Date: Fri 05-Jun-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

commentary-powell-kennelly

Full Text:

COMMENTARY: At Last Kennelly Tries To Get Connecticut Angry

By Chris Powell

Last August when former state Comptroller William E. Curry, Jr, held a press

conference for his gubernatorial campaign on the street in front of the

headquarters of the state Department of Environmental Protection to accuse the

department of lax enforcement, Commissioner Sidney J. Holbrook came outside in

his wheelchair to dispute the charge. While Curry had some fair points, they

were mostly lost in the sympathy for the commissioner. The television and

newspaper cameras made it look as if Curry were attacking a handicapped guy.

Curry's successor as the Democratic Party's likely candidate for governor, US

Rep Barbara B. Kennelly, chose the same issue the other day to launch her

first serious attack on Governor Rowland and to invigorate her campaign.

While the guy in the wheelchair had been promoted from the DEP to a job in the

governor's office and so posed no threat of distraction this time, Kennelly

did not have her press conference at DEP headquarters. Instead she chose the

banks of the Naugatuck River in Naugatuck, where thousands of fish had been

killed four years ago in a discharge by a chemical company upriver in

Waterbury -- MacDermid Inc., whose president had contributed to Rowland's

campaign for governor and whose pollution fine was negotiated down to $70,000

from the $250,000 sought by DEP staff.

Unfortunately for Kennelly, the riverbank was pleasant, the water was

inviting, and wild ducks and geese swam and waddled in abundance past the

television and newspaper cameras, as if all indeed had been forgiven by

nature, if not by the Democratic candidate. The waterfowl seemed to perform

for Rowland the same unexpected public-relations function of damage control

that the plucky commissioner in the wheelchair had performed last year.

Despite her attack on the Rowland administration, Kennelly said environmental

enforcement is very much a matter of judgment.

Everybody wants to come down hard on polluters in general. But when it gets to

specifics, punishing even chronically negligent polluters becomes much less

popular as soon as jobs in Connecticut's dwindling manufacturing sector are at

stake, and even conscientious companies inevitably will suffer accidents and

make mistakes.

Enforcement bureaucracies -- whether they deal with the environment, taxes, or

civil rights -- do tend to fill up with zealots who often must be tempered by

the political authorities.

And as for the access and sympathy that may be purchased by campaign

contributions, no one from either political party in government in Connecticut

has clean hands.

Was the MacDermid case an unscrupulous political payoff that devastated the

environment and environmental policy?

As the oblivious ducks and geese suggested, maybe not. Kennelly herself

acknowledged that environmental enforcement might have been overzealous in the

years before the Rowland administration, even as she argued that it is too lax

now.

But, like Curry before her, Kennelly had some good ideas on policy,

particularly to increase the DEP's inspection staff and to do more regular and

surprise inspections of companies that are liable to pollute. Given all the

extra money that was appropriated by the state budget revisions just enacted,

Connecticut might have been able to afford that much improvement in

environmental protection if the governor had wanted it -- or, for that matter,

if there had been more support for it in the General Assembly, which is

controlled by Kennelly's party.

More important than her particular attack and proposals made on the banks of

the Naugatuck was what seems to be Kennelly's new readiness to give

Connecticut the campaign it deserves. Kennelly may have realized that, amid

prosperity, voters have to be given compelling reasons for removing an amiable

incumbent. Like any incumbent, the governor may want and advocate a "positive"

campaign, but no challenger can afford to fall into such a trap. For a

"positive" campaign, such as Kennelly had been waging prior to her press

conference in Naugatuck, largely with television commercials pledging support

for education, more or less accepts an incumbent's record as he chooses to

describe it.

The polls suggest that Connecticut is as accepting of the Rowland

administration's record as were the ducks and geese that gave an ironic

contrast to Kennelly's complaint about pollution of the Naugatuck River. So

she may have to offer a lot more criticism -- criticism practically every day

-- to make herself competitive. But if she indeed has decided to wage such a

campaign, the governor's enormous lead may never be greater than it is now.

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