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Unions
Malloy had no choice with budget cuts, and he doesn't want

Chris Powell of the Journal Inquirer has done it again. 

Another excellent editorial which helps to define our state….

Don’t miss a word as Powell ends his editorial appropriately stating

 

“The government employee unions run his party,

the majority party, and thus the whole state and that's that”.

 

**********

 

 

Malloy had no choice with budget cuts, and he doesn't want ...one

 

By Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Journal Inquire   Sept 23, 2015.

As the pretense of a reviving economy crumbles and Connecticut and the country sink deeper into recession, Governor Malloy has imposed $103 million in emergency cuts on the state budget.

 

State hospitals will see a loss in financial aid of about $190 million, since the reduction in state aid to them will prompt cuts in aid from the federal government as well.

 

As they already have absorbed big cuts from the Malloy administration, the hospitals are complaining bitterly. But the hospitals can recover the money by raising charges to patients with medical insurance, so the cut in aid is really another hidden tax increase on that insurance. Besides, while nominally nonprofit, most hospitals still pay their executives extravagantly, as a spokesman for the governor noted Tuesday, even though the governor himself just arranged the appointment of his chief of staff to a cushy state college administrator job paying $335,000 per year.

 

Since state aid to municipalities is being cut as well, also complaining bitterly are municipal officials and legislators most sympathetic to municipal employee unions, like House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, D-Hamden. Sharkey says cuts in municipal aid should not have been made until the legislature had more time to consider the recommendations of a committee appointed to propose efficiencies in municipal government, whose prospective savings were built into the budget before they were specified and quantified.

 

But the legislature has had decades to find efficiencies in municipal government -- or, rather, to figure out how to cut costs on the municipal level without taking anything away from municipal employee unions, whose members consume as much as 75 percent of municipal budgets. (Just how much can towns economize on heating oil and toilet paper in municipal buildings?) The prospective savings from the study committee were really just another "employee suggestion box," the savings provision inserted into the governor's first budget to make it look balanced long enough so the General Assembly could go home before it was discovered that there were no suggestions and no savings, just a deficit needing to be covered.

 

Bitter complaints also come from nonprofit social service agencies, which are to suffer more aid cuts too. The head of the Connecticut Association of Nonprofits calls the cuts "unconscionable."

 

But none of these complaints is worth anything because no complainer offers any alternative for the governor. For awful as the governor's cuts may seem, they are exactly what state law requires when revenue falls short.

 

That is, state law exempts nearly all of government's biggest costs, personnel, from emergency cutting by the governor and municipal officials. The compensation of most government employees is set by union contract and not alterable without union consent. Further, state law sets these union contracts through binding arbitration, which makes the union interest equal to the public interest.

 

State law thereby proclaims that the highest objective of government in Connecticut is not service to the public but only the contentment of government's own employees.

 

Public health and safety, the mentally handicapped, neglected children, the deranged and addicted, education -- you name it -- in Connecticut, if it's not compensation for a government employee, it is a mere incidental. Yet there are no complaints about this.

 

The Republican minority leader in the state House of Representatives, Themis Klarides of Derby, more or less acknowledged this on Tuesday as she urged the governor to seek concessions from the state employee unions so the emergency cuts could be mitigated.

 

But if the governor ever wanted public service to come ahead of government employees, he would have asked for such concessions on his own. The government employee unions run his party, the majority party, and thus the whole state and that's that.

-----

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.