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Activist Claims State Police Engaged In 'Political Spying' Online
December 20, 2009
A political activist and free-lance journalist who is suing the police over his arrest in Hartford at Gov. M. Jodi Rell's 2007 inauguration parade says he has found evidence that state police used phony e-mail identities to gather information on political activities.
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Bonus For Not Retiring Is Questioned
December 13, 2009
The idea was simple: To cut government expenses during the worst economic crisis in decades, the governor and legislature created a retirement incentive program last summer to induce highly paid state officials to leave the public payroll.
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Lobbyists Balk At Proposal To Hike Registration Fee
December 6, 2009
The 700 or so Connecticut lobbyists who try to influence legislators at the Capitol are paid handsomely — tens of millions of dollars in annual fees and salary. So what's wrong, then, with the state ethics agency increasing the lobbyists' registration fee from $150 to $250 for each two-year legislative term?
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Rowland-Case Lawyer Hired For South Carolina's Guv
November 29, 2009
It's one of the biggest episodes of political and legal déjà vu you'll ever see.
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Highway Bypass And Turtle Tunnel Seeing Traffic
November 22, 2009
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday for a $100 million highway bypass that will decrease traffic in the commercial center of the western Connecticut town of Brookfield, the state's transportation commissioner referred jokingly to the unusual complications that haunted a three-decade effort to build a 2.3-mile stretch of expressway.
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Owing Big On The Tax He Helped Pass
November 15, 2009
If former Democratic state Sen. Gary A. Hale hadn't voted the way he did 18 years ago, he might not owe the state $77,951 in back taxes today.
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Documents Subpoenaed From UConn-Rell Study
November 8, 2009
At least one subpoena has been issued — and others "almost certainly will be" — for scores of documents in an investigation of whether a University of Connecticut professor's $223,000, taxpayer-funded study on government efficiency was misused to provide political advice to Gov. M. Jodi Rell, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says. The legal maneuver is intended to guarantee production of all relevant documents — e-mails, memos and other records — by the Rell administration and UConn in the month-old probe conducted jointly by him and the bipartisan state auditors of public accounts.
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Quinnipiac University Says No More Sneak Peeks At Polls
November 1, 2009
The national visibility and prestige of the Quinnipiac University Poll, which has been trending upward for several years, experienced a bit of a downturn last week.
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State Legislature Spends Extravagantly On Its Mailings
October 25, 2009
In case you want or need to know it — which maybe you don't — your friendly and diligent state legislator has some "news" for you. You receive it periodically by mail, in full-color constituent mailings and, naturally, you pay the postage.
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Ethics Brushfire Not Moody's First
October 18, 2009
Gov. M. Jodi Rell was asked last week if she still has confidence in M. Lisa Moody, her widely feared, intensely political but infrequently seen chief of staff.
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State Pays Judges' Commuter Mileage
October 11, 2009
If you offered most Connecticut residents a job for more than $150,000 a year inside the state's borders, they'd gladly accept — and probably wouldn't expect to be paid for driving to and from work.
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A Much-Touted Reform Is Undone
October 4, 2009
It was only a deletion of about $200,000 from the state's new $19 billion annual budget, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on the abolition of the state Office of the Ombudsman for Property Rights little more than two years after its birth.
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Moody's Missing E-Mail Speaks Volumes
September 27, 2009
Some of the most interesting things you can learn about how government works are found in e-mails between officials.
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E-Mails Show Rell's Budget Posturing
September 20, 2009
On Sept. 1, when legislative Democrats approved a new state budget that Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell called excessive, the governor held a press conference at 5:15 p.m. — in time to get on the TV news at 6 — and said that she wouldn't give her "stamp of approval" by signing the budget bill.
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Is Latino Affairs Commission A Soap Opera?
September 13, 2009
Twelve months of turmoil have plagued the state's Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission, and it won't let up.
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Simply Put, Woman's Ethics Case Is Very Complicated
September 6, 2009
It sounded relatively simple last month when the Office of State Ethics announced plans to hold the first public trial of its four-year existence this Friday in Hartford.
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Auditors Give College A C-Minus
July 26, 2009
The state's virtual college for adults is on the cutting edge of progressive higher education, but it still has a few things to learn about basic administrative procedures.
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DUI Judge: Two Drinks Preceded Racial Insults
February 8, 2009
The judge who called a state trooper racial names such as "Negro trooper" during her October drunken-driving arrest told a state panel Jan. 26 that she had one beer and one mixed drink more than three hours before her blood alcohol level tested at twice the legal limit.