A 2015 study of Connecticut’s State Employees Retirement System (SERS) miscalculated the level of employee pension benefits, saying they were not “overly generous.” They were and, today, still are overgenerous.
Posts published in “Connecticut Newspapers”
Joe Markley, Ed Dadakis and Dan Quigley have sent letters to the editor to set the record straight about state employee compensation in response to attacks by state employee union apologists upon columns on The Red Line. The Red Line is grateful to Messrs. Markley, Dadakis and Quigley for their defense of fact-based journalism.
Give it to Connecticut Democrats. They never give up. They are determined to diminish local government to a status of virtual triviality in the name of progressivism and in their unquenchable thirst for ever more state tax revenue.
Last week, Governor Lamont invoked the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) to explain his reordering of the sequence of eligibility for COVID-19 vaccinations. He should not stop there. The entirety of state government could use a rigorous application of the principle.
Last year, Yankee Institute released a study of state revenue sources. The study was simple. What it found was not. The study was just a one-page list of all the state’s revenue sources – all 344 of them.
Governor Lamont unveiled his proposed Connecticut Comeback budget last week. A comeback is unlikely given the long-festering problem of overgenerous and woefully underfunded compensation for privileged state employees.
For over a decade, state employee compensation has exceeded compensation in Connecticut’s private sector by about 40 percent, the biggest gap in the nation.
The consequence is that the State Employee Retirement Fund (SERF) is drastically underfunded. It is difficult to fund such wildly overgenerous benefits.
What now is an ongoing gravy train for state employees is ultimately a train wreck for them and the state.
The evidence is piling up that schoolchildren, teachers and staff are safe in schools. Indeed, the evidence suggests schools are the “safest place” for them to be, as CDC Director Robert Redfield said last November. Yet, teacher unions and other school employee organizations are ignoring mounting evidence that support Redfield’s words.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released its first two studies of in-school spread of COVID-19, first, a study of the experience of 17 Wisconsin schools that operated in-person from August through November.
I am not famous, but I am somewhat infamous, at least to leaders of two big public sector unions, the Connecticut State Employees Association (CSEA) and the statewide teachers union, Connecticut Education Association (CEA).
After a long summer of frequent violence and riots attending protests and after the recent horrific assault on the Capitol, it is especially meaningful to remember that non-violence was the bedrock of Martin Luther King's activism.
Remembrance is enriched by discovery of new previously unknown dimensions of the person or event. King spent college summers in Connecticut working on tobacco farms. It was the first time he ventured outside the Jim Crow South. He said it was an eye-opening experience.
Marvelously, high school students and teachers in Simsbury have just completed a years-long project to memorialize King's time in Connecticut. The CT Hearst newspapers have a wonderful article by Robert Marchant describing King's summers in the Nutmeg state and the Simsbury high school project.
Earlier this month, just days before the first Connecticut health care workers were administered the newly-approved coronavirus vaccine, a coalition of public school employee unions demanded Governor Lamont close schools - and extend all school employees a full-pay-no-layoff guarantee.
What a striking juxtaposition between the selfless dedication of health care workers who have been treating patients hospitalized with serious – and highly contagious – cases of COVID-19 for nine straight months and the selfish outlook of the 14,000 petition signers, who, only over the last three months, started again to interact with school-age kids, who present the lowest risk of transmission of all segments of the population.
To demand the closing of schools is tantamount to desertion on the field of battle. The top generals in this war -- Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams -- have all said schools should be open. Fauci said this earlier this month even as the current surge of the virus was well under way.
School children themselves have virtually no risk from COVID-19. Of the 225,000 COVID-related deaths for which the CDC has demographic data, there have been only 130 school-age COVID-19 deaths, while 195 died of the seasonal flu during the 2019-2020 school year.
Schoolchildren do become infected. But do they spread the virus? That is a fair question for adult school employees.
Some studies published in the summer and early fall "suggest" that children may be "potential" spreaders, but they do not conclude that they are. Significantly, both Dr. Fauci and Director Redfield called for schools to be open after the publication of these studies, about which, presumably, they were aware.
Recent public announcements concerning Connecticut’s fiscal condition have come out in separate disjointed fashion. Taken together, they spell impending crisis.
It is no surprise that the state is facing an enormous deficit this year (and into the future), due, in part, to the sudden economic shutdown occasioned by the pandemic.
However, in larger part, the crisis has been long coming and widely anticipated. It is a function of the bill coming due for decades of paying state employees massively overgenerous, yet woefully underfunded, compensation. It is unlikely that Connecticut will have money both to continue state operations and to fund employee retirement benefits.
On the first of this month, Governor Lamont released his official deficit mitigation plan, as required after Comptroller Kevin Lembo made the obvious official, namely that the state faces a deficit of $1.8 billion in the current year’s budget of approximately $21 billion.
No one really knows where the state and the country are headed economically. The good news is that the state’s rainy day fund has grown to $3 billion since 2017. Lamont said he would use most of the fund to close the budget gap, leaving little for the next fiscal year and beyond.
Just days before, the governor announced his hiring of Boston Consulting Group to find $500 million in annual state savings, primarily from workforce attrition. The goal is to automate or eliminate many job functions, so that the expected retirement before mid-year 2022 of an estimated one-third of the state’s 49,000-person workforce will require the fewest possible replacements.
Of course, Lamont could have saved one-quarter of BCG's savings target by using his emergency powers to cancel the $135 million state employee pay raise last July 1st.
That would have caused employees little pain, as demonstrated by a recently released Yankee Institute study, which found that Connecticut’s state and municipal employees (excluding teachers) are paid about $20,000 per year more than their private sector counterparts. That translates into an aggregate annual premium of almost $1 billion for 49,000 state employees, assuming they and municipal employees enjoy equivalent pay.