In an age of ever-faster trains connecting major cities globally, is there any future for anachronistic night trains with sleeping cars?  Why, yes!

In the old days you used to be able to travel long and relatively short distances on overnight trains, either in coach or a comfy sleeping compartment.  On the New Haven Railroad you could board your train at Grand Central before midnight and awake the next morning in Boston, Cape Cod or Montreal.  It was like combining the cost of travel and a hotel in one package.

Accommodations in the sleeper cars ranged from upper or lower berths to single roomettes and even drawing rooms… in addition to the joys of trying to sleep sitting in a reclining, albeit cheaper, coach seat.

As a 16-year-old growing up in Canada I have fond memories of traveling from Toronto to Vancouver and back on “The Canadian,” the CPR’s famous streamliner replete with sleeping cars, diners and dome cars.  The scenery and comfort could never be beat by flying.

Fast forward to the introduction of Amtrak in 1971 and in the U.S. the overnight trains continued, albeit with less luxurious sleeping options.  At one point Amtrak restored sleeper service on the Boston to Washington “Night Owl” (affectionately called The Night Crawler because of its slow speeds and multiple stops) with an added twist.

A New York “Executive Sleeper” car was added to and from Washington D.C., which could be boarded in NYC as early as 9:30 p.m.  While you slept the car was coupled to the southbound through train and left trackside in DC’s Union Station until 8 a.m.

“The Night Owl” service resumed last year from Boston to Washington but minus the NYC sleeper’s pick-up and drop-off.  There was only one sleeping car and it wasn’t cheap: $284 for a roomette, $376 for a bedroom, one way.  Alas, the Amtrak timetable now says that train has been cancelled for the moment due to COVID, but it may come back.

Of course, long distance Amtrak trains have always depended on sleeping cars given the length of their journey:  New York to Chicago is 19 hours and from The Windy City to Los Angeles takes another 43 hours.  Yes, they offer coach seating, but sleeping car passengers get “free” meals and access to onboard showers.

But the real growth in overnight trains is, ironically, happening on the continent with some of the world’s fastest trains:  Europe.

There are renewed overnight trains between Berlin and Sweden, Scotland and London and from Vienna to 25 destinations in Italy, Germany and France on the Austrian Railroad’s “NightJet” fleet.  Accommodations are in brand new railcars with everything from six-berth couchettes (great for families) to private bedrooms.

So, night trains still make sense, especially using underutilized tracks during the overnight hours.  And given European concerns over global warming, fuel-efficient trains have a great future compared to flying.  In France they’ve even banned short-haul domestic flights where trains offer a much “greener” alternative.

Jim Cameron is Founder of the Commuter Action Group, advocates for Connecticut rail riders.  Contact Jim at CommuterActionGroup@gmail.com

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Just two days after the details of a master plan to expand Tweed New Haven airport were released in July, there was a harsh reminder that in a showdown between climate change and Tweed, climate change may well win.

Elsa, the first of three tropical systems this past summer that drenched the Connecticut shoreline, dumped a whole lot of water on Tweed.

The terminal flooded; the runways flooded; the access roads flooded; nearby homes flooded.

It nearly happened again when Henri came through and did happen again during Ida. And that was just one summer.

The problematic climate future Tweed faces actually is possible along just about all of New Haven’s shoreline. Parts of that shoreline – including the Long Wharf area — were once under water and may be destined for it again as the entire area faces increased battering from ever more-intense and frequent storms and the highest rates of sea level rise in the in the U.S. in the last 60 years, according to multiple studies, including data from NOAA.  

But New Haven is moving ahead with new projects along Long Wharf and the east shore of the harbor, in addition to the airport, despite the climate risk, citing the need for economic development and city growth.

The city says it can handle growth and climate change at once. Science may say otherwise.

“I think in general we should have real reluctance to develop further in areas which are inherently vulnerable to flooding,” said Jim O’Donnell, executive director of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation, CIRCA.

O’Donnell has been sounding the climate alarm for years, calculating that sea level rise in Long Island Sound could reach 20 inches by 2050 – a metric the state uses broadly for its resilience policies.

Best case scenarios show Tweed and the New Haven shoreline to be among Connecticut’s areas most vulnerable to the rising waters from climate change. Interactive mapping by the climate research group Climate Central paints a grim picture of what the future holds.

Even just the projected 20 inches of sea level rise, taking into account existing coastal protections, shows Tweed runways under water, in Climate Central’s map.

Add in factors such as moderate flooding and potential storm surge, and almost the entire airport is underwater by 2050, according to the group.

O’Donnell concedes, however, that development in flood zones, like the one where Tweed sits and the one along Long Wharf that extends inland through the New Haven rail yards to the train station, occurs all over the state. Shoreline properties with their views and waterfront access still command high property tax rates that cities and towns are loathe to forgo despite their vulnerability and repeated post-storm cleanup costs.

New Haven’s economic development administrator, Michael Piscitelli, is clear about the city’s priorities: “From an economic development perspective, we have learned over the years, in terms of moving forward on a global economic competitiveness of our city, that access to high quality and convenient air travel is very important both to people who are here now and people who are looking at our region.”

Piscitelli said everyone — from city officials to folks in the business community to those at Yale — agrees. “All point to the need for a much higher quality and more reliable level of scheduled air service in our region,” he said.

Worth noting is that the only commercial service so far in the initial expansion ramp-up is a startup discount airline, Avelo, with routes to Florida vacation destinations.

But the goal of more reliable service raises one obvious question: How reliable is an airport that finds itself — not infrequently — under water?

“No one on the city side or the airport side has any intention of looking away from that science. We’re working with an existing asset, investing in it to the point that we can make it resilient,” Piscitelli said. “The Elsa storm is a good indicator of what we need to plan for going forward — more intense rain events over short durations of time. It’s as equally a threat and a concern to our city as maybe some of the larger coastal storms.”

State Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, who became executive director of the Tweed-New Haven Airport Authority a little over two years ago, agrees that resiliency, not retreat, is the goal.

New Haven Independent

In May, Sean Scanlon, executive director of Tweed-New Haven Airport Authority, announced an expansion master plan for the airport as a who’s who of local, state and federal officials looked on.

“That was never an option,” Scanlon said. “Because why do anything in the state of Connecticut or even with the shoreline? We’re not just going to give up and walk away.”

Scanlon said precautions are being taken in the master plan to account for climate change impacts, but there are still questions about whether those precautions and the changes planned for Tweed are worth the cost, will accomplish the job, and last in the face of worsening sea level rise and other climate change impacts.

For some, the answer to those questions is no.

The Tweed landscape

Tweed has been around since 1931. It sits in the middle of a neighborhood, crammed along with tightly-packed modest homes onto a spit of what was once salt marsh and wetlands at the edge of Long Island Sound. It’s more or less a peninsula between New Haven Harbor and the Farm River mouth that separates East Haven and Branford. Tuttle Brook and Morris Creek run through it. Part is New Haven; part is East Haven.

The airport sits in the low point — basically a bowl — that collects water. It flows in from all directions — from the Sound during storms or due to sea level rise, and from rain – much of it inland runoff from the kind of intense storms Connecticut experienced last summer.

It’s almost impossible to get rid of both types of water at once.

There are tide gates not far from the southern-most shore. They predate the airport and were last replaced about a dozen years ago. When they’re open, the water from the massive kinds of runoff that occurred in Elsa and Ida can flow out into Long Island Sound. When they’re closed, they keep high water from the Sound from coming in. But that means runoff can’t get out, so inland floodwater will stay pooled at the airport and elsewhere. And if it’s a really big storm — with surges that overtop the gates – all bets are off.

“It is a challenging place to have an airport,” said Brian Thompson, director of land and water resources at the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. “It’s not an ideal location.”

That has not gone unnoticed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has the final say on what can be built where. In a 2002 decision authorizing runway safety area and taxiway upgrades to bring them up to federal standards, the FAA noted that the required environmental impact statement showed the changes would result in “unavoidable adverse impact to coastal resources” that included tidal and freshwater wetlands.

Wetlands are the natural sponges that soak up excess water and often prevent or mitigate flooding. Many have been lost to development in and around Tweed.

The FAA went on to say that there were no practicable alternatives that avoided wetland impacts or encroaching on the floodplain. And it called the plan it was approving “the least environmentally damaging practical alternative.”

Opponents of Tweed’s expansion worry the new master plan could be another round of “least damaging” and that, short of turning the airport back to nature, there’s no way to prevent an environmental impact.

“Probably not,” said Chris Kelly, a legal fellow with the environmental advocacy group Save the Sound, when asked this question. “The answer to climate change isn’t always retreat. But smart planning also requires that you don’t just pave over all the land that you have.”

Paving more of Tweed or even changing what’s paved and what isn’t, he said, may mean more of the neighborhood could flood.

New Haven officials often say it’s better to have the water pooling on airport property instead of people’s homes and the streets around them.

“As soon as there’s any storm surge at high tide, no water is getting out of the neighborhood back into the water (of Long Island Sound),” Giovanni Zinn, New Haven’s city engineer told the Connecticut Mirror in 2019. “So water has to go somewhere. In this case it goes into the airport.”

But the water more and more is winding up in roads and homes too. Last summer, residents documented flooding not only on East Haven’s primary evacuation route – which is a regular occurrence – but also along roads closer to the airport that are likely to be access roads for the new terminal planned for the East Haven side.

New Haven Independent

Giovanni Zinn, New Haven’s chief engineer. He lives near Tweed and believes the airport should continue to provide water detention as a way to keep at least some of it out of the neighborhood during bad storms.

In the past, East Haven mayors have fought the expansion of Tweed. But Mayor Joseph Carfora has been quoted as saying the concerns of his community have been addressed, and he was among the many local, state and federal politicians – including both U.S. senators, who consider themselves environmental champions – supporting the airport expansion plans when they were first announced in May.

Ray Baldwin, East Haven’s economic development director, noted that there are still many layers of approval – including some from East Haven – before any runway expansion or terminal relocation can proceed. “The mayor has always said right along this is not a done deal, by any means,” Baldwin said. He said the mayor has consistently said “whatever happens, he’s going to fight to get the best deal for the people of East Haven.”

Baldwin said flood mitigation is a key environmental concern for East Haven, just as it is for New Haven.

“Flooding, flooding, flooding, water streaming across the roads,” said Rachel Heerema, a key organizer of local opposition, who lives on the New Haven side. She moved there in 2012 and days later had to evacuate in advance of storm Sandy. “I’ve had water in my basement, the roads have flooded. I think not only is the issue that flooding happens, right in this area, it’s that we are definitely in climate disorder. It’s here and it’s now and it’s happening, and we are having tropical storms more than we did.”

Zinn, who lives just beyond the northern end of Tweed’s main runway, said what happened during last summer’s storms was a “validation of some of the hydrology.”

“The airport does act as a reservoir, if you will, for stormwater during these big storm and rain events,” he said.

But he admitted a few of the lowest spots of the neighborhood did have standing water until the tides went out. The best plan, he said, would be to use the airport to protect the surrounding neighborhood from stormwater and create resiliency. To that end, Zinn said, the city has asked the airport authority to increase the stormwater retention capability on the site a little. “Not a life-changing” amount, he said.

“Quite frankly, I’d much rather be flooding an airport than flooding people’s homes. One is a nuisance for a few hours for travelers. The other one is someone’s house.”

But climate change predictions point to conditions experienced last summer becoming even worse. And some fear the airport expansion plans may make it worse yet as areas that are now grassy are paved, roads are re-routed and the terminal is moved, possibly displacing existing wetlands.

The plan calls for a 2-to-1 replacement of wetlands that are destroyed. But the compounding effect of doing any or all of these on the existing ecosystem really isn’t known. Nor is how much excess water runways and other airport facilities can withstand before they degrade and become a danger or safety risk.

“Everyone is worried about climate change. Everyone is interested in us being more resilient, but we’re not going to give up our way of life simply because of something that’s happening. We have to adapt,” Scanlon said. “We will take a look at the issues that are affecting everybody, not just our airport, and figure out how they can be adapted.”

Plans and battles

Talk of expanding Tweed has gone on for years, if not decades, as commercial carriers and flights have come and gone in seemingly never-ending cycles. At times, only general aviation has operated there.

Neighbors have fought expansion throughout, most often citing a litany of longstanding concerns, many of them environmental: noise, pollution, traffic — the kinds of concerns that come up around any airport.

But in this latest skirmish, which has expanded to a wider circle of residents, flooding and climate are more of a focus. Opponents have coalesced under a new group – 10,000 Hawks, signifying the raptors that migrate over Tweed every fall. They are among a dozen on more species that could be at risk from changes to the area as documented less than a decade ago.

Some worry repeated floods will wash residue from chemicals used to control overgrowth near the runways as well as sewage overflow from storms onto their properties and elsewhere.

There’s concern that the wetlands and marsh – both salt and freshwater – are so diminished and overburdened by the repeated rounds of flooding that they will no longer be able to adequately do what they’re supposed to – soak up excess water.

Avports

Birds=eye rendering of Tweed-New Haven Airport once the new master plan is implemented. The runway would be extended and a new terminal would be built in a different location. Many worry it would increase flooding in an area already subject to flooding from climate change.

“We all have access to the information on climate crisis. We all have access to the information on how to mitigate the damage. And we have government officials both at the state level and even federal, even Chris Murphy, who should know better, supporting this,” said Gabriela Campos, who lives on the New Haven side of Tweed. “It doesn’t just affect the immediate area. It affects the entire region.”

The expansion master plan anticipates a significant increase in commercial air service, extension of the runway at both ends and a larger four-to-six-gate terminal to be located on the East Haven side of the runway. The existing terminal has been on the New Haven side for decades.

The new plans for management and financing of Tweed are also very different from previous iterations.

Tweed is owned by the city of New Haven, which leases it to the airport authority, which in turn hires a private company to run it. That company is Avports, which has managed Tweed for a couple of decades. In 2018, Avports was acquired by West Street Infrastructure Partners III, an arm of Goldman Sachs.

But it may have been a move – or more accurately, a non-move — by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 that paved the way for the current situation. In choosing to not hear an appeal, the high court ended a 10-year dispute over whether the state had authority to limit the size of the runway at Tweed. The final answer was it doesn’t. And so an expansion master plan moved forward in earnest.

The financial changes switch the airport to a private funding model. In a couple of years, New Haven will be off the hook for the annual $325,000 operating subsidy it had been paying to the airport authority. It will no longer have to supply the match for federal grants. Avports will do that.

The airport expansion, anticipated to cost about $100 million, will be privately funded by Avports, as well as with funds from the FAA, already in use for the master plan and an environmental assessment, just getting underway. The FAA will likely pay for the runway component.

Because of the federal component, the project will need to comply with guidelines under the National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA. But because no state money is involved, a state flood management certificate will not be needed.

It’s not clear yet what state oversight will kick in, but officials at DEEP said most likely the state role will include water quality certification and issuing federal permits such as a stormwater permit for construction and an industrial stormwater permit, if needed.

The state will be able to comment throughout and look at other environmental impacts, such as on wildlife. And it will be able to ensure work is in compliance with state programs and mandates.

As for issues likely to come up, “Certainly flooding is going to be a biggie,” said Fred Riese, senior environmental analyst in DEEP’s Office of Environmental Review, who acknowledged the project is likely to face political pressures in addition to environmental ones.

Riese said the state would likely be looking at the change in what’s paved and what isn’t, what might happen to runoff and drainage rates as well as water quality as a result of any changes, and increases in storms and rainfall intensities.

The Airport Authority has recently named a project advisory committee that includes one resident each from New Haven and East Haven, New Haven’s Zinn, Baldwin from East Haven, O’Donnell of CIRCA, Kelly of Save the Sound and someone from the FAA.

As part of the overall expansion and 43-year lease approved by the New Haven Board of Alders in September, there will also be an environmental stewardship advisory committee consisting of three members each from New Haven and East Haven. The mayors have not made their selections yet. The lease is not final, but one component is that after it ends, New Haven takes back control of the airport. The current lease runs out in 2023.

Tweed New Haven Regional Airport

The low-cost startup airline Avelo has begun service from New Haven to vacation locations in Florida.

“The idea that we can have a predictable [plan] — let’s look out 40 years and make a plan for a coastal floodplain — it’s really laughable,” Heerema said. “It’s like we’re going to make a plan on how climate disorder is going to impact this area. And while we’re making this plan, the plan is actually going to make it worse. Pave more. Pollute more. It’s doubling down on the problem.”

Kelly of Save the Sound said he couldn’t imagine a scenario where 43 years from now the city would be able to do anything with that land if officials are not planning carefully now for the expected climate change impacts.

“I’m trying to see the value of digging in where there isn’t a future, and I don’t see it,” he said.

CIRCA’s O’Donnell said: “It’s a complicated region, that’s for sure. Its existence is tied to the fact that it gets flooded on a regular basis, like all other salt marshes. So it’s just going to get flooded more frequently as sea level rises. And if you stop flooding in a marsh, the marsh dies, and so you can’t do that.”

If the marsh dies or is removed, it would mean there would be no natural means to moderate the effects of climate change, though O’Donnell points out there are limits to what can be done. A catastrophic hurricane, for example, can’t be protected against. “There’s basically nothing we can do about those in Connecticut.”

He and others have suggested that elevating the runways might be necessary at some point. But that would lessen, if not eliminate, the “bowl” function the airport provides now, and the surrounding neighborhood would certainly flood. He’s suggested better tide gates but also points out that as with elevating the runways, every mitigating action is likely to set off reactions that may be less desirable.

The rest of New Haven’s shoreline

As if dealing with the expansion of Tweed isn’t enough, New Haven is also facing a reckoning for its entire coast because of climate change.

The next battle seems to be plans for two large waterfront apartment buildings at the northern end of Long Wharf.

Elsa and the other storms this summer inundated the Long Wharf area. Union Avenue in front of the New Haven train station and police headquarters (at the intersection of the appropriately named Water Street) was impassable. That area, all the way out to the harbor, was once harbor itself – and is now low-lying fill that includes I-95 and the rail yards, both of which flood regularly.

The city and state have chosen to double-down on investment there anyway, infusing money into the rail facilities and the Long Wharf Responsible Growth Plan, an updated version of a renewal and redevelopment plan first conceived of in the early 1980s. A small amount of what was originally envisioned has been built, though reconnecting the waterfront side of the highway and train tracks with the rest of the city has not.

Since then the area has flooded repeatedly. After Irene and Sandy in 2011 and 2012, plans for so-called living shorelines were put in motion at Long Wharf and the East Shore Park in Morris Cove, which was also battered in both storms.

Living shorelines use natural-style constructions such as dunes, slopes and marsh grasses to temper the impact of water. But there are limits to what they can accomplish. New Haven’s theoretically will moderate wave action and in turn the erosion it causes. But they can’t temper sea level rise. And they are of no use for inland flooding runoff – and in fact can make things worse by not letting water out. In large violent storms, waves can easily over-top them.

Fusco Development Corporation

Renderings of two residential buildings being planned for an area of Long Wharf that is prone to flooding. DEEP says the site should be for water-dependent use only.

“They’re not intended to do anything for that,” city engineer Zinn conceded. “We’re looking at really a layered approach in New Haven.”

He said one layer would be natural systems like the living shorelines and the hundreds of bioswales installed around the city to soak up a little excess water and prevent it from becoming runoff. New development would also be required for industrial scale runoff systems, including some way to hold excess water until it can be removed without flooding buildings and streets. The city is considering building new pipe under the railyards into the harbor to help get rid of flood waters.

Another component the city is counting on is its selection by the Army Corps of Engineers for a floodwall project along the highway at Long Wharf, and a large pump station. The concept and selection have been underway for a number of years. The Corps, which is also involved in the living shorelines, declined to discuss the project, only providing material already on its website.

Zinn expects work on the East Shore shoreline to begin in the first half of this year. The two together are expected to cost about $8 million.

While not a development issue, an item added to the city’s shoreline headaches are two federal lawsuits filed by the Conservation Law Foundation over some of the massive petroleum product tanks on the water at the port of New Haven.

Just two days before Elsa hit, CLF sued Gulf and Shell, contending they have not prepared properly for the flooding and extreme weather that is now more prevalent due to climate change. Gulf has 13 acres containing 16 tanks at or below sea level. Shell has 39 tanks on 38 acres.

Even a Category 1 hurricane could inundate the area and damage tanks filled with petroleum products, CLF alleges. CLF has filed similar suits in the Boston area and Rhode Island.

But already making figurative waves are the two apartment buildings – up to 500 units total – proposed by Fusco Development Corporation as part of the redevelopment of Long Wharf.

The site is a high-density flood zone in an area already prone to flooding — which means it will likely get even worse – that DEEP designated for water-dependent use under the Connecticut Coastal Management Act. That means something like a marina or ferry service.

But in November, the Board of Alders approved a zoning change to allow for the apartment buildings, inaccurately claiming DEEP had found the plan consistent with the CCMA. DEEP had not.

The department, in fact, filed a letter reiterating that the development district “is located within Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) special flood hazard zones. Sea level rise and other effects of climate change will increase the District’s coastal flood risk and associated damages, loss, and disruption.”

The letter further noted that “sea level rise will increase the probability of future flooding in the area” and that the Long Wharf area “has at least a 50% chance of flooding in any given year and local data from the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation (CIRCA) at the University of Connecticut that predicts a 50% to 20% chance that some or all of the District will be flooded by storm surge and wave action in any given year.”

New Haven Independent

Michael Piscitelli, New Haven’s economic development administrator, believes shoreline development at Tweed and Long Wharf is vital to the city’s growth, even though both areas face risks from climate change.

And it provided maps showing the risk.

“We raised concerns about coastal hazards putting residential development in an area that is vulnerable, prone to flooding and exposed to wave action,” said DEEP’s Thompson, whose signature is on the letter.

The alders ignored him. But the project faces a long regulatory road.

“They will come back to us with a site-specific coastal site plan review. So a more detailed plan for the development of the site,” Thompson said. “We review and comment on it. And their comments go back to the city, and they make the decision.”

But they could very well ignore DEEP then too.

The site faces the same kinds of forces as Tweed: saltwater incursion, freshwater runoff, wave action and sea level rise, all moving in different directions.

“It’s really a planning and engineering challenge to manage all that. I think the Long Wharf area is probably a really good example of where those forces meet,” Thompson said.

But because conditions are changing so dramatically and so quickly, planners can’t rely on old trends and patterns. New models need to be developed.

Thompson said he thinks the various factors can be addressed. “But,” he said, “I think there needs to be a lot of assessment and potentially some hard decisions on what to do.”

Dave Anderson, the lands campaign manager for Save the Sound, who has years of experience doing municipal planning on the Connecticut shoreline, also filed a letter with the Board of Alderman expressing concerns about the apartment buildings.

“DEEP actually does have the ability to take legal action if the local boards and commissions are not actually enforcing the provisions of the (Connecticut Coastal Management) Act,” he said. “I think probably DEEP needs to take the lead on identifying priority water-dependent use sites on the shoreline and have a stronger regulatory control of how those sites get developed.”

But on the matter of Long Wharf – as with Tweed – New Haven remains committed to the economic development necessity.

“The preservation focus of Long Wharf has to be front and center,” said Economic Development Administrator Piscitelli. “We have 5,000 jobs in this district. We have the Interstate 95 corridor, and we have the rail yard. And when you pull the lens back and you look at New England relative to the United States, it’s much more plainly evident how important this corridor is.”

“The absence of a strong resilient strategy here exposes this corridor and truly complicates the movement of goods, people, services to our entire region.”

But he pushes back against the often-raised distinction between protecting what’s already there and putting more infrastructure in harm’s way.

“I think it’s an overreach to say it’s putting people in harm’s way. There is a significant resiliency strategy associated with that development,” he said. “This is a very important moment for public governance to identify and then fund resilient strategies, where they’re most needed.”

Jacqueline Rabe Thomas

Willow Creek Apartments under construction in the North End of Hartford in 2020.

Preliminary state data shows that fewer building permits for new housing were granted in 2021 than in every year since 2011, further contributing to Connecticut’s housing shortage.

As of November 2021, 3,335 units had been recorded. In comparison, the state recorded 4,452 by November 2020 and 4,662 by November 2019.

The data is compiled by the Department of Economic and Community Development and provides an overview of monthly permits each town issues, according to available census numbers. Raw data is available only up until November 2021 because official data isn’t released until May, but preliminary numbers suggest Connecticut fell behind on housing production last year.

“[The] new housing market sector is not performing as [well] as previous years,” said Kolie Sun, a researcher with the DECD. She’s been collecting this data for 20 years.

Sun said the pandemic is partly to blame. Some developers have paused production and demolition.

“You can’t look at production without looking at demolition data, too,” Sun said. “I’ve been doing this simulation for many years, and in 2020 [demolition] dropped.”

Demolition plays an important role in housing production because it targets aging buildings or those with safety concerns, according to Sun. Taking those buildings down opens up areas for new construction. Demolition data for 2021 isn’t available, but in 2020 there were 500 demolitions statewide and 828 in 2019. Before 2019, Sun said the state recorded more than 1,000 a year.

Other factors that are possibly behind the low housing production are supply chain issues and the labor shortage – similar problems affecting other industries across the country.

“It’s hard to get materials, and the cost of materials is skyrocketing,” said Greg Ugalde, a Connecticut-based builder and former chairman of the National Association of Home Builders. “And that’s forced some builders to the sidelines waiting for things like lumber to get under control. Prices have doubled or tripled in some areas, and you have to factor that into the price of a house.”

He said lumber is just one commodity whose cost is skyrocketing and affecting the housing market as a whole, including prices.

“For every $1,000 that you add to the price of a home, there are almost 154,000 households that are knocked out of the market. So when you increase prices you have to be on the lookout for families you’re losing,” Ugalde said, explaining why developers and builders may be holding out right now.

In the end, Ugalde predicts that Connecticut may continue to see low numbers of new housing units, but he said that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The state has been recording low production numbers since the 2008 housing market crash.

“When you look at the number that we have today, we are still struggling to get Connecticut back to where we need to be. We have never really recovered from the last recession,” Ugalde said.

This story was originally published Jan. 12, 2022, by Connecticut Public Radio.

The most familiar indicator of COVID-19’s inexorable nationwide spread —daily state and local case counts— may be on the way out.

Instead, public health officials are considering a shift from increasingly inaccurate case data to numbers they say better represent the effect of the disease on the community and the health care system: COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

Omicron case counts are shattering all previous COVID-19 records. But the numbers don’t carry the same weight they used to. State and local health departments are preparing to explain that to the public and start reporting more meaningful data on the virus.

“The goal of public health data is to provide information to people so they can take actions to keep themselves safer and healthier,” said Meredith Allen, vice president for health security at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We’re getting to a point where a daily case count isn’t giving people that information.”

So far, Tennessee is the only state to scale back its COVID-19 case reporting since omicron hit. But experts expect other states to follow once the omicron surge subsides.

In addition, New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul last week asked hospitals to start providing more meaningful COVID-19 data by specifying whether patients were admitted because of COVID-19 or entered the hospital for unrelated reasons and incidentally tested positive for the virus.

For now, daily case counts remain the primary gauge of omicron’s nationwide spread. But epidemiologists caution that the numbers should be relied on only as broad indicators of the velocity and direction of the disease’s transmission.

Because of testing shortages, unreported home tests and a high percentage of asymptomatic infections going undetected, daily case counts are vastly underreported, said Janet Hamilton, executive director at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. The true number of infections is some multiple of the reported cases, she said.

This week, the average daily reported case count was 781,000, more than three times the daily count of 250,000 at the peak of the delta surge a year ago. On Jan. 3, more than a million omicron cases were recorded.

But that doesn’t mean hospitalizations and deaths, which lag new cases by several weeks, will rise in equal proportion. Early data indicates that omicron infections are producing milder symptoms and fewer deaths than previous COVID-19 variants.

“We don’t want to keep telling people there’s X number of new infections out there without giving them an idea of how many of those cases will have serious outcomes,” Hamilton said.

Despite its lower hospitalization and death rate, omicron’s soaring infections are resulting in a surge in hospital visits, almost entirely among unvaccinated people, straining health care systems nationwide. And even though it’s proving less virulent than previous COVID-19 strains, omicron is expected to result in more deaths because of the sheer number of people infected.

Better barometers

Months into the pandemic, epidemiologists said COVID-19 ultimately would become endemic, infecting nearly everyone and remaining in the population indefinitely.

That endemic era may have started. As a result, many state health officials say they’re preparing to scale back the frequency of case count updates, possibly as soon as the current surge subsides, Allen said.

“That would allow public health agencies to focus on prevention efforts in high-risk populations such as long-term care facilities and work more closely with schools and vaccination clinics,” she said, “rather than put the time and energy into producing that daily number.”

Tennessee shifted from daily to weekly reporting of new COVID-19 cases Jan. 1, citing a need to focus on other public health priorities, including the expanding opioid overdose crisis.

Florida, Iowa and Nebraska moved to weekly counts last summer, as COVID-19 cases waned nationwide. Alaska, Kansas and Michigan publish case data three times a week.

For now, though, state and local COVID-19 policies, including school and business closures, travel restrictions, mask requirements and quarantine rules, largely hinge on daily numbers.

Since the pandemic began, the rise and fall of case counts has proven a reliable indicator of whether the virus is gaining ground, leveling out or retreating, said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and adviser to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We all know that the data is less precise than it was,” he said. “But we do get a good sense of the trends over time and geographically, particularly in a state that is long and thin like Tennessee. It allows us to look at what’s happening in Nashville versus Chattanooga, for example.”

The CDC official guidelines continue to recommend that state and local health departments publish daily COVID-19 case counts, he said. But in discussions with health officials, the agency is “giving states leeway to put more emphasis on hospitalizations and other data.”

Schaffner and other experts say the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 may be a better indicator of the severity of the disease and its impact on communities and the health care system. Others argue that the number of patients in intensive care units would be a more meaningful measure.

Gray areas

As cases of omicron mushroom, it’s becoming increasingly likely that hospital patients will test positive for the virus upon admission or become infected while in the hospital, said Eili Klein, an epidemiologist and associate professor of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Even before omicron became dominant, studies showed that roughly half of patients admitted to hospitals with COVID-19 were there for other reasons. Still, their COVID-19 infections likely affected their health outcomes and the length of time they stayed in the hospital, Klein said, and it certainly meant the hospital had to expend additional resources to treat them.

It’s not easy to unspool COVID-19 hospitalization data, he said. “There’s a large gray area that’s difficult to determine in real time.”

Klein and other experts argue that use of intensive care is a better measure of the virus’ health burden.

“In Maryland, for example, hospitalizations are at an all-time high right now,” Klein said, “but use of intensive care is not.” Last year during the delta surge, hospitalizations in the state were much lower than they are now, but almost every patient was very sick.

“As we move forward, there needs to be some decisions about how we adjust our reporting,” Klein said. “Do we go to weekly reports, separate people admitted for COVID as opposed to those with COVID? It depends on how we plan to treat people who test positive but aren’t sick.

“Do we quarantine them? Maybe we stop doing that. We don’t quarantine people who have the flu.”

Testing shortages

From the beginning, testing shortages, inaccuracies and delays have plagued the nation’s response to COVID-19. As a result, many county and city health departments have never been able to publish daily case counts, said Adriane Casalotti, chief of public and government affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

In this omicron surge, she said, long lines at testing centers continue to stress city and county health departments, particularly as they field an avalanche of questions from the public about the CDC’s recent about-face on COVID-19 quarantines.

In December, the CDC announced that it was reducing its quarantine recommendations from 10 to five days. The American Medical Association and other experts called the weaker recommendations risky, suggesting that people get tested before ending quarantine.

With home tests still in short supply and people waiting hours to get tested at a public site, it’s a hard call for local health departments to suggest people get tested before they end quarantine, Casalotti said. On top of that, local health departments typically experience major public backlash when they try to implement stiffer COVID-19 restrictions than the CDC.

When will the testing shortage ease? President Joe Biden announced this week that insurance companies will be required to cover the cost of up to eight tests per person per month starting Jan. 15. But drugstores are still short of tests.

Mara Aspinall, a professor of biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University, projects the nationwide supply of COVID-19 home tests will jump from 631 million tests this month to 732 million in February and 907 million in March. Since many consumers buy tests to have them on hand when needed, not all tests are used in the same month they’re purchased, she explained.

Since omicron hit the United States in December, Aspinall estimates Americans have been using an average of 4 million home tests per day, rising to 5 million per day last week as corporations distributed tests to employees coming back to in-person work. Whether that number stays the same, rises or falls depends on the spread of the virus, she said.

This story was originally published Jan. 14, 2022, by Pew Stateline.

MARK PAZNIOKAS :: CTMIRROR.ORG

Congressman John B. Larson announces his reelection in person and on Zoom.

EAST HARTFORD — U.S. Rep. John B. Larson, D-1st District, staged a modest campaign kickoff Friday, formalizing what never was in doubt: He is seeking reelection, typically a desultory affair in this safe Democratic district.

Larson, 73, has held public office for most of the past 45 years, moving from the Board of Education and Town Council to the state Senate, then landing in Congress after winning a fierce Democratic primary for an open seat.

That was 24 years ago. He has not been challenged since for the nomination, a streak that a 27-year-old progressive Muslim and former Capitol Hill staffer named Muad Hrezi is trying to end, arguing Larson has stayed too long.

In short, Hrezi is hoping to catch a wave, testing whether there might be an undetected vein of dissatisfaction with Larson — and if anything in the playbook used by U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley might work here.

Larson was elected to Congress in 1998, the same year as Joseph J. Crowley of New York and Mike Capuano of Massachusetts. Both lost primaries in 2018: Crowley to Ocasio-Cortez, Capuano to Pressley. Both challengers benefitted by being women of color in districts where minorities had become the majority. That is not the case in the 1st District.

“I think they’re very different races,” Larson said. “But the lesson you always take is: Don’t take anything for granted, including the democracy that we’re in; don’t take your seat for granted; don’t take this great democratic republic that we’re a part of for granted.”

Hrezi is the same age Ocasio-Cortez was when she opened her campaign against Crowley in April 2017. He is using at least three of her issues: support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and opposition to the special interest money that readily flows to congressional incumbents.

The dominant industries in the 1st District are insurance, including major health insurers like Aetna and Cigna, and aerospace, with East Hartford’s Pratt & Whitney Aircraft reliant on the military as a major purchaser of its jet engines.

Hrezi is trying to make the case that Larson is too deferential to both.

“Let’s make sure that we can build an industry outside of just health insurers and defense contractors,” Hrezi said. “And that to me is the vision of what a leader does. A leader doesn’t just play as a mouthpiece for the biggest employers in their district.”

He faults Larson for continuing to support funding for the troubled F-35 fighter, which uses Pratt engines, and accuses him of being too conservative on health care, even if Larson supported the Affordable Care Act and a public option for health insurance.

Hrezi Campaign Video

Muad Hrezi, a former staffer to Murphy, featured his connection to the senator in a campaign video, but Murphy is backing Larson.

With U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and others, Larson has proposed expanding Medicare but does not favor making it the basis for health coverage. Larson, who has made a point of working with Ocasio-Cortez on a bill aimed at stabilizing and enhancing Social Security for future generations, said incremental progress should not be dismissed.

“Both Joe Courtney and I have a Medicare buy-in bill that ultimately will get us to where many people who believe in Medicare for All would like to be. But with 185 million people having private insurance, that’s not going to happen tomorrow,” Larson said. “You know, this is a business where you have to deal in increments many times because you have to. And people aren’t going to necessarily give up the insurance they already have, if they don’t know the alternative. And we’ve seen that in two presidential cycles.”

Insurers may be a major employer, but Hrezi casts them as an enemy of change, one that Congress should disregard.

“We shouldn’t just be a mouthpiece for these insurers. And I think that they’re not interested in actually taking care of people anymore,” Hrezi said. “Health insurers are making a killing putting up barriers to care. And they’re not good players in our economy.”

So far, Hrezi has not demonstrated that those issues can act as a catalyst for building a wave capable of unseating Larson. In 2006, opposition to the war in Iraq energized liberal Democrats and helped Ned Lamont defeat Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in a primary. Lieberman was reelected as an independent, but the loss contributed to his not seeking another term in 2012.

The challenger said he finds encouragement from voters, and he believes his fundraising will help assure Democrats of his viability.

Hrezi had raised nearly $132,000 and had $42,000 in available cash at the end of September. Numbers for the final quarter of 2021 are not due until the end of January. Larson raised about $640,000 in the first nine months of 2021, $220,267 from individual donors and $419,400 from other committees, including industry PACs. He had $783,131 cash on hand.

Outside groups willing to finance liberal challengers in primaries, such as the Justice Democrats, have not yet shown an interest.

“Listen, it’s a great country. Anybody has the right to run,” Larson said. But he said dollars he needs to spend on a primary will mean less money available in competitive district. “It’s a very consequential time. It’s a time when we have the barest of minorities, and this is something I think that is lost on people. For the most part, the 1st District is what we would call a donor district, meaning we’re helping other members.”

Hrezi said he is committed to the race.

He was born in Libya and raised in Connecticut, where his parents relocated after fleeing the Gadhaffi regime. He described his father as a dissident, though declined to offer details, saying relatives remain in Libya.

The congressional bailout of Wall Street after the housing bubble burst in 2008, sparking a deep recession from which Connecticut has not fully recovered, and the protracted fight over health care reform contributed to his interest in politics. He said he supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, then joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy after studying health policy at the University of North Carolina.

Murphy’s office says Hrezi worked for the senator in Washington as a legislative correspondent from May 7, 2018 until Sept. 11, 2020. Hrezi filed papers creating his campaign committee four months later, on Jan. 25, 2021.

Murphy played a role in encouraging Jahana Hayes to run for Congress in the 5th District in 2018, when Hayes and Pressley became the first two Black women elected to Congress from New England. But he has distanced himself from Hrezi’s challenge.

MARK PAZNIOKAS :: CTMIRROR.ORG

The benefits of the incumbent: Larson joined the governor and senators at the Bissell Bridge to promote infrastructure spending.

Larson made his reelection announcement in a community room at Goodwin University to two reporters, one television photographer and a virtual audience on Zoom.

Then he hustled up I-91 to Windsor to enjoy a benefit of incumbency and make small talk with Hrezi’s former employer.

In the shadow of a rusting Bissell Bridge that carries I-291 across the Connecticut River, he joined Murphy, Gov. Ned Lamont and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal to celebrate a Democratic legislative victory: Passage of a massive infrastructure funding bill that will accelerate rehabilitation of the bridge.

After the event, Murphy declined to comment on whether his former staffer’s challenge reflected anything deeper in contemporary politics about generational impatience with the pace of change — or the number of septuagenarians in Congress.

“All I know is that John Larson has more energy than a 23-year-old, and more passion for this state and for the Hartford area than anybody I’ve ever met,” Murphy said. “I just think it’s rare to have somebody that’s so effective, so good at his job, and cares so much about the state. And I think that people of the 1st District have seen that for decades. And that’s why they keep on sending him back with big, big margins.”

University of Connecticut

Andrew Agwunobi

University of Connecticut officials announced Friday that Interim President and CEO of UConn Health Dr. Andrew Agwunobi is resigning from the university next month.

Agwunobi was appointed interim president in July 2021 following the resignation of former UConn President Thomas C. Katsouleas last March. He is leaving his position as both interim president of the university and CEO of UConn Health effective Feb. 20 for an opportunity with the private sector health care company Humana, according to a statement released by UConn.

“I had no plans to leave UConn, but a unique and unexpected opportunity in the private sector presented itself, and while I am excited about this new chapter, the decision to leave UConn was a difficult one,” Agwunobi said in a statement. “I am immensely grateful for my time at UConn and UConn Health, and I wish the Board of Trustees, the UConn Health Board of Directors, my colleagues, and our faculty, staff and students all the best.”

Agwunobi joined UConn Health as its CEO in 2014. Before that, he served as managing director and co-leader of the health performance improvement practice of Berkeley Research Group and held several other top administrative positions such as CEO of the Grady Health System in Atlanta, CEO of Providence Healthcare in Washington and Secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration.

University of Connecticut

Radenka Maric

The Board of Trustees will meet on Jan. 26 to appoint Radenka Maric, the university’s vice president for research, innovation and entrepreneurship, as UConn’s interim president and Dr. Bruce Liang, dean of the UConn School of Medicine, as interim CEO of UConn Health.

Maric and Liang will serve in their new positions effective Feb. 1 as Agwunobi remains “for a transition period through Feb. 20.” An immediate search will begin for the next UConn president, and the goal is to have someone named by the fall.

“Both [Maric and Liang] are outstanding longtime senior leaders at the university and have played vital roles in helping to make UConn the incredibly vibrant, successful institution it is,” UConn Board of Trustees Chairman Daniel Toscano said in a statement. “We as a board have immense confidence in them, and we will be working very closely together in the next several months. This continues to be a period of transition for UConn, as we knew it would be, and we look ahead to a successful search process at this critical time in UConn’s and Connecticut’s history.”

Cloe Poisson :: CTMirror.org

Julyssa Colon, a nurse with Optimus Health Care, adjusts her PPE before administering a test for COVID-19 at a mobile test site set up by Optimus Health Care in the parking lot of the Russell Temple Church in Bridgeport, June 30, 2020.

Twenty-two months into the pandemic, health care workers are dealing with record hospitalizations, unsustainable work schedules and abuse from a public that’s frustrated and exhausted. 

On top of all that, they’re also contracting the virus at higher rates than ever before, federal safety standards surrounding COVID-related working conditions in hospitals have been peeled back, and changes in workers’ compensation policies are making it harder for many who cannot work.  

“We have had record numbers of staff members that have been out with COVID,” said Yale New Haven Health CEO Marna Borgstrom.

As of Wednesday, 439 staff members were out across the Yale system, down from 700 on a single day last week. Tom Balcezak, chief clinical officer at YNHH, called the trends in worker infections even more frightening than hospital admissions. 

Hartford HealthCare reported 1,500 workers out with COVID on Wednesday, down from 1,600 last week. As of Jan. 11, over 500 hospital staff were out at Nuvance Health, a network including Danbury Hospital in western Connecticut, though the number had decreased in recent days. 

Trinity Health declined to provide the specific number of staff out with COVID. 

“We’re dropping like flies,” said Sherri Dayton, a registered nurse at the Plainfield Emergency Care Center, an emergency center affiliated with Backus Hospital and part of the Hartford HealthCare System.

Bill Garrity, who serves as the president of the University Health Professionals Local 337, a union representing over 2,800 health care professionals at UConn Health, said keeping workers safe can start in the hospitals themselves. He wants to see more transparency from management about infections in the workplace to help control worker outbreaks.

“I’d love to know numbers [of workers infected] and where they’re stationed,” said Garrity. 

Changes in workers’ compensation policies

Earlier in the pandemic, the state and federal government put in place crucial workers’ compensation policies and federal safety measures that have since either expired or been relaxed. 

At the state level, in July 2020, Gov. Ned Lamont signed an executive order that automatically approved workers’ compensation for essential workers applying for benefits because they were infected with COVID between March 10 and May 20, 2020. The policy temporarily assumed that essential workers who contracted COVID did so at work. But that policy is no longer in effect.

Now, several health care professionals report that when they test positive for COVID, they’re often told they likely contracted it out in the community and therefore are not eligible for workers’ compensation.

In December 2020, after the temporary workers’ compensation policy had ended, Sherri Dayton tested positive for COVID. Earlier that week, her manager alerted her that she had been in contact with two patients who came into the hospital for a tick bite and a skin infection who were later found to have COVID, she said.

When Dayton reported her positive result and applied for workers’ compensation, she was told that she likely contracted the virus somewhere other than the hospital, and her request was denied. 

Workers’ compensation covers a range of expenses resulting from workplace harm, including medical bills and a portion of lost wages. It also covers all future medical bills related to the injury or, in the case of COVID, the disease. At a time when the long-term effects of the virus are unknown, that safety net is critical, many say.

“Down the road, you might end up with an asthma problem. People didn’t know asbestos was going to cause long-term problems,” explained John Brady, vice president of AFT CT, a union representing health care professionals.

Brady added that nearly all COVID-related workers’ compensation requests he’s seen have been initially denied, and many health care workers don’t have the resources to know they should appeal the decision. 

In Dayton’s case, she was compensated for lost wages and medical bills, but Dayton appealed the workers’ compensation denial in case she has future medical expenses associated with her infection. She has not received an update on her case in over a year. 

OSHA, CDC policies in flux

Recent changes to federal policies also threaten to leave medical professionals less protected. 

On Dec. 23, the CDC cut the quarantine period for infected health care workers from 10 days after a negative test to seven days. The agency noted that this was to help increase staffing for the coming omicron surge. The announcement also specified that the “isolation time can be cut further if there are staffing shortages.”

In July 2021, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency charged with ensuring workplace safety, issued a temporary standard that set specific COVID-related safety requirements for health care settings, including a requirement to develop a COVID hazard assessment and provide respirators for workers directly exposed to infectious cases. 

At the end of 2021, that temporary standard lapsed. OSHA said it is committed to putting in place a permanent standard but has yet to do so. Even though the standard wasn’t perfect, explained Brady, it provided specific guidelines that health care facilities had to follow in terms of COVID workplace safety.

These lapses in policies at both the state and federal level have left health care workers with less workplace protection during the peak of COVID infection rates. Health care worker infections also put a strain on staffing at a time when the state’s health care system is already bursting at the seams, officials said.

“It’s obviously affected hospitals and health care workers from a physical standpoint of being sick but also from a standpoint of our volumes are higher than they have been in the past, and we’re also dealing with people who are unable to work because they’re testing positive for COVID,” said Dr. Seth Lotterman, an emergency room physician at Hartford Hospital.

Stretched thin, some hospitals are mandating overtime for certain health care professionals, often requiring them to stay for additional shifts with little notice. This can result in 12- to 16-hour work days. 

On top of mandated overtime, Sherri Dayton reported that, in the emergency center, she and her colleagues have also been forced to treat an unsustainable number of patients at a time. Normally, she treats four patients at a time. Recently, she has been forced to treat six, seven, and, on a particularly difficult day, 11 patients at once.  

“We are exhausted. And we are shouting at the top of our lungs, ‘Help us,’” said Dayton.

This past October, the New York Times reported that Israel invoked its Counter-Terrorism Law of 2016 to outlaw as “terrorist” six Palestinian civil society groups that have long been active in legal, peaceful, and legitimate human rights advocacy.  Israel’s unsupported “terror designation” has been widely rebuked by world leaders, including several members of Congress (H. Res. 751).

John Fussell

However, our Connecticut congressional delegation (U.S. Reps. John Larson, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, Jim Himes, and Jahana Hayes) have remained silent to this injustice.

This author is very familiar with Defense of Children International Palestine (DCI-P), one of the six human rights organizations unjustly labeled as terrorist. DCI-P supports H.R. 2590, the Palestine Children and Families Act. Thirty-one members of Congress presently co-sponsor that legislation. Sadly, none of our Connecticut representatives have yet to co-sponsor the bill. A coalition of Connecticut organizations has collected resolution endorsements of 78 Connecticut faith-based, labor, legal, civil rights, and community organizations requesting our Connecticut members of Congress to join in co-sponsoring H.R. 2590.  If passed, that bill would require auditing the $3.8 billion given to Israel each year to ensure that U.S. aid is not paying for the military detention and abuse of Palestinian children, the demolition of Palestinian homes, or the annexation of Palestinian land.

Al Haq (Arabic for the “Truth”), one of the six organizations unjustly labeled “terrorist,” was among the first human rights groups in the Arab world and the first in the Israeli-occupied territories.  Raja Shehadeh, a life-long resident of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, completed his legal studies in London in 1978.  Enthused with the idea of using international law to resist Israeli occupation, the following year, he, along with two colleagues – a recent Yale graduate named Charles Shamas and an American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab – established Al Haq as an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva.

The December 2, 2021 issue of the New York Review of Books describes Al Haq’s human rights work, including contesting Israel’s illegal acquisition of Palestinian land.  Israel’s past efforts to discredit Al Haq’s work failed to silence this trusted resource for numerous international human rights organizations, the United Nations, and governments worldwide.

In an editorial on October 24, the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes the unjustly “terrorist”-labeled Palestinian human rights organizations as follows:

Addameer offers legal aid to prisoners, collects data on incarcerations, including so-called administrative detentions – without trial – and acts to end torture. Al-Haq which documents violations of Palestinian human rights in the occupied territories. The Palestine branch of Defense for Children International monitors the killing of children and the wellbeing of children imprisoned in Israel. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees aids Palestinian farmers, mainly in Area C of the West Bank, which under the Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control. Also included are the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees and the Bisan Center for Research & Development.

The Haaretz editorial denounced the Israeli government’s anti-democratic action “characteristics of military regimes” as a “stain upon Israel,” noting that:

The literal meaning is clear: All resistance to the occupation is terror. Israel is undermining the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate struggle. This is a boon to terrorist organizations and the use of violence.  If all forms of resistance constitute terror, how can one resist the occupation with being a terrorist?

United Nations experts condemn Israel’s designation of Palestine rights defenders as terrorist organizations.  U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet denounced the Israeli designation while defending the legitimacy of the civil society organizations and their work. “Claiming rights before a U.N. or other international body is not an act of terrorism, advocating for the rights of women in the occupied Palestinian territory is not terrorism, and providing legal aid to detained Palestinians is not terrorism, said Bachelet.”

Jonathan Cook, a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism, noted in the Washington Report this month that labeling Palestinian human rights activists as terrorist serves the same goal for Israel as labeling Western activists seeking to end Israel’s oppression of Palestinians as “anti-Semites,” or labeling Jews acting in solidarity with Palestinians as “self-hating” and “traitors.”

Our Connecticut congressional delegation favors billions of dollars in aid to Israel.  But to do so without taking measures to hold Israel accountable to international law and human rights is at best misguided. Our Connecticut congressional delegation should condemn Israel’s McCarthy-like efforts to silence legitimate criticism and human rights advocacy.

John Fussell is the Connecticut Organizer for Americans for Justice in Palestine Action (AJP-Action).

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This past legislative session, the Connecticut General Assembly shelved consideration of a public option insurance plan after Gov. Ned Lamont threatened to veto the bill. In fact, 2021 marked the third consecutive legislative session where the proposed insurance plan did not receive a vote.

Ryan Koski-Vacirca MD

But as a physician caring for Connecticut’s most vulnerable residents in the Emergency Department, we know that the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the shameful unmet public need for more support — and the evidence in support of the public option is clear. Now, more than ever, the Connecticut General Assembly should pass a public option for Connecticut.

The public option (Senate Bill 842) proposes to allow small businesses and nonprofits to buy the same health plan coverage offered to state employees. Most importantly, the bill utilizes federally available money to permanently eliminate premiums for families making less than 200 percent of the federal poverty limit. This public option won’t fix the health care system in Connecticut. But it will make Connecticut residents healthier and will make health care more affordable for every person – not just people who don’t have health insurance now.

Many nonpartisan experts have detailed how this is possible. New gold standard research evidence shows that increasing the number of insured people reduces mortality – that is, fewer people die when they have health insurance coverage. If the public option increases the number of insured Nutmeggers, it may also drive down insurance prices across the board.

But this is not just expert opinion; it’s the public’s opinion, too. According to the nonpartisan nonprofit United States of Care, 71 percent of Connecticut residents support the public option, including 72% of small business owners, 82% of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and 79 percent of people with a high school education or less. People instinctively know that health care in the United States provided without oversight does not work. Health care needs a push from local government to better serve the public.

Some lobbying groups – including insurance companies with offices here in Connecticut – have argued that the public option will increase costs and cause hospitals or doctors’ practices to close up shop. Others have stated that temporary pandemic funding already closed the uninsured gap in Connecticut. In a consulting report funded by political ‘dark money,’ insurance companies argue that vulnerable populations like rural Connecticut towns will lose: “When providers struggle, so do patients.”

But I am from rural Delaware and worked in search and rescue in rural New Hampshire. I am used to special interests appropriating our story to make a point – or to make some money.

In reality, the most recent evidence from other states suggests that the public option can reduce costs and provide a durable framework for future innovation. This current thinking also suggests that the Connecticut legislature’s public option design may avoid doctor and insurance participation issues with other state public options. And unlike temporary pandemic funding, the public option is built to reduce costs in the long term with a permanent solution.

It’s not possible to address the prices of the U.S. health care system with one fix. The foremost experts and advocates agree that we need many smaller changes – at all sizes of government and practice – to keep Americans safe from rising prices. By chipping away one percent at a time, or even one tenth of one percent, we build momentum and leave a better future for those behind us.

As a physician in the emergency department, I see the consequences of unaffordable health care every day. It’s always the most psychologically challenging to care for patients who do not have the money or time to take care of their chronic medical conditions. One of the most common refrains in the electronic medical record? “Patient lost to follow-up.” We know that 41 percent of Americans have foregone health insurance because they cannot afford it. We don’t want to lose patients to follow-up anymore.

Connecticut’s public option is a proud state contribution to the public’s health. If the General Assembly has the will to act, peers and future legislators will view their actions as a defining legacy – a new chapter in American health care. What is more, momentum may build for other states to develop contributing alternative payment models to support the public’s health. This has already happened in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona.

The COVID pandemic laid bare all that we have ignored in the U.S. health care system for a century – including care that many cannot afford. The only thing left is for us is for us to decide what we will do with the time left to fix it. The Connecticut public option is a perfect place to start.

Ryan Koski-Vacirca MD is a Resident Physician at the Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale University.

CTViewpoints welcomes rebuttal or opposing views to this and all its commentaries. Read our guidelines and submit your commentary here.

The U.S. is facing a shortage of teachers, including the ever-present serious issue of a shortage of teachers of color. With the emergence of COVID, more and more teachers in the workforce have been infected and quarantined.

Safety concerns about COVID-19 have led some educators to leave the profession, including 40% of teachers with 21 to 30 years of experience and even 55% of teachers with more than 30 years of experience. This has simultaneously exacerbated the ongoing shortage of teachers of color in the U.S. In response, Connecticut has proposed a plan that it claims will address the teacher shortage, prepare the next generation of highly skilled professionals, and diversify the state’s teaching workforce.

In practice, however, the scheme does not really respond to and address the teacher shortage in a meaningful way, does not produce quality education quickly and efficiently, and requires long-term investment to diversify the state’s teaching force.

Connecticut and school officials announced a program in November 2020 to bring college students majoring in education into primary schools classrooms. The NextGen Educators program was created by a partnership between the state Department of Education and Central Connecticut State University. It places students who are studying to become educators in public school classrooms where they will support experienced teachers two to three days a week. And NextGen teachers are paid fees agreed with the school system. The pilot program is already underway in Bristol Public Schools.

The project is intended to attract more students into the education system through financial assistance and internship opportunities to better support their academic and professional development, train the next generation of highly skilled educators and alleviate the teacher shortage.

But at the same time, there are valid critiques of NextGen. For one thing, the program will increase the pressure on current teachers to help the interns. In the program description, these students will enter public schools with the support of experienced teachers. This is quick, hands-on training that takes advantage of the classroom environment and the experienced energy of the teachers. In an environment where there is already a shortage of educators, it will put more pressure on the teachers to spend more time and energy to train these students. Secondly, interns trained in this environment, with limited resources and energy, do not have the benefit of long-term teaching knowledge and experience. They are not able to bring the appropriate level of instruction to children who are currently in desperate need of attention from professional teachers. And the students will have a shorter tenure than professional teachers and less time on campus, a situation that is fraught with instability and high mobility.

On the question of whether this program can increase the diversity of teachers, we need to think about why there is a shortage of teachers from ethnic minorities.

Shelley Xia and Jiwen Fan

According to the U.S. racial wealth gap, people of color have lower income levels and net worth than white households. So minority students have greater economic pressures hindering their career progress. And the next generation of education programs, in which students receive corresponding salaries, should attract and train more diverse students as future teacher candidates, thereby having a positive impact on students of color, further allowing for an increase in teachers of color.

Overall, The NextGen Educators program does well in providing students with good opportunities to get paid and encouraging students of different ethnicities and backgrounds to join the teaching profession. However, it does not do much in the short term to address the shortage of teachers and to train the next generation of highly skilled professionals. Therefore, the Connecticut government should conduct a rigorous evaluation of the program to further clarify the purpose of the program and the extent to which it has been effective in different areas, in order to decide whether or not to expand the program in the future. In the meantime, policy makers should seriously consider and provide a long term development strategy to directly address the underlying problem of teacher shortage in the state, and to make sure it does not continue into the future.

Shelley Xia is a junior at Trinity College, currently double-majoring in Educational Studies and Economics. Jiwen Fan is a junior at Trinity College, currently double-majoring in Educational Studies and Film Studies.

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Yehyun Kim :: ctmirror.org

Long-term care workers block the intersection at the Department of Social Services in March 2021 to draw attention to the treatment of caregivers. Protestors asked for better wages and benefits, including affordable health insurance and retirement options and paid time off.

Hoping to secure better pay for thousands of home health care aides who’ve risked their lives during the pandemic, Cynthia Johnson of Greenwich posed a direct question as she protested outside of Gov. Ned Lamont’s Greenwich home on a chilly December morning.

“Where’s our Thanksgiving and Christmas?” asked Johnson, who wore a Grinch hat while dozens of fellow protestors chanted “Fix the broken system” and “Shame on you.”

But while these members of New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 SEIU were rallying for a new contract with better pay and benefits, their question is part of larger one, labor leaders say, and the lack of an answer is producing a crisis across Connecticut.

The state received billions of dollars last year in federal pandemic relief, holds billions more in its budget reserve and expects another whopping surplus next June. Unless state officials use some of this to compensate the wide range of workers who risked their lives daily to provide essential services over the past two years, labor leaders say, staffing shortages will become a pandemic unto themselves.

And if Lamont and state legislators — who face reelection this year — don’t remember the health care personnel, teachers, social workers, emergency responders, prison guards and grocery store employees that couldn’t work from home, union members say, these essential workers will remind them.

“You might be holding our future in your hands right now,” Johnson said. “But come Election Day, your future will be in our hands.”

‘We put them at risk. We put their families at risk.’

Lawmakers routinely field complaints that Connecticut employers can’t find enough nurses, other health care workers, teachers, restaurant staff and skilled manufacturing laborers.

That’s not an accident, said Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven. The pandemic and the ensuing divide between remote and front-line workers have permanently changed how workers view front-line jobs.

Simply put, the wages and benefits offered in some cases simply aren’t worth the risks of illness and death, she said.

“Let’s be honest, it’s not a labor shortage,” Porter said. “It’s a wage shortage. … It’s a health insurance shortage.”

Porter added that some in government aren’t ready to acknowledge this responsibility that Connecticut effectively imposed on a poor subset of the population.

“We said, ‘If you’re essential, you’ve got to go out and keep the economy open,’” she said. “We put them at risk. We put their families at risk.”

District 1199 made that argument repeatedly last year, winning raises and better benefits for group and nursing home workers, and is still battling for the same outcomes for home health aides. Workers in all three groups are employed by private agencies that get the bulk of their funding from government sources.

District 1199 took its protest to Lamont’s Greenwich home last month to highlight that labor divide.

“People in this neighborhood got to work from home. Did any of you get to work from home?” Diedre Murch, vice president of the union’s home care sector, asked protestors. “Many of you are making impossible decisions every single day about whether to pay rent or pay bills, about whether to buy food or buy medicine.”

Murch said about two-thirds of Connecticut’s 10,000 personal care attendants  — most of whom are female or racial minorities — rely on public assistance,, while one in five are without health insurance. 

The union has asked for $20 per hour, paid sick time, and affordable, quality health insurance. The $3 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funds Congress sent to Connecticut last year included $240 million for home care services. District 1199 officials say this should be enough for the state to resolve the dispute, but members have been without a new contract for more than seven months.

“Gov. Lamont has proposed and executed multiple programs to support front-line workers and their families since the start of the pandemic,” said Max Reiss, Lamont’s communications director.

The governor and legislature earmarked $34 million in ARPA resources to cover a portion of lost wages and medical expenses incurred by front-line workers. Lamont also ordered $75 million in federal funds be distributed to poor working families.

But critics say this is far too little.

The $34 million was a bone thrown to lawmakers who couldn’t convince the governor to alter the workers’ compensation system. Labor advocates argued that any worker exposed to COVID and facing wage losses or health expenses should be able to tap workers’ compensation benefits automatically.

The pandemic sparked thousands of workers’ compensation claims, and legislators say the $34 million likely will be exhausted before all requests for aid have been processed.

The $75 million Lamont is distributing is earmarked for families that earned less than $57,000 during 2020, an average benefit of $377. Porter noted that a family with two adults working low-paying front-line jobs might easily be disqualified from any assistance under this criteria.

The Lamont administration has been in negotiations with state employee unions since September about some form of special hazard compensation, but those talks haven’t produced any agreement to date.

And while one source close to the administration said the governor didn’t appreciate the protest outside of his Greenwich home, labor advocates say the numbers speak for themselves.

Two years into pandemic, ‘Hero Pay’ remains a concept only

Lamont has been reluctant to tap any state funds for COVID-19 relief for workers, preferring to dole out only federal dollars. That’s despite holding a record-setting $3.1 billion in the rainy day fund and with analysts projecting a nearly $1.9 billion surplus for the current fiscal year.

“The governor remains open to additional measures of support, but only if the math adds up, and only if the qualifying criteria for public and private sector participation are clear,” Reiss said.

Some combination of federal and state funds should be used, labor advocates say, for what many are calling “hero pay” — a one-time cash infusion for the workers who risked their health to keep the state functioning.

“Of course, there is no amount of money that would fully compensate essential workers for their sacrifices — but two years in to the pandemic, the state hasn’t allocated a dime,” said Puya Gerami, campaign director of Recovery for All CT, a coalition of labor- and faith-based groups. “We’re eager to work with the Lamont administration to formulate a comprehensive package honoring all workers in both the public and private sectors for their crucial sacrifices.”

Legislators and labor groups have discussed dedicating anywhere from $250 million to $500 million for hero pay, noting the funds likely would be distributed among hundreds of thousands of Connecticut households. Porter and the other co-chair of the Labor Committee, Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, raised a bill last year to direct nearly $400 million for this purpose.

Cities and towns received more than $1.5 billion in direct federal aid through the ARPA legislation, but union officials say communities, in general, have been reluctant to use it to fund pandemic compensation.

Joe DeLong, executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, said that’s “a worthy discussion to have” but also noted that the coronavirus challenged school systems, left many businesses and families struggling financially and pushed social service caseloads through the roof.

But all sides agree the state has the deepest pockets right now, and that any hero pay will likely come from the Capitol in Hartford.

“I’m disappointed as a state that we have not done this yet,” Kushner said, noting that Lamont and lawmakers carved out $155 million to ease the tax assessment businesses face to replenish the state’s unemployment trust.

Lawmakers are talking about expanding that assistance when the 2022 General Assembly session convenes in February. And Chris DiPentima, president of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said his group is urging lawmakers to invest more in worker training programs to combat the growing staffing shortages.

The focus, Kushner said, is almost entirely on employers and not enough on working families.

“We’ve helped businesses, we’ve helped large corporations,” she added, urging Lamont and other lawmakers to see hero pay as another investment — one that will keep families off public assistance, reduce evictions and help send more students to college. “I believe we have to invest in the workforce in Connecticut … if we truly want everyone to recover.”

Arielle Levin Becker :: CTMirror.org

A primary care office in Cheshire, part of Hartford HealthCare Medical Group.

A competitor’s antitrust lawsuit against Hartford HealthCare comes as Connecticut already was struggling to explore one of its central issues: What does the purchase of physician practices by hospitals do to competition, costs and care?

The lawsuit filed by Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center accuses Hartford HealthCare of  buying physician practices with the predatory intent of controlling the referrals that feed patients to its hospitals, surgical centers and other affiliates.

The General Assembly last year directed the state Office of Health Strategies to report by Feb. 1, 2023 whether it has sufficient regulatory powers to oversee the mergers and acquisitions of medical practices. 

In an instant, the politically charged lawsuit brought to the fore what had been the concern of a low-profile working group, whose membership included a variety of stakeholders — including a physician from Hartford HealthCare and an executive from a Saint Francis affiliate.

Given the sweeping antitrust allegations, the 75-page lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court quickly became required reading in the office of Attorney General William Tong. A spokeswoman acknowledged it was under review.

The political sensitivity of the claims was evident in the courtesy calls Saint Francis made to Gov. Ned Lamont, House Speaker Matt Ritter of Hartford and others before declaring war on Hartford Hospital, its cross-town competitor and biggest piece of Hartford HealthCare.

“I’ve always enjoyed working with both of them, and I’ll remain committed to helping them both,” Ritter said. “They employ a lot of people, a lot of Hartford residents. Their workforces reflect the diversity of the city. And you know it’s hard when two friends are not in agreement on something.”

Hartford HealthCare says the suit is without merit. Saint Francis says Hartford’s predatory practices have taken away its major referrers of cardiac cases and produced a stunning migration of physicians — a 25% increase in the Hartford HealthCare’s staff in just two years.

The governor’s office declined comment, but legislators said the litigation underscores the volatile market dynamics of health care and renews questions about Connecticut’s ability to protect competition and preserve the medical practices of sole practitioners and unaffiliated group practices.

Victoria L. Veltri, the executive director of the Office of Health Strategy, said she could not comment on the merits of the claims, but the broader issue of the limits on the oversight of mergers and acquisitions of physician groups was central to the mission of the working group.

The office is responsible for administering the state’s primary tool for overseeing the business of medicine, the Certificate of Need program. It is described by OHS as “a regulatory process that prevents costly duplication of services, protects access to and continuity of health care services, and ensures Connecticut’s residents have a voice regarding health care for their communities.”

Sen. Heather Somers, R-Groton, the ranking Senate Republican on the legislature’s Public Health Committee, said the litigation will bring an urgency to the state’s struggle to assess the consolidation of health services and the state’s role in regulating it.

“I do think that this lawsuit will be interesting,” said Somers, who has a background in bioscience and is married to a physician. “I think it will bring to the surface some of these issues that really have to be discussed, because I think the focus should really be patient care and not making it easier for Yale or Hartford to get more patients.”

Yale New Haven and Hartford HealthCare are the two major hospital systems in Connecticut, the 800-pound gorillas of health care in Connecticut, in the wry view of Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, who said, “At least we have two 800-pound gorillas in Connecticut, not just one.”

The purchase of physician groups as a feeder of business is not new, even if Saint Francis contends that Hartford HealthCare’s approach has reached a tipping point capable of destabilizing other hospitals, said Steinberg, the co-chair of the Public Health Committee who formerly worked on the business side of health care.

“There’s a bigger issue at play here, which is what is the appropriate role of government in terms of interfering with market forces,” Steinberg said. “We’re a small state, diverse in the sense that we’ve got behemoths and we also have tiny hospitals that struggle each year to even break even.”

Seven years ago, Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, and Republican Len Fasano of North Haven, then the Senate minority leader, raised similar concerns about the Yale New Haven’s acquisition of hospitals and physician groups.

“This is part of this monopoly of medicine, which is awful. And Marty and I tried to stop it from happening here in New Haven,” said Fasano, whose father was a family care physician. “I think that, unfortunately, by the time we recognized it and worked on it, the die was cast.”

“We were both worried about the issue of physician practices being taken over by the large hospital systems and the loss of physician autonomy at the time,” Looney said.

Ritter, a former Public Health Committee co-chair, said he remembers the fight as important, albeit one waged by two New Haven area politicians against a New Haven institution.

“It really hadn’t become an ugly issue in Hartford, to be honest, until yesterday,” Ritter said.

Mass incarceration is the number one human rights issue of our time.

Mass incarceration disproportionately affects communities of color, and is only exacerbated by recidivism rates. Recidivism refers to the likelihood that someone will return back to prison once they are released, due to a subsequent conviction. These rates can decrease with the proper resources. The big question is: Are prisons doing what they need to do to make sure once people leave they never go back? The answer is, not really.

One of the most effective ways that they can do this is by offering educational resources.

This country needs to create more accessible educational opportunities such as college courses and vocational training to give those inside prisons knowledge and skills they can use to find jobs and provide them with the resources to do better. In the state of Connecticut, there are some educational classes, but they are not accessible to everyone.

During the Obama administration, in 2016, there was an implementation of the Second Chance Pell Grant that created a partnership with community colleges for inmates in Connecticut. This grant allows for inmates to take classes to earn credit for an associate’s degree. Many of them could not participate still because this was not enough money to help them cover everything they needed for the classes. This leaves inmates from communities of color in a lose-lose situation causing them to go back out and commit the same or different crimes instead of getting the necessary support.

The power of education allows prisoners to think about ways they can give back to their communities, build bonds with families, and stop the cycle of imprisonment.

As a current student of color, I understand the value of an education and how it can change the path that people are in. This is what we should be doing to support incarcerated individuals. We claim that prisons are a way to make sure people are held responsible for their actions, but if we don’t have accessible ways to make sure that they don’t return, then this is a failing system.

Renita Washington

Fundamentally, educational opportunities decrease recidivism rates tremendously. I support the push for government aid such as the Pell grant because it will allow them not to worry about the cost of their education. This is just one way we can do our part.

I urge policymakers and taxpayers in Connecticut to fight for an increase in funding for educational programs because denying incarcerated people an education directly contributes to systemic racism. People of color in this country have been denied equitable education for way too long and this is simply a way to provide more to our community.

Taxpayers and policymakers may be reluctant to see limited funding providing educational services for incarcerated people. I would ask them to consider how much it costs to keep someone in prison and give them their basic needs such as toiletries, adequate food, and adequate health care. The Connecticut Department of Correction’s (DOC) 2012 study on recidivism reported that of the offenders studied, within five years of returning to society “79 percent were re-arrested, 69 percent were convicted of a new crime, and 50 percent were returned to prison with a new sentence” ultimately making it more expensive and continuing mass incarceration when we can make better investments in the educational system.

There are still a lot of questions that need to be answered to make sure that these programs are affordable and sustainable, so we need to evaluate some of the current programs. Overall, this issue of access is one that we need to think about when trying to support people who have made mistakes.

Renita Washington a Senior Posse scholar at Trinity College. She is an Educational Studies Major with a focus on Early Childhood and Prison Education reform.

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In June of 2021, the legislature passed the Highway Use Tax (HUT), which is a per-mile tax applied to tractor trailers where the tax rate is higher for the heavier vehicles. There have been a few major developments since that time which warrant repeal of the Highway Use Tax.

One is passage of the federal infrastructure law. On Nov. 15, 2021, President Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill into law, of which Connecticut will receive $5.38 billion. In June 2021 when the state’s highway use tax was signed into law, we had no idea if the federal infrastructure bill would pass or not. The good news is that it has passed, and we now know that the state is going to reap financial benefits from it.

Secondly, the state’s Office of Fiscal Analysis is now projecting that the Special Transportation Fund (STF) will run a surplus for the next several fiscal years. This projection was not known when the HUT was signed into law. In fact, data contained in a OFA presentation given on Nov. 19, 2021 shows that even if HUT revenue is subtracted from revenue estimates for future fiscal years, the STF will still run a surplus every year through fiscal year 2026. Even without the HUT, calculations using OFA data show that at the conclusion of fiscal year 2026, the STF would have a balance of $884.8 million. Additionally, the minimum “debt service ratio” requirements (annual revenue / annual debt service) of 2.0 outlined by OFA in their November 19 report would be met.

The numbers in the top half of the image are direct from OFA’s report. In the lower table, MTAC removed the HUT revenue and updated the numbers accordingly.

As long as the legislature does not divert funds that are supposed to be sent to the STF before they get there, this data from OFA clearly shows that there is no need for the HUT or any other new revenue stream through the conclusion of fiscal year 2026.

Right now, Connecticut and the rest of the U.S. is dealing with a supply chain crisis and rising inflation, which had not yet materialized when the HUT was signed into law. All consumers are paying more for life’s essential products, and it is clear that transportation costs are a huge reason for that. As Bloomberg News recently noted, in the fourth quarter of 2021, trucking freight rates saw their largest increase in about 30 years. “Increased shipping costs are adding to concerns that inflation across the U.S. economy will be slow to dissipate,” Bloomberg stated.

Connecticut’s own small businesses have also explained that this will increase the cost of products. “We can’t absorb it. This is going to have to be passed down to our customers,” said John Pruchnicki of Coastal Carriers of CT, a business that brings gas to gas stations. “We’re playing a critical role right now in the food chain, and we’re in a difficult position to pass these costs on to our retailers,” said George Motel of Bozzuto’s, a business that brings food to grocery stores.

Connecticut residents are already paying more for food and gas than they were a year, or even six months ago. Allowing this tax to take effect will exacerbate the inflation that is already being experienced. Let’s repeal this tax in order to support both our Connecticut small businesses, and Connecticut residents as we deal with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joe Sculley is President of the Motor Transport Association of CT

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I am an example of a student who went the test-optional route when applying to college, and this opened a lot of doors for me.

No matter how hard I worked, I was never a good test taker. However, on other types of assignments, such as essays, I performed better. When it came time to apply for college, I only applied to schools that did not require the SAT or ACT.  Now, I am at Trinity College in Hartford and achieving my lifelong dream of preparing to be a teacher. The test-optional route allowed me to be where I am today. Therefore, I believe all colleges and universities should offer test-optional admissions.

There are several reasons why it is more inclusive for colleges to have test-optional admissions. First, research shows that standardized tests do not accurately measure one’s intelligence. Second, test registration and preparation are expensive and therefore advantage wealthy students. Finally, research shows that there are ways, other than testing, for students to demonstrate what they know.

While standardized tests are widely used to assess student intelligence, they may not adequately assess student potential. Instead, research shows that there are racial disparities in SAT scores, suggesting that the test disadvantages Black and Latinx students. A  complaint against the University of California claims the use of testing is inequitable, given the way that the test appears to advantage Asian American and white students.  Statistics from the College Board, which administers the SAT, show that 55 percent of Asian-American test-takers and 45 percent of white test-takers scored a 1,200 or higher on the SAT in 2019. For Hispanic and black students, those numbers were 12 percent and 9 percent.

The patterns in the data illustrate that Hispanic and Black students have a disadvantage and mistakenly suggest that other groups who have the upper hand are more “intelligent” when in reality we are all equal. The scores are a reflection of whether we have the resources or opportunities to understand how to get a high score on the SAT and ACTs. They measure the use of testing strategies that we have to learn; the only way to do so is to get expensive training which not everybody has the opportunity and means to do.

Sonia Lau

Wealthy or privileged students’ high schools are more likely to provide SAT and ACT preparation. These students are also more likely to afford top-notch test preparation, where they learn, for example, that the Reading and Science sections of the SAT and ACT are all about the strategies. For example, when I took an SAT prep class, I was taught to merely scan the first sentence and the last sentence of the section I had read, and that understanding the reading was not important.  Preparation and expert advice are essential for doing well on the SAT. However, such preparation is only accessible to wealthy students. Online courses cost $100-$2800, while private sessions cost $1,600-$8,000.

Finally, students have varying strengths. Everyone on earth is unique, just as everyone has unique talents. For some, it’s music, sports, or theater. The standardized exam results are simply a snapshot of their knowledge. Research shows that GPA or any grades done in school are a better predictor of college success than standardized tests. GPAs are a collection of  “effort over a long period of time, in different types of classes, demanding different types of academic skills and expectations.” Beyond that, teachers that have known students for years have a better understanding of the student’s potential and what they have going on in their life. Therefore, instead of relying on the standardized test, colleges should base their admissions decisions on students’ GPAs and recommendations from their teachers.

Getting institutions to adopt test-optional policies helps many students. We all deserve a chance at college. I’ve known I wanted to teach since I was five years old. It was test-optional admissions policies that allowed me to pursue that passion.

Sonia Lau is a sophomore at Trinity College from Hong Kong, majoring in Educational Studies with a possible focus on Special Education and Psychology.

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Mark Pazniokas :: CT Mirror

Gov. Ned Lamont announced in March 2020 that he was declaring a public health emergency in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Gov. Ned Lamont established a bargaining posture Wednesday towards lawmakers on the question of his emergency COVID-19 pandemic powers, making clear an intention to share the responsibility with the General Assembly.

Lamont said he will ask the legislature to codify in state law a short list of executive orders issued to manage an emergency that was declared 22 months ago and is set to expire on Feb. 15, a week after the legislative session begins.

About a dozen orders are necessary to maintain safety, such as a continued mandate on masks in the schools, and to allow the state to act quickly on the purchase of vital supplies, such as testing kits and protective equipment, he said.

“But I’d like to have the legislative imprimatur on that,” Lamont said. He added later, “I’d like to think the legislature will have an opportunity to vote on them — or otherwise.”

While some lawmakers have assumed that “otherwise” means Lamont will seek an extension of emergency powers if the legislature fails to act, the governor’s top aides insisted in interviews that the administration has no plans to seek an extension — a position that seems aimed at putting lawmakers in the position of either codifying certain executive orders or giving Lamont some continued, if limited, emergency powers.

“However, the governor is pretty clear that he wants there to be skin in the game, that if there’s a recognition that the legislature is unable to make these types of quick decisions relative to factors on the ground with the pandemic, then they need to be the ones who articulate that,” said Max Reiss, the governor’s communications director. “At this point, we do not anticipate a request from the executive branch for an extension.”

The question of what happens on Feb. 15 is a matter of tension between the Democratic governor and the Democratic majority and Republican minority in a General Assembly that has largely deferred to Lamont on COVID.

This is an election year for the governor and the General Assembly, and lawmakers generally are averse to taking on controversial issues in the three-month session in even years.

The first major expense of the reelection campaign Lamont opened two months ago is $48,500 for a baseline poll that would measure the voting public’s current stance towards pandemic restrictions.

Whether prompted by polls or principle, Lamont has steadfastly refused to consider new restrictions, leaving to mayors and other local officials responsibility for requiring masks at stores and other public venues.

Lamont has continued other controversial mandates, most notably a requirement of masks in the schools and vaccinations for state employees and certain health care workers.

Legislators could be asked in the first days of the 2022 session, which opens on Feb. 9 with the release of the governor’s budget proposals, to vote on what mandates should be imposed, continued or abandoned.

“Whatever we do is focused on keeping the people of Connecticut safe during this pandemic,” said Paul Mounds, his chief of staff. “And the big part as we get closer to the start of the legislative session and Feb. 15 is giving the legislature a firm understanding of what are the tools the governor needs to continue to keep Connecticut safe.”

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, and House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, in separate interviews, expressed a shared frustration with the absence of a firm action plan as time runs out on the current emergency declaration.

“You can’t drop this on the legislature on Feb. 10 and expect it to be done. It will not be done by the 15th,” Ritter said.

House Democrats held a virtual caucus on the coming session and the emergency powers for much of Wednesday. 

Ritter said the challenges to lawmakers involve substance and process. Will the legislature hold hearings on which orders should be codified in law? Are there metrics that can be identified to determine when masks or vaccinations no longer are required?

“I have 96 people whose opinions are going to be varied on every single executive order, potentially,” Ritter said. “Do you run them as one big bill? Do you run them separately? All fascinating questions.”

Ritter said lawmakers may propose their own emergency measures, such as allowing the use of absentee ballots by voters concerned about the danger of COVID.

Candelora said time already is short, given that Republicans will want the administration to present data supporting the continuance of executive orders. One example, he said, is a desire to see evidence on the efficacy of masks in preventing the transmission of COVID among school children.

Lamont is not requiring adults to wear masks in indoor venues, yet he demands them for high school students; Candelora said that is an inconsistency that Lamont needs to justify.

“To suggest that we can codify any executive order within the next 30 days, assuming we started today, is unrealistic,” Candelora said. “And so the governor’s failure to interact with us sooner is creating a position where there are limited options.”

Lamont had unanimous support of Democratic and Republican legislative leaders in 2020 when he declared an emergency that empowered him to order the closure of businesses and require public health precautions.

Extensions of the original emergency declaration have become sharply partisan, with 10 House Democrats and two Senate Democrats joining Republicans opposed to the most recent extension in September.

Passage came on votes of 80-60 in the House and 18-15 in the Senate to continue Lamont’s emergency COVID-19 pandemic powers through Feb. 15, keeping mask and vaccine mandates in place.

Lamont spoke to reporters about the emergency powers Wednesday at a virtual press conference called to promote his expansion of the earned income tax credit. He offered examples of questions lawmakers might face.

“The legislature may say, ‘I don’t think we ought to be wearing masks in school. Or I don’t think a store should be able to tell people, to ask their vaccination status,’” Lamont said.

Without asking for the broad powers of an extension, Lamont is suggesting that lawmakers give him some flexibility on how to enforce whatever orders are codified in law, such as purchasing powers.

“I think there’s a narrow group of things going forward, where it will be helpful for us to have a little agility to be able to move fast,” Lamont said. One example was the test kits the administration recently purchased.

On the video calls was Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, who defended the governor’s management of the pandemic and downplayed the potential for conflict.

“I think it will continue to be a cooperative effort, as it has been,” Looney said. “I think the governor has done a fine job in using his emergency powers to this point. He has been judicious and restrained in them and has not abused them.”

Keith Phaneuf contributed to this report.

Connecticut Voices for Children Executive Director Emily Byrne

While Gov. Ned Lamont touted plans Wednesday to share one-time federal COVID relief funds with Connecticut’s working poor, progressive reformers urged him next to secure permanent relief for low- and middle-income families.

But that would require spending the state’s money, not distributing aid from Washington — which the fiscally moderate-to-conservative governor has been wary about since the coronavirus struck Connecticut almost two years ago.

“The reality is a lot of these families were struggling before the pandemic, probably struggling during the pandemic, and they will struggle after the pandemic,” Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford said during a midday online press conference with Lamont.

The Democratic governor was touting his plan to share $75 million in expiring federal coronavirus relief funds with nearly 200,000 working poor households in Connecticut — an average of about $375 per household. 

To be eligible, these families had to be employed and qualified in 2020 for the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, on their state income tax returns by earning less than $56,844.

“I think there’s nothing more important than rewarding work,” Lamont said, adding that those who maintained some of the most vital services during the pandemic are among society’s lowest paid.

“Essential workers were sometimes doing the most essential work at the lowest pay, and that is wrong,” he added.

Created in 2011, Connecticut’s Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the state’s chief tools to help its poorest working families stay afloat.

Originally set in value at 30% of the federal EITC, it has been chiseled down gradually since then and stood at 23% in 2021. 

An estimated 198,708 households received the credit, worth an average of $550, through tax returns filed last spring. Advocates say poor families must spend all of this money on basic needs, such as utility bills and groceries, because of Connecticut’s high cost of living.

Lamont’s plan would raise the average EITC benefit, for one time only, to nearly $930 on average, which represents 41.5% of the federal EITC benefit.

“We’re really hoping we can build on that, and not make it a one-time effort,” said Lisa Tepper Bates, president and CEO of the United Way of Connecticut.

The United Way’s ALICE methodology — an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed households — holds that federal metrics for assessing poverty, particularly in Connecticut, drastically understate the problem.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Federal Poverty Level for a family of four in Connecticut is $26,500. Only about 11% of state households fall below this threshold.

But the bureau’s metric focuses chiefly on a household’s pre-tax earnings and the adjusted cost of a minimum food diet — originally set in 1963. Key elements like health and child care, transportation, utilities and other housing costs aren’t major factors under the FPL.

According to ALICE, that Connecticut family of four needs to earn $90,660 to cover basic survival needs.

Connecticut Voices for Children, a New Haven-based, progressive policy group, has advocated in recent years for greater relief for low- and middle-income families through the EITC and other state income tax changes.

Emily Byrne, executive director for Connecticut Voices, called Lamont’s plan a “courageous first step,” then noted that U.S. Census data currently shows 22% of renters in the state are behind in payments, and 646,000 adults here are reporting difficulty covering normal household expenses.

Arielle Levin Becker

Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford

The General Assembly’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee proposed last spring boosting the state EITC from 23% to 40% of the federal credit. Legislators and Lamont settled on 30.5% starting with the 2022 tax year in the final adopted budget.

The finance panel had proposed several other tax changes that were scrapped entirely.

Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, pushed for a new $600-per-child state income tax credit for households making $200,000 per year or less. To ensure poor households — which often owe little or no state income taxes — still could benefit, Scanlon also proposed making 70% of the credit refundable.

Fonfara, the other co-chairman, recommended two income tax surcharges on the state’s wealthiest households and a new digital media ads levy on major online giants like Google.

The Hartford lawmaker wanted most of the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from these tax hikes invested in Connecticut’s poor urban centers to reverse decades of unequal access to education, health care and economic opportunity. The revenues also would ensure tax relief for the poor and middle class could be maintained even after temporary federal fiscal aid tied to the pandemic expires in 2024.

Lamont argued tax hikes would destabilize the economy at the worst possible time. The governor also has steadfastly opposed raising state taxes on Connecticut’s wealthiest households, arguing it would prompt them to flee the state.

Fonfara responded by calling the new state budget “a knee on the neck of the Black community” when the plan was debated on the Senate floor in June.

And since then, state revenue projections only have grown. While Lamont and lawmakers used nearly $1.8 billion in federal COVID relief to help balance state finances across this fiscal year and next, the budget is on pace to close this fiscal year alone nearly $1.9 billion in the black, according to Comptroller Natalie Braswell’s office.

“Income inequality wasn’t created overnight, but it can be significantly reduced with robust anti-poverty measures,” Connecticut AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne said at Lamont’s press conference.

The labor leader also encouraged Lamont “to build on this effort” by supporting a new child tax credit, lowering state income tax rates for the poor and middle class and increasing state investments in urban centers.

These initiatives likely would throw state finances out of balance, unless offset by some degree of higher taxes on the state’s top earners.

Lamont has said he is open to some form of state tax relief for low- and middle-income households in the coming legislative session, which begins Feb. 9.

The governor said he prefers to focus on municipal property tax burdens. 

Lamont reneged on a 2018 campaign pledge to pump an extra $400 million per year into low- and middle-income households by expanding the property tax credit by 2021. The administration argued the state could not afford to provide the relief, even though government finances are more robust now than when Lamont made the pledge in 2018.

The governor and the legislature did expand municipal aid by about half that amount in the new state budget adopted last June. 

Still Lamont also said he was hopeful about making the state EITC expansion permanent, though he gave no indication he was willing to consider a broad tax redistribution plan that would affect Connecticut’s wealthy.

“We’re going to have to set some priorities because … the federal money does not go forever. But this is an incredibly important tax cut for working families. … We’re going to do everything we can to keep this going.”

Yehyun Kim :: ctmirror.org

Joanne Kombert, a Hartford HealthCare nurse, injects a patient with COVID-19 vaccine.

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Connecticut is nearing a record that was set in the earliest months of the pandemic, but some health care professionals argue the recent rise in cases within hospitals may be somewhat misleading.

Roughly 1,939 COVID-positive patients are currently hospitalized in the state, which is only 33 patients off the record that was set in mid-April 2020.

The difference now, however, is that a large number of patients testing positive in Connecticut’s hospitals are not in an emergency room or critical care unit because of the virus.

Many people are testing positive for coronavirus after seeking out care for other medical issues and ailments. Those cases are being referred to as “incidental” COVID infections, but they are counted in the same way in the statewide data.

It’s unclear exactly how many incidental COVID cases there are in Connecticut’s hospitals at the moment, because not all health systems are breaking down the data in that way. But some hospitals are tracking the issue to determine how many people are actually arriving at hospitals seeking care directly because of the virus.

Thomas Balcezak, the Chief Medical Officer at Yale New Haven, said his team is currently classifying around 10% to 15% of their COVID patients as incidental infections.

As an example of that, Marna Borgstrom, the CEO of the Yale New Haven Health system, said Wednesday that roughly 50% of the women entering her hospitals to give birth are coincidentally testing positive for COVID-19.

Meanwhile, officials with Hartford HealthCare explained this week that roughly 30% of the COVID-positive patients in its seven acute-care hospitals did not arrive at the facilities seeking treatment for the virus.

“We have to take into context that many of the patients are requiring care, seeking care, for unrelated reasons,” said Ajay Kumar, Hartford HealthCare’s Chief Clinical Officer.

That’s a big distinction from the last time Connecticut neared 2,000 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in April 2020. There were no vaccines or booster shots. And many of the patients being hospitalized at that very early stage of the pandemic were suffering from more serious symptoms.

Even so, adding more COVID-positive patients to the state’s hospitals will increase the burdens on health care workers and providers, even if those patients are being treated for a broken leg, heart attack or other medical condition.

On Wednesday, Kumar pointed out that treating incidental COVID patients still requires increased precautions, including personal protective equipment and isolation rooms to curtail the spread of the virus in hospitals.

Those requirements still increase the strain on nurses, physicians and other health care employees who work on the front lines in the fight against COVID.

“I don’t want to undermine or write off the impact the pandemic has on society, our colleagues or the health care system,” Kumar said.

The recent surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations should still be taken seriously, health care leaders argue, especially for the portion of the population that is unvaccinated.

More than 68% of the hospitalized patients with COVID-19 are unvaccinated, according to the most recent state data, and the virus is spreading rapidly throughout Connecticut’s 169 towns and cities at the moment.

More than 85,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the last week and a half in Connecticut, according to the official state count, which does not include at-home tests that people sought out after the holiday season. The current surge could also last several more weeks before cases start to plateau in Connecticut, according to epidemiological modeling.

Dimitris Bertsimas, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been advising Hartford HealthCare, said his modeling suggests the wave of cases tied to the omicron variant may not reach a peak for another couple of weeks.

“Unfortunately, I don’t believe we are out of the woods,” he said.

The positive news, he said, is that members of the public have the tools to protect themselves against the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. The state and its people, he said, are “much better equipped” to address this serious health crisis.

“I would like to emphasize again how important it is for the population to be vaccinated and boosted,” he added.

Yehyun Kim :: CT Mirror

Chief State’s Attorney Richard J. Colangelo Jr., at a news conference in July.

The commission with the power to hire and fire top prosecutors in Connecticut is awaiting completion of an independent investigation of how Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. came to hire the daughter of a top state budget official while he lobbied the budget office for raises.

Justice Andrew J. McDonald, the chair of the Criminal Justice Commission, said in an interview that no action will be taken until former U.S. Attorney Stanley A. Twardy Jr. reports the findings of his inquiry, which was commissioned by the governor’s office.

By statute, the commission’s primary function is to appoint the chief state’s attorney, the top deputies, and the 13 state’s attorneys. It has the power to discipline state’s attorneys. Oddly, the law allows the commission only to remove the chief, not discipline him.

“We are awaiting the outcome of the independent review being conducted by Stan Twardy, which will be shared with the commission upon completion,” McDonald said.

Colangelo hired Anastasia Diamantis while he was lobbying her father, Kostantinos Diamantis, and other officials for help in securing raises for prosecutors. Kosta Diamantis was deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management before his firing on Oct. 28.

Two weeks later, the state contracted with Twardy, a partner at Day Pitney, “to conduct a factual investigation on behalf of the Office of the Governor regarding possible improprieties by state employees and possibly others.” 

The existence of the investigation and details of Colangelo’s lobbying were first reported Dec. 3 by the CT Mirror. Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie had disclosed the hiring of Diamantis’ daughter on Oct. 1 in a column questioning the process and her qualifications for the $99,000-a-year job as executive assistant.

“Obviously the commission is aware of the news articles that have discussed the chief state’s attorney’s hiring of Ms. Diamantis, and I have been in contact with the governor’s legal counsel over the last several weeks about the issue,” McDonald said.

Colangelo said last month he welcomed the inquiry and that there was nothing improper about Anastasia Diamantis’ hiring. 

The commission has been silent on the controversy involving Colangelo, whom the commission promoted to chief state’s attorney two years ago from the ranks of the 13 regional state’s attorneys to complete the term of Kevin Kane, who retired. Colangelo was  appointed to a five-year term in June.

“The commission did not want to interfere with the governor’s overall supervision of the investigation. And frankly, we don’t have the resources,” McDonald said.

CT-Network

Justice Andrew J. McDonald, who chairs the Criminal Justice Commission.

The commission has a token annual budget of $409. The contract with Day Pitney was capped at $75,000.

The exact scope of Twardy’s inquiry has not been disclosed, but McDonald said it clearly extends beyond the hiring of Diamantis’s daughter, another reason in his view to await Twardy’s report.

“We are restricted to anything dealing with the Division of Criminal Justice and the chief state’s attorney. The investigation being conducted is broader than that,” McDonald said.

Aside from being second-in-command at the Office of Policy and Management, Kosta Diamantis was the director of the Office of School Construction Grants and Review.

Emails obtained by CT Mirror through a freedom of information request filed the day after Diamantis was removed not only showed that Colangelo had been lobbying for raises for his division but that Anastasia Diamantis long had a part-time job with a school-construction management company.

They showed that Anastasia Diamantis, a state employee since 2015, worked for the school construction company for several years and kept the part-time job for at least 14 months after going to work for Colangelo on July 3, 2020. The school job was not on her resume, but Colangelo said he was aware of it.

Anastasia Diamantis has declined interview requests. Her father told CT Mirror last month there was no conflict in her private school construction job and his state one. 

Antonietta DiBenedetto-Roy, the owner of the construction management company, said Diamantis had worked for her on projects in Rhode Island, in part to avoid any potential conflict with her father’s role in overseeing construction grants. Emails show, however, that at least on a few occasions, the younger Diamantis helped the company with documentation on a Connecticut project.

The governor’s office has been circumspect about the reasons for Diamantis’ dismissal, initially saying only that he was removed because of “a personnel manner still under review.” 

On Oct. 28, the night he was removed from his OPM job, Diamantis said Rennie’s column was a pretext for a removal that he attributed to tensions between the governor’s office and him and his boss at OPM. At the time, his daughter’s employment for a school construction company was not publicly known.

Diamantis, a former Democratic state representative, was hired for the school construction job in the Department of Administrative Services in 2015 during the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. He took the school job with him to OPM in November 2019 when Secretary Melissa McCaw made him her deputy.

Diamantis was fired from his OPM job, where he served at the pleasure of the governor, and placed on paid leave from his school-construction job, which came with civil-service protections. Rather than go on leave, Diamantis retired.

He was shot by a state trooper months before George Floyd.  Floyd’s police killers have been indicted, tried and convicted.  Yet there has still been no decision whether to even indict any of the officers involved in the shooting of Mubarak Soulemane through a car window on January 15, 2020.

To remind readers of an article I wrote a year ago on the homicide, Mubarak Soulemane, age 19, had stolen a car in Norwalk and drove at high speed on the highway.  He took the West Haven exit and within a minute was surrounded by police cars.  There’s plenty of video from state trooper dashcams that showed what happened next.  He was wedged in-between police cars.  His car windows were up, and he sat there.  Yes, he had a knife in his lap.  But troopers and West Haven police acted like he was John Dillinger.  Trooper Brian North immediately aimed his pistol at him and ordered him to get out of the car. Another trooper had a gun pointed at him from the passenger side.  Why pull out the pistols? When Soulemane didn’t instantly obey him, Trooper North told a policeman to smash in the passenger side window and shoot a taser.   Five seconds after the taser was shot, North opened fire from his pistol.

Soulemane was not threatening anyone.  He was just sitting there. Why not deescalate and talk the youth into surrendering?

Mubarak Soulemane

Two things are at issue here:  Should anyone be criminally charged and should anyone be fired or disciplined.  Middlesex State Attorney Michael Gailor has had the case for almost two years but made no decision on the criminal charges.  Sure, there was and is a pandemic, but the prosecution and trial of the police who killed George Floyd also took place during the pandemic.

Beyond criminal responsibility there’s the matter of competence and judgement.  Why should someone be on the force who was so quick to shoot a gun and take a life?  What about the other troopers and West Haven police who went along with this, who never told North to take it easy and let things get straightened out?  The only discipline so far, if it can be called discipline, is that Trooper North was put on desk duty and remains there to this day.

You can imagine the agony of the family.  I asked the sister of Mubarak Soulemane, Mariyan Soulemane, for a comment, and she wrote:

“Our family is mentally drained by this drawn-out process of holding State Trooper Brian North accountable for shooting my brother 7 times. Reliving this trauma for almost 2 years now has been taxing and doing it in the public eye has been even more overwhelming. We realized that, since Mubarak’s passing, we have not been granted a pause to process our loss. Therefore, as a family, we decided to take a step back and process this internally whilst still attending important meetings and awaiting a verdict.”

There is news. The Soulemane family lawyer Mark Arons has filed a lawsuit against the city of West Haven for negligence and excessive force, and failure to intervene and deescalate. He’s also filed suit against three state troopers for constitutional violations.  I interviewed him recently and he said he’s doing this now because there a two-year statute of limitations.  He also told me the case has been taken over at the state level by the newly appointed Inspector General, Robert Devlin. As Arons put it, “Delays, after delays and still further delay now.”

I spoke with Scot X. Esdaile, President of the CT NAACP State Conference, and he said, “The CT NAACP will be meeting with the new State Inspector General to discuss this very important matter, and we want to make sure that this is a top priority.”

This incident is not going away.  Besides being reported in Connecticut media, it has become nationally known.   “US News”  “Essence” “Associate Press News”,  “CNN” and the New York Times Student Journalist Institute have had reports.  An interview of Mubarak’s sister with a leader of the national organization Black Lives Matter received over 60,000 views on Instagram. The case even received attention in a British newspaper.

The family of Mubarak Soulemane deserves justice.  Out-of-control law officers need to be disciplined and charged.  Two years is too long.  #Justice4Mubarak

Stanley Heller is executive director of Promoting Enduring Peace, a peace, environmental and social justice organization founded in New Haven in 1952.

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