reconvene tomorrow to vote on the nitty gritty of the budget the Democratic majority passed in the early morning hours of September 1.

There’s talk legislators will also try to cobble together a new land conveyance bill. That was one of the pieces of legislation Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell successfully vetoed over the summer.

The bill, intended to provide various cities/towns with parcels of state land for a variety of projects, had significant bi-partisan support.

But Rell at the time argued the state should not be giving away potentially valuable parcels of property during a budget crisis. The administration was also not pleased with language intended to give Rell and school officials second thoughts about shuttering J.M. Wright Technical School to help get the state out of the red.

In the final minutes of the session Stamford’s bi-partisan delegation successfully inserted a few lines into the conveyance bill requiring the state lease Wright Tech to the city should the school be closed. Further details about the last minute debate can be found here and here.

Wright Tech was officially closed over the summer, although state education officials claim they are using the time to retool the technical school concept for the Stamford region.

When I heard rumors about salvaging some of the land conveyance bill tomorrow, I immediately thought about the Wright Tech piece.

In an e-mail this afternoon Doug Whiting, spokesman for House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, wrote: “Yes, likely to be revived. Don’t have all the specifics yet.”

I placed a quick call to Sen. Andrew McDonald, D-Stamford, who said the $1-lease concept is “an issue that is currently being bandied about.”

Of course no one has yet explained what Stamford would do with the vacant Wright Tech building, which needs plenty of work.

UPDATE: Area legislators have abandoned the above tactic and instead convinced Democratic leaders to support a likely far more constructive and practical proposal – setting aside money to renovate Wright Tech.

According to budget documents I saw this evening, Democrats want to add $50 million to $40 million set aside a few years ago for Wright Tech’s upgrade, for a total pot of $90 million.

The thought is this will encourage state education officials to move quickly to devise a new curriculum for the school and try to re-open it within two or three years.

“It just keeps it on the radar screen. That was our goal,” said Rep. Livvy Floren, R-Greenwich, who also represents parts of Stamford.

“We could have sought to recover the school in the conveyance (bill) but decided to give the state one more chance at fulfilling it’s promise to provide a first class vocational education to students in our area,” Rep. James Shapiro, D-Stamford, said.

No word on what Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who supported the state Board of Education’s proposal to close Wright Tech, thinks about the $50 million, and she ultimately will have to release it.

When the state July 1 entered the 2009-10 fiscal year without a budget deal, Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, in an effort to look like she was working to trim the deficit while the legislature’s Democratic-majority was coming up with new tax proposals, announced the possible sale of various pieces of state property.

Specifically Rell directed her commissioners and agency heads to submit lists of assets that could be put on the market. They were given the deadline of July 27.

Rell got some positive press out of the announcement, but if those lists of assets exist nearly two months after their due date, her office isn’t making them public.

I’ve been asking on and off for about a month (minus my two week vacation) for the lists and getting nowhere.

The Department of Transportation in late August was kind enough to hand over the information they had gathered for the Governor without hassle. But when in recent days I again asked the administration for the rest of the data, a Rell spokesman said he was told it was still in “draft form” and unavailable.

“Draft form” is a convenient word tossed about by government agencies when they want to avoid being compelled to turn over public documents under the state Freedom of Information Act.

The data will have to emerge at some point. The Democrats’ two-year state budget which Rell allowed to become law earlier this month counts on raising $60 million from the sale of unspecified assets. It requires Rell’s budget office and the state treasurer to come up with the asset plan by Feb. 3, 2010.

UPDATE: Rell today is criticizing the Democrats for, according to the administration, failing to include in the budget language “establishing an expedited process for the sale of state assets.”

“Frankly,” Rell wrote in a letter to legislative leaders, “without an expedited process, I am not confident that we will be able to realize this revenue within the specified timeframes.”

It was a perfect example of “does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?”

When state lawmakers overhauled the teen driving laws last year, they eliminated the traditional 16-question written test given at the end of the training process and increased the initial knowledge test youths need for their driver’s permit from 10 to 25 questions.

Driving schools complained removing the written test from the end of the licensing process meant students could coast through classes and only worry about their final road test.

Several state legislators countered they had never intended to do away with the final written test as part of the reforms.

The Department of Motor Vehicles defended the change and said it was an opportunity for driving schools to modify and improve their instruction.

“I don’t believe teens get into crashes because they don’t know the rules of the road,” DMV Commissioner Robert Ward testified earlier this year. “It’s because they make poor decisions.”

But the legislature re-instated the final written test this past session anyway and the DMV announced over the weekend it will begin requiring 16 and 17-year-old drivers take it Oct.1

“If they don’t pass this new second knowledge test, then they will need to study more before they get their driver’s license,” said Ward in a statement that, understandably, did not elaborate on how this all went down.

Of course, given the tough fiscal times, lawmakers did not provide any new funds. Today I e-mailed DMV spokesman Bill Seymour and asked how much it is going to cost to bring back the final exam.

“We must do it within existing budget and staff,” he replied.

When legislative Democrats sought to entice Stamford lawmakers to back tax increases on the wealthy this summer, they proposed a budget that, despite the fiscal crisis, included some extra cash for the City That Works, including money to re-open the recently shuttered part-time Department of Motor Vehicles office.

The $50,000 or so operation was closed in late June, a victim of the budget crisis.

Although some of the Stamford perks (increases in education aid) survived budget negotiations and were included in the final spending plan passed a few weeks ago by the General Assembly, the DMV office did not make the cut.

“At the moment we have no plans to re-open it,” DMV spokesman Bill Seymour said in a brief interview this afternoon.

Like many other state agencies, Seymour said the DMV is still in the dark on some of the details of the budget. Although the general framework was approved, legislators meet again this week to vote on budget implementers – the real guts of the spending plan.

And even then not all the details will be known since it will take some time for the state’s number crunchers to actually publish the final document.

However an overview of the budget highlights prepared by the state Office of Fiscal Analysis says nothing about restoring funds for the Stamford office.

Seymour said what is known is the budget imposes millions of dollars worth of cuts on the DMV’s overall operations.

“There’s really no guidance … on exactly how that’s going to happen or what we should even be thinking about,” Seymour said. “I can say there are no plans (for the Stamford office) and we are looking at how we are going to make the DMV run with all these cuts.”

Senate Minority Leader John McKinney, R-Fairfield and House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk held a press conference at the capitol today to urge the Democratic-majority to suspend a handful of unfunded mandates on municipalities struggling with their budgets.

City and town leaders have been asking for the mandate relief since the start of the year. Republicans today argued that the last chance to act is next week when the General Assembly reconvenes to essentially vote on the dirty details of the recently passed state budget.

One of those mandates, passed in 2007, required school administrators beginning this past July provide in-school programs for suspended students rather than simply sending them home for a few days off. It was supposed to take effect in July, 2008 but was delayed one year to give school districts more time to find the necessary money, personnel and classroom space.

“This is the wrong time to implement it,” Cafero told reporters, citing the estimated costs to cash-strapped cities ($600 annually for Bridgeport, $360,000 to $600,000 annually for Stamford and $250,000 annually for Norwalk).

During the press conference McKinney and Cafero displayed their differences over the necessity for the in-school suspensions law.

McKinney argued the legislature should not have butt into the issue in the first place.

“It is the easiest thing in the world to grandstand on policy … and then not put any money behind it,” McKinney told reporters.

Knowing he has served for several years as Norwalk’s expulsion officer, I asked Cafero his thoughts on the bill’s merits.

“I did vote for the bill,” Cafero said. “Sometimes it is easier and cheaper to just say (to students) ‘get out for ten days and we don’t have to educate you’. I’m not so sure that is the best policy.”

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities in a statement thanked the GOP for the support.

“Unfunded mandates are particularly onerous now, as towns are desperately trying to avoid property tax increases and service cuts caused by the economy and declining levels of state aid,” CCM head Jim Finley said in a statement.

One wonders if the cities and towns will EVER want to deal with the law or simply keep coming up with excuses to postpone it.

And I also wonder if it’s a little too late. Technically all school districts should have begun complying with the in-school suspensions legislation as of the start of the new school year a few weeks ago. I suppose a delay now would mean they could use the money for other things.

Back in February, when Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell proposed delaying the in-school suspensions mandate as part of her first budget proposal, I spoke with Rev. Lindsay Curtis, president of the Norwalk NAACP. Curtis said he would be disappointed if the law was delayed.

“The kids who are going to be the most affected by delaying this will be African-American kids, kids of color,” Curtis said. “Those are the brunt of the suspensions … The delay means kids would be on the street. The whole idea was to keep kids who got in trouble in a learning environment. And if they are not educated, chances are they end up being incarcerated.”

But also in that same story Rep. Bruce Morris, D-Norwalk, who is black, said delaying the law was reasonable given the economic realities.

“I think what still remains of value is all school districts receive the message the legislature is still going in this direction,” Morris said.