Municipal life

Welcome to Long Island City, Amazon! (And maybe Connecticut). We hope you’ll look to high-speed ferries to give your employees great choices on where to live and easily commute from. Fairfield County can be minutes away via high-speed ferries offering close-knit, small-town communities, excellent universities, terrific public and private schools, and beautiful homes with open space land — giving your new employees wonderful choices where their families can grow.

Congratulations to the Hartford City Council on passing an ordinance that raises the age of sale of tobacco products to 21. The ordinance, which was introduced by Councilman Larry Deutsch, makes Hartford the first city in the State of Connecticut to pass this policy. The ordinance, which includes the purchase of electronic cigarettes, was passed just weeks after an announcement from the State Department of Public Health that the number of high school students using electronic cigarettes doubled in just two years.

Which is better for the residents of Hartford: a trash- to- energy plant or a 250 megawatt gas- fired power plant? City officials have voiced strong opposition to the current proposal to modernize the waste processing facility in Hartford’s South Meadows, arguing there are better uses for the site, and that the facility imposes significant health impacts on residents. The City Council impaneled a Solid Waste Task Force to consider alternatives for managing the city’s waste. While some council members have spoken of marinas or upscale riverfront condominiums, the area is suitable only for commercial/ industrial development.

On September 5, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford awarded its annual Stowe Prize to writer and professor Matthew Desmond, whose work highlights the impact of evictions on poor people in America. Desmond is the author of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which follows eight families facing eviction in Milwaukee, WI. The real genius of Desmond’s contribution ) is that it highlights the ways in which the costs of evictions, although brutally imposed on the poor, are also borne by the wider community. This includes Hartford, which has one of the nation’s highest eviction rates.

One of us is a lifelong, third-generation resident of Newington who has lived all over this town. The other is a more recent transplant.  Both of us love this town. We do not believe in building barriers to affordable housing because these barriers mean that the cost of admission right now is too high for others to live in and enjoy our wonderful town.

Twenty five years ago Hamden was a healthy, thriving town with generally happy residents. Taxes were manageable, schools were good and the town had excellent services. Town workers were fairly paid and got great benefits, particularly top-notch, town-funded health care and a generous defined-benefit pension plan. The Hamden real estate market had its ups and downs but was as strong as most in the area. Unfortunately, decades of miss-management and union commiseration have reversed the town’s strong prognosis.

If the opportunity for shared or regional services is to be realized, there needs to be a comprehensive realignment of which level of government — state, local or regional — should be responsible for what. Possibilities are open for strengthening and maximizing the opportunities provided by Connecticut’s regional Councils of Government (COGs) for the efficient, effective and economic delivery of needed services. However, reforms must be enacted.

It seems that Sen. Len Fasano and his Republican caucus prevented the Capitol Region Development Authority from pulling a fast one last month. Word surfaced on Tuesday the 22nd that the CRDA planned to initiate action at its meeting later that week to seize by eminent domain the section of the XL Center owned by Northland Investment Corp.  A letter from Fasano and other Senate Republicans led the CRDA to remove the proposal from its agenda.

On Saturday, April 28, I attended the ceremony unveiling a monument in New Britain for the Borinqueneers – the Puerto Rican Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army. The audience members were dressed up for the occasion holding Puerto Rican flags, veterans were in full uniform, and it was a festive environment full of pride. It was a culmination of six years of hard work to find a location, seek state funding and obtain city support to commemorate a unit that became a national icon in Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans on the mainland for their heroic combat role, especially during the Korean war.

The United States has been facing a housing affordability crisis for at least a decade, and it should come as no surprise that Connecticut’s cities have not been immune. The nation’s eviction rate peaked in 2006, when 7.5 percent of renter-occupied households had eviction filings made against them, and 3.1 percent were evicted from their homes. Connecticut’s eviction rate peaked earlier, at 3.9 percent in 2003, but remains slightly higher than the nationwide rate.

Today it is often stated that pushing municipalities to share services is critical to solving the state’s financial problems. I doubt that.
First, municipalities have already regionalized services more than many realize. Second, while the term regionalization is hastily deployed, business plans showing the savings and who gets them are rarely seen. I suspect many of the ideas floated would not stand up to analysis.