Gov Rell Crashes The Spending Party

When Governor M. Jodi Rell announced last week that she would veto the legislature’s $3.2 billion general bond package, it had the same sobering effect on lawmakers as when mom turns up the lights on the big teen party in the basement. Sorry, the party’s over.

The Democratic majorities in the state House and Senate complained bitterly that the veto would derail essential projects benefiting schools and other municipal transportation and clean water projects. Despite the governor’s calls for restraint, however, the lawmakers had increased funding for a variety of state grant programs, including LoCIP, STEAP, Urban Act, and the Clean Water Fund, and authorized $1 billion in new unspecified spending on Connecticut State University campuses over the next ten years.

Gov Rell acknowledged that the long list of state grants to towns and cities was “well intentioned” but “simply unaffordable” for the third smallest state, which now has the third highest bonded indebtedness per person in the nation. In announcing her veto, she scolded lawmakers. “It is too easy, sometimes, to use terms like bonds and bonding,” she said. “The simple fact is the bond commission really is Connecticut’s credit card, and we are over the limit.”

In recent years, state debt payments have weighted the state’s operating budget to the detriment of existing programs and services. And the rate at which the state has been accumulating that debt has accelerated. Ten years ago, the state allocated $660 million in general obligation bonds. Last year, the total was $1.4 billion. In the bonding package passed by the General Assembly this year, 2008 allocations would be $1.77 billion.

Recognizing that not every bonded expense is pork, the governor called the legislature back into session this week to approve a bonding package limited to school and transportation projects — many of them already underway. For a state that has been underfunding education and its infrastructure for decades, no one views capital grants for local school and road projects as anything less than an obligation. Negotiations over borrowing for other items, however, can wait for the next legislative session in February.

Though Gov Rell’s veto does not affect any projects or programs in Newtown, we would still welcome her attempt to bring a little light and discipline to the big spending party in the legislature even if it did. In the long run, running up the debt on the state’s credit card creates more problems than it solves.