Last night by a vote of 13-2 the New Britain Common Council passed a resolution condemning the occupation of war in Iraq. The vote broke along party lines, with the Council's two Republicans, Louis Salvio and Mark Bernacki, ensuring they lose their next reelection voting nay.
State Representative Tim O'Brien is working on a plan to address brain drain in the state by creating an incentive for Connecticut college students to stick around after they graduate. His plan at present would allow students to defer the entire cost of college until after graduation, and pay back only a portion of the tuition based on income. Graduates who don't plan to stick around CT for at least 10 years would have to pay back the full amount.
State House Majority Leader Chris Donovan came to New Britain Wednesday evening to talk about a proposal he has that would provide both lower property taxes and build a plan that could be used to offer good quality health care coverage at an affordable price to businesses and their workers.
The idea is very simple. The state is able to get a low price for a very good health plan for state workers because it is buying for many thousands of people. But Connecticut's 169 cities and towns each have their own separate employee health care plans, so they end up paying more to cover each employee than the state pays - often thousands of dollars more per worker.
So the idea is to let municipalities buy the same health coverage at the same low price that the state pays. This could save massive amounts of money, allowing city and town governments to have lower property taxes.
Rep. Donovan is trying to find out just how much it would save New Britain taxpayers. Council Majority Leader Micheal Trueworthy is working to get information Rep. Donovan needs to calculate what New Britain taxpayers' savings would be.
A quick follow-up on yesterday's post about the primary in New Britain's 5th Ward. Democratic endorsed candidates Roy Centano and Lori Rocha won, leaving incumbent Democrat John Carroll off the November ballot.
Carroll campaigned with postcards and fliers, but he didn't have an army of door-to-door campaigning volunteers.
The town committee did.
"The Democratic Town Committee did me in," Carroll said after learning of the results. "I lost. No hard feelings. No remorse."
If anything, the primary resolved the question of just how powerful the Democratic Party machine really is, although Democratic Town chairman John McNamara was quick to say Tuesday that "it is not a machine; it is a group of dedicated individuals who work like a machine."
(Fascinating. Great work by mikect as usual - promoted by Maura)
Few candidates are more annoying than than the flip-flopping politicians who change their positions with the wind. These slippery souls are most often affiliated with the major parties and their overpaid consultants and handlers. But their chameleon tendencies are also sometimes shared by independent and minor party candidates desperately hustling for a political nitch.
Having run for New Britain City Council in 1997 and 1999 as a Democrat, and for Mayor in 2005 as a Green appealing to progressives, Miguel Angel Nieves has lately been plagiarizing ideas from the far right and seems to be running a low- to no-profile campaign for Mayor as an independent. A leader of a local Latino organization, Nieves is taking his policy direction from a third party that promotes racist rhetoric and endorses white supremacists for public office.
Since there have been no recent updates on his 2007 campaign Web site and little or no news coverage of his campaign, he may thought better of his plans and stopped campaigning. In any case, his political career is interesting primarily as a maddening case study in just how intellectually lazy, politically opportunistic, and morally rudderless some candidates can become.
(This kind of coverage of important local events is terrific! - promoted by Jon Kantrowitz)
Edwin Lopez (at left), a New Britain resident and member of Connecticut Working Families, was recently fired from his job at the New Britain Wal-Mart, after seven years of employment, for offenses he claims were largely fabricated. Edwin says the firings had more to do with race.
There are fairly large number of practices at Wal-Mart that we object to. But out and out racism against the people working there is around as bad as it gets. So, we held a rally to highlight the pattern, to call on the store to create an official 'no harassment' policy to allow Spanish speaking Wal-Mart workers to communicate in Spanish with Spanish speaking customers without fear of retribution or punishment, and to call on Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to open an investigation into discriminatory practices.
The most excited part: the Attorney General came to the event and agreed to investigate.
The event got covered in the New Britain Herald (read the story) and the Courant (read the story), and also on NBC 30 news.
Our rally is also the topic of the New Britain Herald's online readers poll. Go to the front page at www.newbritainherald.com and in the left column, you can vote whether you believe that employee complaints about racial discrimination at Wal-Mart are valid on the left hand side.
The rally was attended by several dozen members of the New Britain community, including a bunch of very energetic sign holding kids, as well as local elected officials. Read on to see pictures. Here's a taste:
On Monday and Tuesday New Britain legislators, Sen. Donald DeFronzo, Rep. John Geragosian, Rep. Peter Tercyak and I issued a press statement about some events at the Capitol and we thought were inappropriate.
The whole issue involved an effort by Mayor Timothy Stewart to get a fellow Republican, Rep. Sean Williams to quietly slip through legislation that would allow Stewart to sidestep the regular personnel laws and rules in order to qualify for a full pension.
But, the issue got much larger when Stewart approached me, before final action to reject this special pension deal, and said he would make working conditions worse for city fire fighters (who he has a running feud with) as a result of the legislature rejecting this special pension legislation.
It was a completely inappropriate and threatening abuse of power for a public official to hold the welfare of public employees under threat in order to gain extra pension benefits for himself.
Few candidates are more annoying than than the flip-flopping politicians who change their positions with the wind. These slippery souls are most often affiliated with the major parties and their overpaid consultants and handlers. But their chameleon tendencies are also sometimes shared by independent and minor party candidates desperately hustling for a political nitch.
Edwin Lopez (at left), a New Britain resident and member of Connecticut Working Families, was recently fired from his job at the New Britain Wal-Mart, after seven years of employment, for offenses he claims were largely fabricated. Edwin says the firings had more to do with race.
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