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Welcome to Southward Park in Middlebury. It’s a 77 acre in a zone that permits warehouses. And the parcel includes fewer than five acres of wetlands.

A proposal earlier this year on a larger lot in the same spot to build a warehouse caused considerable local engagement–in a way that only local zoning does. The developers’ application meets the requirements of its designated zone so requires only a site plan approval, a routine special permit when more than 1000 cubic feet of dirt is moved (which is most projects) and a text amendment on building height.

Legislative leaders and Governor Ned Lamont diminished themselves in June when they agreed to include a House Republican provision in the state budget that prohibited Middlebury from approving the original warehouse proposal. The budget section applied to towns with a population between 6,000 and 8,000. It specified warehouse or distribution facilities of more than 100,000 square feet on a site with less than 150 acres that contains more than five acres of wetlands and is not more than two miles from an elementary school. The scheme was first reported in Daily Ructions.

Developers have reconfigured the parcel, reducing the area designated as wetlands to below that lethal five acres standard. You can read more about the proposal here.

The zoning process will proceed.

Published September 1, 2023.

Welcome to launch day for Now You Know–The Cultural Lives of Others on Substack. Each issue will provide a look at a guest’s cultural life. You will learn what they read, watch and listen to. Also what they have meant to read but never get around to it. There will be guest lists of fantasy dinner parties.

First guest is State Treasurer Erick Russell. He discloses his cultural interests, enters the ice cream wars and has something to say about the Dallas Cowboys.

Published August 28, 2023.

Return to Daily Ructions Monday morning, August 28th when the curtain rises on something new.

Published August 25, 2023.

The state lottery continues to be stumped by technology. The quasi-public agency has announced that it cannot process winning tickets with a prize of $600 to $5,000. The lottery previously told players that the new equipment it required retailers to begin using in May does not always recognize winning tickets when a customer uses the ticket reader available where tickets are sold.

Expiration dates will be extended for valid tickets.

Published August 24, 2023.

Entrepreneur Robert Patricelli criticized advertisements placed in the Hartford Courant criticizing health insurance giant Cigna. The ads were purchased by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation of Los Angeles. Mr. Patricelli’s opinion piece also appeared in the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper. The ads alarmed him.

Cigna, an international company, possesses the resources to defend itself over an issue involving the cost of drugs. Patricelli, long a figure in the shrinking Hartford business establishment, nevertheless provided an intervention that portrayed Cigna as “our home team — the business version of the Huskies….” It is not. Cigna is a business that attempts to provide a service that consumers will purchase at a price that returns a profit to its shareholders. It is nothing like the Huskies. Its audience is Wall Street, not the people of Connecticut.

Cigna, created by the merger of Connecticut General and Philadelphia-based Insurance Company of North America, designated Connecticut as its corporate headquarters when David Cordani, a Connecticut resident, became its president more than a decade ago. The decision came with a hefty price tag. It was the first of then-Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s First Five corporations to receive hefty state assistance in 2011 as Connecticut’s finances deteriorated and residents endured a series of destructive tax increases. Cigna saw an opportunity to increase its profit and it took it. That’s what businesses do.

Making that profit–and satisfying the intense attention of Wall Street–is how corporations are judged and we are all better for it. Free markets and the innovations that they bring have raised billions around the world out of grinding poverty. The people of a sovereign state need not pick a side based on locations.

Corporations change. Connecticut General was in the forefront of companies abandoning cities when it moved from Hartford to Bloomfield in 1957. Mr. Patricelli highlighted CIGNA’s striking and architecturally significant building as a side note in his explanation of the company’s big old ding dong of a fight with a non-profit operator of pharmacies. At the dawn of the 21st century, Cigna executives were intent on the destruction of that municipal building to make way for a golf course, luxury housing and two undistinguished office buildings.

The Courant led the fight against the demolition of that notable building in the teeth of opposition by Cigna executives and, oddly, Bloomfield officials. In 2000, the company’s director of public relations, Kenneth J. Ferraro, told the New York Times, ”Cigna’s history and tradition is not a building. It’s providing competitively superior value and service from its employees to its customers and shareholders. This development proposal allows us to continue to do this.”

The company abandoned its plan to get rid of the Wilde building. In a blow to preservation, Cigna did sell the modern marvel of design to the north of Wilde building, once the headquarters of Emhart Corporation. It was demolished.

“Executives for Cigna have dismissed the outcry from the architectural community,” the Times reported, “as the inflated opinion of impractical elitists.” It did not feel like it at the time and that has not changed.

Mr. Patricelli tut-tuts AIDS Healthcare Foundation for including an unflattering photo of David Cordani in an ad. No one rises to the top of a large American corporation without knowing how to fight. Cordani is a dab hand with the shiv and the bazooka. If anyone doubts what Cordani is made of, ask the supporters of a misbegotten plan to create an unregulated state-operated health insurance plan (with no reserves). The Cigna chief may or may not have been at the center of defenestrating their heaving dream of competing with Cigna and other health insurance companies under distinctly uneven terms–and making the public the guarantors of their errors.

An unflattering photo? Most Courant readers would not recognize Cordani in any photo, realistic or distorted. He runs a business. We have no need to know what he looks like. Cordani’s $22 million in compensation last year ought to go a long way in repairing any wounded feelings an unflattering photo inflicted.

Space limitations always play a part in opinion pieces. That may explain why Mr. Patricelli did not include a chapter in Cigna’s history in Connecticut that still perplexes. When the state’s health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act was launched in 2014, Cigna did not participate–and it has not. As of last year, Cigna offered health insurance coverage on the exchanges of 16 states.

The company is free to choose where it will offer its products. Regrettably, it chooses year after year not to offer them in Connecticut to its neighbors who need help to afford health insurance.

“When distant third parties unfairly attack one of our state’s major companies and its CEO,” Mr. Patricelli writes, “we should all push back.” When one our state’s major companies and its CEO decline year after year to lend a hand to their fellow residents through the health care exchange, we should all push back on that, too, because it is part of the Cigna story in Connecticut, too.

Published August 22, 2023.

The Boston Globe reports that LEGO’s new American headquarters will be 100,000 square feet in a new Boyleston Street building atop the Massachusetts Turnpike. LEGO announced early this year that it will close its Enfield headquarters after nearly 50 years in the north central Connecticut town.

“Being in proximity [to MIT and other innovative institutions] can make a big difference in collaboration,” LEGO American group president Skip Kodak told The Globe. “You don’t know who you might bump into when you move into a new neighborhood.”

Governor Maura Healey called the announcement, according to The Globe, “an incredible opportunity to bring new jobs and innovation to the area, while inspiring the next generation of leaders.”

LEGO’s decision remains a stinging wound in Connecticut’s 15 year struggle to restore jobs to the state’s economy.

Published August 21, 2023.

Inside Higher Ed reports on an extended conflict at Trinity College that began with complaints in the school’s engineering department, furtive bullying by two deans armed with a sealed envelope, an intervention by the school ombuds, followed by meetings of the Academic Freedom Committee, and action by the Board of Trustees and college president. To summarize, administrators have made a complicated mess with collateral resentments and grievances litter the leafy campus.

Reporter Ryan Quinn explains the web of actions and conflicts at the elite liberal arts college with the help of documents he obtained and conversations with the early target of the administration, engineering professor John Mertens.

Henry Kissinger, who served on the Harvard faculty before joining President Richard Nixon’s administration at its start in 1969, famously observed, The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.” The conflict at Trinity sounds like a right royal brawl with nothing accomplished other than a guarantee of future fights.

Published August 17, 2023.

State Senator John Fonfara and retired Superior Court judge and former state senator Eric Coleman have qualified for the Hartford Democratic primary for mayor. They will face each other and town committee-endorsed candidate Arunan Arulampalm on September 12th.

Nick LeBron, who is a member of the City Council, did not gather enough signatures to make the primary ballot.

Liam Brennan, the former federal corruption buster, will meet New Haven’s Democratic mayor, Justin Elicker, in that intensely political city’s primary.  Tom Goldenberg and Shafiq Abdussabur fell short in their effort to collect signatures from their fellow Democrats and will not be on ballot. Elicker recently announced he thinks New Haven holds too many elections and should extend his term from two years to four years.

Published August 16, 2023.

The imminent departure of Connecticut Lottery Corporation President and CEO Greg Smith was not announced at Thursday’s board meeting. The first hint of a major change came near the end of the meeting when the board approved a motion to form a search committee for a new leader.

The lottery, which has a long history of troubles accompanied by intense finger-pointing often ending in lucrative settlements, continues to endure an embarrassing year. Its new point-of-sale technology was launched in May and has alienated lottery retailers and customers with a series of troubles that the quasi-public agency has been reluctant to highlight.

Published August 10, 2023.

Not a good day at Connecticut’s fourth branch of government. The Wall Street Journal shines a light on public university spending–with an emphasis on the University of Connecticut. The state’s premier public university has increased spending, according to the Journal, by 73% between 2002 and 2022. Enrollment has risen by 47%, with much of the burden falling on students.

The Journal story, written by Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller and Jennifer S. Forsyth, includes an examination of public university spending on athletics, highlighting UConn:

The University of Connecticut won the national championship this spring in men’s basketball, and its women’s team has been a near-constant presence in the Final Four. Yet since 2016, Connecticut’s athletic department has received more than $35 million annually in student fees and university subsidies to stay afloat. In 2022, it took in $55 million in such funds, making up more than half its total athletics budget.

The school said more than $13 million of that subsidy covered a payout to a former men’s basketball coach as part of a legal settlement over his employment contract, and that it faces unique challenges in having to pay rent and other fees for basketball and hockey games, which are played off campus. 

Overall, the University of Connecticut’s spending rose by 73% between 2002 and 2022, far faster than enrollment grew. Much of that was driven by personnel costs, with spending on benefits more than tripling.

Reka Wrynn, associate vice president of budget, planning and institutional research, said that was in part because the school was on the hook for a growing share of the state’s unfunded pension liability. Connecticut was also obligated to pay for raises that unionized employees negotiated with the state, she said.

The treatment of Kevin Ollie, the men’s basketball coach fired by ruse, remains a deep stain on UConn’s administration. That will not begin to change until the university officials who plotted to terminate Ollie’s contract, embarrass the NCAA championship coach and deny him the compensation he was entitled to in an agreement the university negotiated with Ollie endure consequences proportionate to their bad acts.

Daily Ructions readers will profit from reading the entire WSJ story.

Published August 10, 2023.