Commentary––

State’s Leaders Helpless Amid Graft And Waste

By Chris Powell

Connecticut’s cities are supposed to be poor and desperate. The trial and conviction of Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim on 16 federal corruption charges showed that as desperate as those cities may be, they are hardly poor –– they are practically rolling in money, much of it sent by state government in the name of their poverty.

Mayor Ganim’s former cohorts told how easy it was to jack up the cost of contracts for city services and siphon off the difference; how easy it was to cut themselves and the mayor in on a piece of everything undertaken in Bridgeport in the name of economic development; even how easy it was to contrive entire city government programs for which there was little purpose at all besides the greed of the parasites involved, but which nevertheless went unquestioned elsewhere in the government.

After Ganim’s indictment, Governor Rowland repeatedly said the mayor should resign to avoid distraction from the city’s business, and when Ganim refused, the Rowland administration tried working around him in Bridgeport. But among political people only Bridgeport’s congressman, US Rep Christopher Shays, got the big point. Shays announced that he could not continue to seek financial aid from the federal government for Bridgeport while there was such likelihood that the money would be stolen or otherwise misapplied.

Meanwhile, as it turns out, the governor seems to have been doing a bit of what would have deprived Mayor Ganim of the benefit of any doubt once he was hauled into criminal court (if the jury could have had much doubt) –– accepting personal gifts from a state government contractor, discounted hospitality at vacation homes in Vermont and Florida. From there it is barely a step to suspicion of bribery, the suspicion under which the whole Rowland administration now labors because of the sudden, incompletely explained, and thus ominous confession to federal bribery charges of the governor’s former deputy chief of staff, Lawrence E. Alibozek.

Campaign contributions from government contractors impugn the government enough. When a politician gets so chummy with contractors that he makes a habit of using their vacation homes and hopes that the discounted honorariums he pays will withstand comparison to market rates for the use of similar property, arrogance or stupidity or worse may be setting in.

The Alibozek scandal has indicated that while the Ganim gang was leeching away at Bridgeport, the Rowland administration was awarding without competitive bidding certain state construction contracts that are coming under scrutiny by the US attorney’s office and the news media. The funny thing is that, regardless of whether such contracts were “steered” to the Republican administration’s chums, the general procedures for avoiding competitive bidding for these contracts was authorized by law for “emergencies,” and nobody on the Democratic side within state government questioned anything –– perhaps because the contractors long had supported both political parties financially. Indeed, the contractor under suspicion of bribing the Republican administration’s former deputy chief of staff responded quickly with a management shuffle that included hiring the former chief of staff to the Democratic majority caucus of the state House of Representatives. There seems to be plenty for everybody at Both Sides of the Street Inc.

The bigger outrage about the Bridgeport and Alibozek scandals is the refusal of anyone besides Congressman Shays to acknowledge the evidence and draw the obvious conclusion. The sound of public money cascading down the drain is almost deafening, and yet the governor, most state legislators, and most local officials can think only of raising taxes in a recession that is deepening, not easing.

Indeed, Connecticut’s government seems largely to be giving up. The General Assembly investigates nothing, and lately the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, supposedly a representative of town governments, has joined the Connecticut Education Association, the teachers union, in sponsoring a television advertising campaign demanding more “state aid to education,” which long ago ceased to be anything other than more state reimbursement for raises for the best-paid teachers in the country.

Like state elected officials, town officials don’t want to bother governing anymore –– just give them more money so they can turn it over to one more special interest. Now that CCM has defected to the other side, the easiest money that towns could save would be to withdraw from the organization.

So hooray for the US attorney’s office; congratulations on nailing the Ganim gang and Alibozek, and on whatever convictions may follow. But federal prosecutors can only put crooks in jail; they can’t govern Connecticut. Doesn’t anyone want to try?

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)