With natural gas and fuel oil prices rising, more than 320,000 poor Connecticut households faced energy bills this year that exceed their ability to pay by a collective $450 million, a new, nonprofit study has reported.
CT’s poor find winter energy bills increasingly unaffordable
Posted inCT Viewpoints
Massachusetts vs. Connecticut educational success — one man’s experience
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas’s three-part series about spending, education reform and student achievement in Massachusetts and Connecticut provides an outstanding review of the progress of education in both states over the past 25 years. I see the series from the perspective of having been Associate Commissioner for Finance and Accountability in Massachusetts from 1993 to 1998, Superintendent of the Fall River (MA) Public Schools from 2005 to 2009, and Superintendent of the New London Public Schools in Connecticut from 2009 to 2014.
Posted inEducation
Board of Regents votes to consolidate all 12 community colleges
The governing board of the state’s 12 community colleges voted Thursday to advance a controversial plan intended to merge the schools into a single accredited institution, despite fervent opposition from faculty and students who attended the meeting.
Posted inPolitics
Malloy, CT lawmakers blast FCC net neutrality rollback
WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission’s partisan vote on Thursday to scrap “net neutrality” regulations and stop regulating internet delivery systems like utilities prompted partisan reaction. Most Democrats, including members of the state’s congressional delegation and Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, condemned the move. Republicans supported it.
Posted inHealth, Money, Politics
Legislature headed for a holiday session to fix social services program
With partisan feuding providing the final push Thursday, the state legislature now will come into session between between Christmas and New Year’s Day to reverse an unpopular cut to a social services program for poor seniors and the disabled.
Posted inEnergy & Environment
CT’s preliminary conclusion: Millstone profitable through 2035
State energy officials concluded in a preliminary report released Thursday that the Millstone nuclear power station in Waterford will be profitable through 2035, undercutting its owner’s assertion that Connecticut must change how its electricity is sold or face the early retirement of New England’s largest source of carbon-free power. But they reached no conclusions on whether the profits represent a sufficient return on investment for the owner, Dominion Energy.
Posted inMoney, Politics
Final tax bill improves outlook for CT homeowners, students
WASHINGTON — As House and Senate negotiators of a final tax bill worked to finish the plan Thursday, changes were made that could help Connecticut homeowners and students. A final bill would allow greater deductibililty of state and property taxers and restores some tax breaks for students lost in earlier versions of the bill.
Posted inEducation, Justice, Money
DCF to hire 120 social workers to meet ‘Juan F.’ goals
The Department of Children and Families will be hiring 120 social workers to comply with an updated consent decree in the long-running Juan F. case, and the Malloy administration already has warned legislators it will need to spend $10 million more on the agency than is budgeted, the state’s top budget official said Thursday.
Posted inCT Viewpoints
Deeply flawed community college consolidation must be slowed down
The Board of Regents for Higher Education meets today to consider a consolidation of state community colleges. Since April, the deeply flawed proposal by state colleges and universities system president Mark Ojakian has been moving at warp speed, often under the radar. The board must slow it down. If not, the legislature must step in; should it too default, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the accrediting entity, must withhold its approval.
Posted inCT Viewpoints
GOP fiddles with fossil fuels while Los Angeles burns
The wrong-way Republicans are on the dark side of history again, proposing tax cuts for their wealthy donors and oil companies while gutting programs that have helped to fuel the rise of America’s alternative energy industry. Solar and wind power, two of the fastest growing (and cleanest) sources of power in this country, provided nearly 7 percent of the nation’s electricity in 2016 (the same as hydropower). More Americans work in solar power today than in the coal industry. But various Republican proposals in House and Senate tax bills have targeted the incentives that have helped alternative energy surge, while providing tax and other benefits to fossil fuel and nuclear power purveyors — including opening up the National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling.
Posted inPolitics
Newtown tragedy creates new political movement
About 400 members of Moms Demand Action, a gun control group that was formed the day after the Dec. 14, 2012, Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, say they are interested in running for office, and many may do so next year.
Posted inMoney, Politics
Malloy, legislators in a new standoff over budget priorities
It’s a new budget deadlock that could spill into the New Year: Legislators want a special session to reverse their intensely unpopular cut of $54 million from a Medicare assistance program, while Gov. Dannel P. Malloy insists they address the larger and more politically difficult issue of how to close a projected deficit of $207.8 million.
Posted inMoney, Politics
Malloy offers tough medicine for deficit: taxes, spending cuts
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy released an array of options to rebalance the state budget Wednesday that include raising the sales tax rate as high as 6.9 percent, boosting other taxes, cutting municipal aid by $50 million and reducing health care, social services, and other programs.
Posted inEducation
Judge simplifies path for DCF to end court oversight
A federal judge Wednesday ordered Connecticut to commit to certain staffing and caseload levels at the Department of Children and Families as a step toward ending the court’s quarter-century oversight of the agency under a consent decree. Unlike an exit plan rejected in February by the legislature, it does not shield the DCF from budget cuts.
Posted inCT Viewpoints, Talking Transportation
Updates on the billion dollar bridge and high-speed rail
A few updates on some recent items: HYPERLOOP: In July I wrote about tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s idea to build a 700-plus mph tube system to whisk passengers from Washington D.C. to New York City in 29 minutes using a combination of a near-vacuum and linear induction motors. I noted that Musk has yet to build a working full-scale prototype, and called him “the PT Barnum of technology” offering “more hype than hope.”
At the time, Musk had just gone public after a meeting at the White House saying he’d been given “approval” to start boring giant tunnels for his project. I scoffed at the notion, but have been proven wrong.