Kevin Rennie: Why the Connecticut legislature does need a hall monitor - Hartford Courant

Getting your

Trinity Audioplayer ready...Sometimes the rule makers require a reminder of their own rules.

The day after this year’s regular session of the legislature began on February 4, Speaker of the House Matthew Ritter reminded his colleagues of the rules they had voted unanimously a year before to impose on themselves.

Ritter’s comments were prompted by State Rep. Cara Pavalock-D’Amato, R-Bristol, wearing a jacket during Gov. Ned Lamont’s state of the state address that displayed “ICE IN” in large letters on the back of it. The Bristol Republican’s stunt was a show of support for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies and as a counterpoint to Lamont’s criticism of them, particularly the shocking Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents’ killings in Minneapolis of Americans Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Ritter’s two-minute warning was a deft use of the speaker’s prerogative to address the House whenever he chooses. He reminded his colleagues that the rules prohibit display material in the House and the gallery overlooking it when the House is in session. Clothing turned into a placard violated the rule and the decorum of the chamber.

“I am not a hall monitor,” Ritter announced in his two-minute address. “We are not an elementary school.” He reminded the legislators that each is “lucky to be one of 151 people that debate and pass laws….Don’t turn this place into a circus.” And then, “Don’t test me.”

Ritter is destined to be tested by events and his colleagues in the seven weeks left before the General Assembly adjourns on May 6. Mr. Speaker, the danger is within the House, and the Senate, and comes with a dollar sign. In his February speech, Lamont urged the legislators to reform their secretive practice of putting millions of dollars in the state budget for organizations favored by individual members. The legislation often requires state agencies to send the money to the favored organization and deliberately makes no provisions for review of the grant.

Here’s how it works. The men who are in the legislature’s top leadership positions maul the budget the committee chaired by two diligent women adopts after weeks of hearings and deliberations. Millions in earmark rewards for legislators suddenly appear hours before the budget debate begins.

Three years ago, when the final budget proposal was released, it included $150,000 grant for the Travis Simms Foundation, which declared its purpose as promoting arts, sports, and similar events without facilities.” Travis Simms was, and remains, a state representative from Norwalk. The foundation bearing his name was, according to public filings, based in his home. The program that $150,000 is for youth violence prevention and is administered through the state’s Judicial Branch. It applies some standards, so the money did not make it to Simms.

A decade ago, $124,000 appeared for “M.G.L.L., Inc.” The abbreviation served as camouflage. It stood for Minnie Gonzalez Little League, an organization named after the veteran Hartford state representative. Obscuring the title of the organization also caused few to question why the Democrat’s name had replaced that of baseball great Roberto Clemente, who was killed in a 1972 plane crash when flying to Nicaragua to deliver aid to earthquake victims.

The governor’s proposal for reform of these earmarks is accompanied by a sense of urgency not everyone wants to acknowledge. An independent audit conducted by the Department of Economic and Community Development and released in January, found the way Hartford’s Blue Hills Civic Association spent some of the millions is received from the state revealed “patterns of conduct that strongly suggest potential fraud and misappropriation of public funds.”

State Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, who figures prominently in the audit, said it “demonstrates clear bias against me.” He has denied any wrongdoing. McCrory faces more formidable trouble from a federal investigation of his role in where public funds went and how they were spent. The $15 million in state grants McCrory helped obtain for BHCA in the last five years will continue to face searing scrutiny. However the investigations end, what we already know should prompt legislators to work immediately with Lamont to add some safeguards into their urge to bestow unrestricted grants on their friends and themselves.

They had a chance at the end of February when leaders of the House and Senate, Ritter and state Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, used their authority to certify emergency legislation containing a thick mishmash of bills that failed to pass both chambers of the legislature last year. The emergency certification is a rarely used authority and has usually been reserved for urgent matters.

The contents of the February bill were most of all a reflection of the power Republicans wield at the end of each legislative session when they run down the clock by talking and talking and talking some more. It is tedious and frustrating. If the legislature paced the flow of business better, the gasbag Republicans, whose ranks grow smaller and smaller, would lose their power to disrupt with hours of monologues.

Evidence that the Democrats are not concerned about the cost of their folly found a place in the emergency bill. It included $750,000 for the Capital Region Education Council for a teacher training program. McCrory works at CREC and made the request for the money for his employer. This seemed to raise no serious concerns with Ritter and Looney about conflicts or the appearance of conflicts. Lamont saved them from themselves by vetoing that grant and several others.

Lamont is the hall monitor, and it’s what we need until some formal process is created that oversees millions in grants that skirt anything close to a traditional review. That should be soon.

Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at [email protected]