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Connecticut Public Employees, June 5, 2008 Connecticut’s public employees are frustrated and depressed -- and they’re lashing out at anyone who dares to question their fiefdoms and platinum-plated compensation packages. In East Windsor, First Selectwoman Denise E. Menard found voters’ nearly 2-to-1 defeat of her tax-hiking budget “quite disillusioning,” and doesn’t “know where we could cut except cutting into the future.” “Truly, we are at our wits’ end,” she lamented. The superintendent of Lisbon’s government schools, Jules D’Agostino, cannot “understand why the education budget failed” in her town. After all, educrats “put so much effort in preparing information and data so all the facts and figures were available.” In a letter to the Norwich Bulletin, she asked potential “yes” voters: “Where were you? Do you know what is at stake? Do you care?” In Meriden, superintendent Mary Noonan Cortright is so steamed, she’s taking her toys and going home. Last month, Cortright submitted her resignation, in large part because the “only way” she knew to “secure appropriate funding for this school system in the future … is to leave my position … and hope that the Council will understand that, to attract a new superintendent, they need to offer a responsible budget.” (This year, Cortright claimed, the town chose to “fund education at the bare minimum required by law in a very mean-spirited manner with the message, ‘Just deal with it.’”) When asked about layoffs of and wage freezes for state employees as tools to address Connecticut’s budget deficit, UConn’s Fred Carstensen told the Hartford Business Journal: “I almost resent this kind of discussion.” The pompous professor -- whose taxpayer-subsidized “Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis” pushes Big Government “solutions” to the state’s problems -- shares local officials’ view that any rollback of public spending would be apocalyptic for Nutmeggers. The reality, of course, is exactly the opposite. Government must be cut, widely and deeply, if Connecticut’s downward spiral is to be stopped. Employees on the public payroll may be in denial, but a growing number of taxpayers aren’t. Local budgets are being voted down in every corner of the state, sometimes by huge margins, and often more than once. Citizen awareness of state-level taxation, particularly Connecticut’s highest-in-the-nation gasoline levies, appears higher than ever. And that’s why so many Connecticut bureaucrats -- and their lackeys in towns halls and the state legislature -- are running scared. They understand that with compensation comprising the majority of municipal spending and perhaps as much as 30 percent of state expenditures, Connecticut’s fiscal woes won’t be fixed until personnel costs come back to Earth. The state’s economy reached its apex in 1989. Amazingly, it has fewer private-sector jobs today than it did then. But state- and local-government employment is 20 percent higher. The last few decades have seen labor productivity in Connecticut and around the nation rise. Through improved technology, slashing middle management, and outsourcing non-core functions, companies are doing more with less. Too bad neither the state nor local governments can say the same. In addition to having too many bureaucrats, Connecticut pays them far too much. The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in every one of its broad employment categories, hourly pay for public-sector workers in the Hartford region bested that of private-sector workers. Even in the “management, business, and financial” grouping, where one might expect the private sector to command a substantial premium, bureaucrats beat out their counterparts in the real world. (In the service sector, government pay was almost 100 percent higher.) Superintendent Cortright, who complains of Meriden’s skimpiness with its schools, earns $149,759 a year -- over 30 of her employees receive salaries in excess of $100,000. The story is even more obscene for benefits. Taxpayers get the bill for 88.5 percent of the healthcare coverage provided to individual state employees. (Family coverage is a real bargain -- tax revenue covers only 86.6 percent.) Some local bureaucrats pay nothing for healthcare. Defined-benefit pensions, nearly nonexistent in the private sector, remain the norm in Connecticut government. The total unfunded liability for pensions and other retirement goodies for state employees and government-school teachers now tops $38 billion. (The unfunded obligation for the post-employment benefits of municipal employees is unknown, but what we’ve learned so far is scary.) Vacation time and paid sick leave are also far more generous for public-sector employees. Sheltered from both the competitive marketplace and the disastrous economic consequences of politicians’ many misguided policy decisions, it’s no wonder that Connecticut’s pampered public sector grows indignant at the mere suggestion that it make sacrifices. D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and public-policy researcher. His website is www.dowdmuska.com. # # # # # |
