Date: Fri 19-Feb-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

edink-tobacco-money-state

Full Text:

ED INK: The Tobacco Money

There is a component of smoke in the $23.7 billion two-year state spending

package proposed by Gov John Rowland last week. Buoyed by a steady stream of

sales and income tax revenues from a sunny state economy, the governor felt

fiscally secure enough to increase a few budgets for state agencies coping

with some of Connecticut's not-so-sunny problems: the Department of

Correction, the state police, and the Department of Children and Families.

Ironically, $87 million earmarked in the Rowland budget for education in the

next two years -- an expenditure that might lighten the load of the prisons,

police, and social services in the future -- is coming from a far less certain

source: tobacco settlement money.

Gov Rowland's budget proposal assumes the state will get $300 million of

Connecticut's $5 billion, 25-year tobacco settlement in the next two years,

even though the state has not seen any money yet from the settlement of its

lawsuit against the tobacco companies. The money could be delayed, and

significant amounts of it could be siphoned off by the federal government,

which has asserted a claim on portions of state tobacco settlements for

reimbursement of federal Medicaid expenses in treating sick smokers.

In addition to the $87 million for education, the governor has proposed

spending $50 million of the tobacco money on towns and cities in the next two

years. Again, none of this money is in hand, and yet towns like Newtown are

expected to plan their own budgets based on promises from the state that may

have to be revised or amended down the line. It would be far better if the

state built its budgets on certainties rather than on hopes.

We also question why the state's tobacco settlement money isn't being spent

exclusively on public health and anti-smoking initiatives. That was the

rationale for the tobacco lawsuit in the first place: the people of

Connecticut must be compensated for the ravages wrought on their health and

finances by their industry-abetted tobacco addiction. Our state leaders should

remember that the $5 billion that may or may not be headed our way from this

lawsuit settlement is not free money -- it was bought and paid for by the

suffering of smokers who grew ill and died early because of a product

relentlessly promoted by an industry which knew, but apparently didn't care,

that it was degrading the lives of millions. The state has an obligation to

spend the tobacco money on efforts to right those wrongs.