Luke Bronin’s parents got value for money when their son went to Yale. The Hartford mayor tells Now You Know he retreats from the world by reading War and Peace. The world would be a better place if more leaders followed that example.

Willie Nelson, Grateful Dead, Derry Girls, a dobro, Sonia Sotomayor, General Douglas MacArthur and Colin McEnroe. All of that and more in this week’s addition of Now You Know, a Substack newsletter on the Cultural Lives of Others.

Published September 11, 2023.

Governor Ned Lamont’s spokesman has emerged as the likely choice to fill the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) new vice chancellorship position. Adam Joseph, a veteran Democratic government communications hand, worked for Senate Democrats and Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz before landing in Lamont’s office. Joseph did two tours with Bysiewicz, the first when she filled her calendar with visits to Democratic town committees as secretary of the state for three fruitless terms.

The title grows more preposterous with each day. The position is an ordinary lobby-the-governor-and legislature sinecure with communications duties soldered to it. The jumped up name is one more misstep as Terrence Cheng, whose title was changed from President to Chancellor, continues to struggle in addressing the troubled higher education system.

The popular Joseph’s experience in the legislative and executive branches of state government may help Cheng find his footing after a calamitous beginning this year. The legislature added tens of millions to Lamont’s CSCU budget proposal.

Legislative leaders were astonished at Cheng’s public displays of ingratitude at their advocacy for the state’s largest education system. It has not been forgotten.

And now these ridiculous titles. Do Cheng and the members of the Board of Regents not know who was history’s most infamous chancellor? Yes, him. Ninety years ago. Changing a some titles will do nothing to address Connecticut’s demographic decline. It is no strategy for filling expensive empty classrooms around the state.

Published September 8, 2023.

Thomas G. Moukawsher has resigned as a judge of the Superior Court after ten years. In this fractious age, most can agree that a decade was enough.

Moukawsher, an active Democrat and a one-term state representative, presided over the state education funding case that went on and on and on. Moukawsher may be remembered for the substance of his decision–overturned by the Supreme Court. Few in the court system will forget that he summoned parties to his courtroom to read the decision to the long-suffering lawyers and litigants.

The opinion attracted particular attention for Moukawsher’s decision included giving school administrators the power to block the schoolhouse door to some disabled children. One commentator called it a “dark poison.” Moukawsher responded to criticism of his heartless pronouncement with an op-ed in The Courant claiming he was not an enemy of the disabled, he was one of them. He had, after all, stabbed himself with a pen while studying in college.

Serious judges customarily explain their decisions in their opinions, not the opinion pages of newspapers.

In a letter to Governor Ned Lamont, Moukawsher announced his resignation is effective at the end of the business day on October 16, 2023.

Published September 5, 2023.

You will want to read the second edition of Now You Know–The Cultural Lives of Others, featuring Connecticut favorite Diane Smith.

The veteran reporter, anchor and radio host reveals what she reads, watches and listens to, as well as her most memorable reporting assignments. And then there was the night she anchored election results coverage with two broken bones.

Published September 5, 2023.

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.

State Comptroller Sean Scanlon will mark the end of the municipal primary season by raising money from lobbyists for his Sound CT PAC. The Guilford Democrat has invited lobbyists and others to join him at J Restaurant I Bar, the “midtown Hartford gem.” (When did Hartford get a midtown?) The 90-minute event takes place on September 14th.

Lobbyists may handover $100 each. Individuals (lobbyists are denied their personhood under the state’s campaign finance law and are not considered individuals) may donate $1,000. Other PACS in the world of PACS supporting PACS are capped at $2,000.

Campaign finance reports reveal the Scanlon committee serves as a fund for the former legislator to sprinkle money on local Democratic campaigns. In June, Scanlon dropped $1,500 contributions on Democratic candidates for mayor in Danbury, Middletown and Waterbury. Helpful for the candidates and some seed money for Scanlon when he spies a chance to reach for a higher rung on the ladder.

PACs run for the benefit of politicians who receive millions in taxpayer funds for their own campaigns have become a common means of chipping away at the purpose of public financing. What’s unusual about the Scanlon PAC is that he continues to serve as its chairman. Connecticut’s comptroller has many duties and responsibilities, as well as significant authority in certain spheres of public policy. There is a bit of the unseemly in him serving as the chair of a PAC that solicits lobbyists, individuals and PACs that may have business before him–or hope to do business with him.

Attorney General William Tong provides a contrast. Nancy DiNardo, the reliable state Democratic party leader, chair’s Tong’s Firewall Fund PAC. Tong and Scanlon may be destined to highlight contrasts between themselves as each seeks to squeeze through the state’s crowded bottleneck of political ambition.

This early round goes to Tong.

Published August 30, 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.