Because of the state government scandals uncovered recently by the state auditors, and maybe because of the ones uncovered recently by the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, the Connecticut Mirror, the Yankee Institute’s Connecticut Inside Investigator, and the New Haven Independent, leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly are creating another legislative committee — a committee on government oversight.
The new committee will more or less restore the Program Review and Investigations Committee, which the legislature abolished a decade ago with predictable results: more scandal, incompetence, policy failure, and official indifference.
Not that the old committee accomplished much. It was usually timid and trivial, mainly just impersonating concern about wrongdoing and failure in government. The committee’s abolition signaled that the legislature no longer wanted even to pretend to be concerned.
It’s unclear how seriously the new committee will take its assignment. The legislature’s dwindling Republican minority hopes that the new committee will follow the old committee’s bipartisanship by alternating its chairmanships between Democrats and Republicans. Since Republican legislators seem not to have been consulted about the committee’s restoration, the Democrats may be planning only more pretense.
The House chairwoman of the new committee will be a Democrat beginning her fourth term in the legislature, state Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, who has experience as an auditor and financial officer. But the Senate chairwoman will be Sen.-elect Sujata Gadkar-Wilcox, D-Trumbull, a rookie legislator and college professor. Neither brings political clout to the committee, though to do the job right, committee members will need to be tough and ready to make and overawe their enemies, not to be ciphers hoping to make friends.
Probably no legislator with any clout and ambition wanted to chair the new committee. But the committee just might be the place for legislators seeking to pursue the public interest rather than the special interest. State government, usually shameless, badly needs to be embarrassed frequently — that is, forced to acknowledge the messes all around it.
Where should the committee start? Options are too numerous.
Recent investigations by the state auditors have found gross overpayments to employees in the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the Correction Department, and especially in higher education, where many perfectly authorized salaries are wildly excessive anyway.
The subsidies for the Hartford-to-New Britain bus highway, the New Haven-to-Springfield CT Rail service, and the Shoreline East railroad should be calculated and publicized, since the state Transportation Department won’t do it.
The criminal-justice system’s coddling of repeat offenders and its dismissal of most gun law violations deserve detailed examination to make clear how public safety is betrayed and how advocacy of more gun control by legislators is so phony.
The expensive incompetence and corruption at the Connecticut Port Authority needs extensive investigation and publicity.
Inadequate discipline throughout state employment should be reviewed, as indicated again recently by the failure of the state police to impose serious discipline on troopers who falsified traffic ticket data. Also escaping discipline lately is the employee of the Department of Administrative Services who leaked promotion test questions to a colleague but will have been kept on paid administrative leave for 13 months at an annual salary of $146,000 before being allowed to retire without rebuke.
If Democratic legislators ever change their minds about flooding Connecticut with illegal immigrants, the new committee could investigate the marriage frauds recently perpetrated at city halls in New Haven, Bridgeport, and elsewhere by the vice chairwoman of the Bridgeport Democratic committee and others.
But probably the most compelling subject for the new committee to start with would be the Hartford school system’s graduation this year of a student who in September confessed to being illiterate.
The state Board of Education and the Hartford school superintendent promised investigations about this but after 2 1/2 months have reported nothing, apparently expecting the scandal to be forgotten even as some educators acknowledge that graduation of illiterates is common in the state despite ever-increasing appropriations in the name of education.
The comprehensive repeal of educational standards is the scandal of scandals.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.