New Haven Independent

Posted by: DingDong | April 15, 2008 5:48 PM

First: this is a fiasco and Rell needs to be held accountable. Offering the heads of low-level officials is not enough; we don't vote for them, we vote for her.

Second, some tax has to be raised and it might as well be the gas tax. Presumably, the state wants fewer people to drive, and it needs money, so it should tax gas. Why raise the sales or income taxes - we don't want people to work less or to sell fewer things. The gas tax is too low anyhow because it fails to capture all of the environmental and social costs of driving.

Posted by: DowntownNewHaven | April 15, 2008 6:37 PM

How about covering the shortfall with a higher gasoline tax? The DOT is all about encouraging mass transit and smart growth, right? A higher gasoline tax would help advance that goal and speed this project along. Without a higher gasoline tax, mass transit users and those who do not own cars will continue to subsidize those who own private automobiles to a massive extent.

Given the rising cost of gasoline, this entire mass transit project should be fast-tracked. Crews should be out building it 24/7 and the train order should be sped up. If we wait, it will just get even more expensive. Although the rail maintenance facility is pricey, it serves hundreds of thousands of people and costs nothing when compared to the cost of building and maintaining new highways (not to mention the cost of private citizens operating millions of vehicles on them every day using money that eventually ends up in the coffers of Venezuela or Saudi Arabia).

As one alternative, maybe Connecticut could sue the Federal government to try to recoup the billions of dollars it has been spending on the Iraq war?

Another alternative involves the creation of a special emergency state tax on all suburban development and/or all suburban jobs (i.e., all development/all jobs not located within a mile of a major train station or high-volume bus line). This would encourage urban density, provide an incentive for expanding transportation, allow more people to live close to where they work, and help pay for desperately needed infrastructure improvements.

If none of these measures are taken, our state's bridges, rails and other infrastructure are guaranteed to continue to crumble, and we'll fall even farther behind our counterparts in Western Europe. But does anyone care if that happens? Not from the looks of the actions of the Rell administration, DOT, and elected officials who are supposed to be acting on behalf of our long-term public interest.

Posted by: nfjanette | April 15, 2008 7:37 PM

The challenge in this situation is not merely the staggering incompetency of the CT DOT, but rather educating tax payers about the true costs involved in all subsidized transportation. Highways and bridges don't pay for themselves in the post-toll era in CT; if you think the cost of rail infrastructure is high, look into the true costs of roads and airports. A well planned and executed program to improve the rail infrastructure in CT would be an investment in mass transit that would pay off on many levels.

The clock is ticking on the project, which is meant to be ready to receive 300 brand new "Virginia" rail cars.

The "Virginia" cars were the 33 refurbished units already acquired for the Shoreline East runs. The 300 new cars in the pending order are the M8 series to be used (mostly) on the MetroNorth commuter runs from New Haven to New York City.

The cars, part of a $2 billion transportation package, are already over a year in delay from their scheduled arrival in September 2006. They are now scheduled to arrive next year, according to Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

The order was at least a decade late already, which isn't Gov. Rell's fault in this case.

Posted by: Richard Stowe | April 16, 2008 12:41 AM

NFJanette is absolutely correct. I've been riding a 4:43 p.m. express train from Stamford to Bridgeport (or New Haven) on those "Virginia" cars. These cars, which travel to Old Saybrook, were a great investment. The 300 M-8 cars are the pending order from Kawasaki Rail Car (Kawasaki builds the 'bullet' train), and are designed to run between Penn Station and Boston, but in reality will mostly run between Old Saybrook and Grand Central Terminal due to Department of Environmental Protection travel restrictions east of Old Saybrook.

Posted by: Steven G. Erickson | April 16, 2008 7:31 AM

Very few people know how Connecticut government works.

Lawyers pretty much run everything. If lawyers steal from their clients, have affairs, drive drunk, or pretty much anything that doesn't get much press, nothing is done.

Favors are owed, and money from schemes is split up. Before Eminent Domain was such a useful tool, police informants were sent out to ruin and set up competition for businesses or to ruin an owner so that the property could be bought by a connected individual for a song.

The Connecticut Judicial Branch might be the most corrupt in the country. I witnessed, and was the only one to film, two judicial branch employees tell a panel of judges and other authorities of felonies committed:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3535602784263432352
Officials such as Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane have long been active covering up felonies and conspiracy of law enforcement, elected officials, and members of the judiciary. After public testimony was sealed from the public, the judicial branch held this hearing, knowing that felonies were exposed in the previous hearing, the link above. The judicial branch pulled a taxpayer scam, saying they can't believe how good their doing, straight A's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddEmYq5WQ8Q

I reported a felony conspiracy to Sen. Kissel.

A price was put on my head and for resisting being beaten up by a police informant in my dark driveway, I sentenced to a year in prison by Judge Jonathan Kaplan and I have proof that former Police Commissioner Arthur L. Spada helped rig my kangaroo trial:
http://thesrv.blogspot.com/2006/12/letter-complaining-to-ct-atty-gen.html

Enfield Superior Court was rented out for a private retirement party, Judge Howard Schienblum sold tickets to lawyers, prosecutors, and other insiders.

A 23 year old woman told me how judges, lawyers, and high ranking police, all white, have private parties, and a lawyer would take a cut of whatever prostitution acts she performed. She was to be scantally dressed serving drinks at private parties.

Former DCF head, Kristine Regaglia was part of a Mafia conspiracy to go national with "Kiddie Max" prisons. Officials get bribes and kickbacks, the mob gets to run, supply, and build the prisons, nationally. Regaglia was caught for taking the same bribes as Rowland but was too sleazy to remain, so Regaglia was put in charge of fraud investigation in Connecticut!

Private investigators who have obtained video and evidence out of Regaglia's garbage were corned by Connecticut State Police and told that they would end up like detainees and Gitmo if they didn't give up the evidence, in the State Police illegal search and seizure of evidence.

So, there you go, the courts are run by a criminal mob, and the Connecticut State Police are obstruction of justice thugs.

Posted by: Gary Doyens | April 16, 2008 8:35 AM

The gas tax does not need to increase. The gross receipts tax was changed by the legislature to a percent, not flat. That means that as oil increases, and the wholesale price of gas increases, the state's take increases. It now collects almost $300 million a year in gas taxes, and spends less than half of that on roads and bridges. My understanding is the rest of it is in the general fund where it may or may not be tied to state bonds.

Secondly, I don't understand those of you who proffer higher gas taxes as a way of discouraging car use. Many working people have to drive to work in locales that don't offer mass transportation. This whole maintenance facility is being built for rail use, and financed by the working folks who will see no benefit. It's always interesting to see the people line up to gouge others through increased taxes to support their priorities.

Expanding rail service and other forms of mass transportation is laudable, maybe even desireable. But it should done as part of an overall set of transportation priorities, funded without tax increases.

Posted by: on whalley | April 16, 2008 8:38 AM

You gas tax guys understand that people live in places like Union, Coventry, Eastford, Marlborough, Hebron Griswold, Voluntown, Moosup, Sterling, etc...
right?

I mean, you know there is a whole world of people not in New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford don't you?

Most of the time I don't think you do. Like .A. and N.Y.C. seem to think only vacation homes exist in Aspen and Bozeman and the rest of that flyover mass is cows and grass who apparently tend themselves I think the jackasses in New Haven really don't believe there is anything outside of the city limits other than some Indians and a casino.

Most of the people who live and work in these small towns are laborers, tradesmen and construction types. Their profit margins are already razor thin in this state and you start messing with gas even more and they'll either be forced to price themselves out of business or close up shop, sell everything they own and move into New Haven and become just another set of working to middle class people who were taxed into dependence and forced into a city setting where they can be miserable in some ghetto at the foot of the ivory tower. Do you really want more people around here asking you for change?

Leave them alone and stop all this social engineering. These people are already fleeing states like CT, MA, NY, NJ, and CA as it is and wherever they go the people and policies that forced them out just follow them.

An open plea to the wealthy urban-socialists who can't seem to mind their own business or let others simply be: exercise some restraint.

Posted by: DowntownNewHaven | April 16, 2008 9:44 AM

On Whalley: "Leave them alone and stop all this social engineering."

"Wendell Berry once noted that we do not know what we have done because we do not know what we have undone. How much has been undone to build the American way of life, and how much more will be undone in the attempt to maintain it all?" - David Orr

On Whalley, how are you so confident that those laborers in Goshen -- forced to drive an hour in a pickup truck to work because of our government's post-WWII land-use and subsidy policies, which enabled the conversion of the Front Range of the Rockies to one long string of weary housing tracts stiched together by strip malls -- are so much happier than the residents of New Haven who have a five minute bicycle or bus commute to work, school, grocery store, park, wood shop, friends' houses?

All I am saying is that it is time for an analysis of what we are doing, why we are doing it and who is really benefiting (Saudi Arabia).

Posted by: nutmeg | April 16, 2008 10:08 AM

on whalley, no one lives in union. it's the least populated town in the state (the building going up on the shartenberg site will be large enough to house the entire population of union). and most people who live in union work locally. nationally, about 50% of all trips are under 3 miles.

what gas tax-haters need to come to grips with is the fact that the federal highway trust fund will be empty in another few years. that means there will be no money to repair connecticut's overbuilt interstates and highways that allow people to live in far-off small towns and work anywhere in the state. if you don't raise the gas tax or put tolls on the highway, then how are we as a society going to continue to support (subsidize) this arrangement?

Posted by: on whalley | April 16, 2008 10:26 AM

"if you don't raise the gas tax or put tolls on the highway, then how are we as a society going to continue to support (subsidize) this arrangement?"

It wont and it shouldn't. These people lived in "far off" towns long before the self-righteous in the cities decided it would be best for everyone else to socialize everything. If these people in the "far off" towns have to find employment in an urban area and commute to it by means of these highways it's because of the social engineering garbage that thrust upon them taxes in the first place making an income necessary which subjects them to further expense and taxation pushing them more and more into dependency.

These "far off" towns are emptying of the working class families who lived there some for generations because the cost put upon them to pay for "services" they did not ask for but were forced to accept by the urban-socialists with the dependents to buy the vote for the entire state are becoming little weekend refuges for the richy riches who instituted all of these policies that brought ruin onto their own cities.

You've got small towns with people who just want to be left alone being told what to do by people in cities. The end result is the people in the small towns are bankrupted and forced into the cities to suck from the "services" they didn't want in the first place. The children of these displaced small town people grow up essentially as property of the city and serve to increase the dependent voter base which continues the assault of small town America which puts the last of these working class families into city situations of dependency and finally all the clowns who started the cycle and got rich from it have empty quiet corners to live in with cheap property they can purchase in bulk to escape the mess they made and profited from in the cities.

Nobody lives in Union? You should be more honest and say that to you nobody of any consequence lives in Union. Show the true colors. Trust me when I say the people in Union have feelings and care about what happens to them. They aren't some sort of sub-species to be dismissed because you want a pretty new train to get you to the theater faster.

Posted by: on whalley | April 16, 2008 10:50 AM

" forced to drive an hour in a pickup truck to work because of our government's post-WWII land-use and subsidy policies, which enabled the conversion of the Front Range of the Rockies to one long string of weary housing tracts stiched together by strip malls -- are so much happier than the residents of New Haven who have a five minute bicycle or bus commute to work, school, grocery store, park, wood shop, friends' houses?"

I know what makes me happy. I know what's getting in the way of it.

I have no right to force a way of life on anybody and neither do you but that is exactly what is happening when a handful of powerful people in a city uses everyone else's funds to pay for what it wants.

The very fact that without extorting money from people across the state and across the nation a city could not afford to do something it desires should be enough reason to not do that thing.

If New Haven were cut from the state dole the growth would check itself and if the state were cut from the federal dole the growth would check itself and nation would stop playing pretend money games across the world its growth would check itself. Because New Haven has been such a fat leech for so long it has no idea what it's like to have to tighten the belt a notch.

It's intentionally doing stupid selfish things. The city of New Haven and all cities are essentially no different than the dead beat unemployed unmarried couple intentionally getting pregnant so their benefits will be extended.

Besides, all that post WWII haphazard growth for the sake of growth garbage is what happened when a few people decided what would be best for everyone else. That debacle was fueled by the same intentions as the current social engineering experiment is. If the people responsible for that mess were alive today they would be great proponents of everything I am complaining about now. They would be you.

Posted by: Mountebank | April 16, 2008 11:05 AM

Gee, we heartless urban types are callous about the needs of the virtuous hard-working guy from Bozrah.

As if the average small town CT resident is in a state of constant anguish about the plight of the cities.

Put the power plants, halfway houses, homeless shelters, group homes, affordable housing, transfer stations, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, hazardous waste facilities, places where suburban youth go to get drunk, in the cities so the towns don't have to deal with it. Keep our taxes low at all times.

Small town politics is all about ducking responsibility and dumping local problems on the nearest urban community.

As far as 'minding one's own business', check out the hysteria in the Reg or Courant comments sections every time urban crime or urban problems are mentioned. "Build a wall around it", the suburbanites screech, singularly failing to acknowledge that a huge proportion of their town's residents happen to work in the city that they despise so much. That their community needs the city in a thousand unacknowledged ways. Guess what, if Hartford goes down, a lot of small towns go down with it.

It's fairly obvious that the typical suburban resident uses city roads and city services far more than vice versa; the wealthy suburban conservative elitists need to step up and pay their share.

Posted by: on whalley | April 16, 2008 11:23 AM

@ Mountebank

You're assuming any of those things have to exist at all. The shelters, rehabs, clinics etc... should never have been built in the first place. Not in cities and not in the rural areas.

Rural people wouldn't have to work in the cities if it weren't for property taxation.

As far as paying their share goes I assume you'll concede that those who wish to use none of these things shouldn't have to pay one red cent then?

Besides, I'm not concerned with the richys in the suburbs. They're still city people. Just because they have some huge house and a gardener it doesn't make them farmers. They are just as city as the uppity "young professional" with the nightstand full of KY in his tight drywall box a block away from his favorite place to drink martinis.

Let Hartford fall. Let any town that is dependent on Hartford follow suit. The dependency should never have been created in the first place.

Posted by: Name Withheld | April 16, 2008 11:31 AM

Mountebank, the ironic thing about your comment is that while all of those suburban residents screech on the late-night message boards about urban crime, they and their kids are, overall, several times more likely to die or be injured than their urban counterparts are, due to the increased risk of auto accidents. Unless they are drug dealers, people are statistically about 100 times more likely to die in auto accidents than in random crime, even if they live in the most crime-infested housing project in the inner city. In other words, the suburbanites are already so much more worse off even before you consider their increased risk of becoming heart-diseased, obese and mortally boring because of where they live.

People don't acknowledge the high risk of a fatal automobile accident as they are barreling down their favorite suburban road at 45MPH - largely because the truth about that would be too difficult to accept.

Same situation with airplanes - even though flying across the country is at least 100-1,000 times safer than driving across it, the people who worry about flying and refuse to accept that it is safer tend to be the ones who don't fly that often.

Posted by: Ned | April 16, 2008 1:01 PM

I don't understand why an employee parking lot should be built at a mass-transit facility? Let's see if you work for the railroad, don't you think you might take the train to work?

Posted by: nutmeg | April 16, 2008 2:51 PM

no one is social engineering this one. we're all paying into a pot to share the cost of a really pricey item like the q-bridge or a rail yard. obviously not everyone in ct is going to use every piece of road that we collectively pay for but we all rely on them in one way or another. i may not drive 84 through union that often but i do like buying eastern potatoes from maine at the supermarket when they're on sale.

and if you really want to talk about social engineering, you should realize people have been voting with their feet on this one by jamming highways and cramming into trains in connecticut. we can all agree that conndot is a joke when it comes to project management. but we do need a new railyard to help meet the demand. you can either accept this or keep dreaming about a return to some small-town utopia that never was.

Posted by: on whalley | April 16, 2008 3:06 PM

@ Nutmeg

Voting with their feet sure. According to the National Census they're all leaving New England and heading South. U.S. Population Migrarion 2006 and have been at least since 1990.

Utopia? I never said anything about a Utopia. The rural life without interference is hard. It's really hard. It's digging in dirt for 18 hours a day while sick and bloodied until your death. It's far away from anyone to come to your "rescue." It's real life. Free from extortion by government. Free from junkie neighbors and criminal thugs. Free from any other human beings at all if you wish. Free to make your own way with your own hands and free to die from something horrible and easily cured in the privacy of your own home.

No Utopia. Just freedom. Real harsh and sometimes terrible freedom. There's no satisfaction in driving to the supermarket and buying potatoes from Maine. It's a sign of failure and dependence. Running to a water bowl like a hamster in a cage is not freedom.

Posted by: DowntownNewHaven | April 16, 2008 4:37 PM

On Whalley, the New Haven metropolitan area is growing in population as of the latest Census Bureau statistics (2008 update). It is growing faster than the NY City metro and several other areas that are farther south. All that, plus the rapidly rising price of fuel, will lead to the continued expansion of mass transit and calls for people to stop subsidizing roads and SUVs to such a large extent.

A good "half way" compromise -- one that is fair to all taxpayers -- might be $10/gallon gasoline, for example, since the true cost when factoring subsidies is about $17-20 (not surprisingly, gas prices in most of the industrialized world are pretty close to $9 or $10 per gallon).

If people want to guzzle gas, fine, I just do not want to pay for it. And I think many local residents increasingly don't either.

Posted by: robn | April 17, 2008 9:13 AM

OW

new haven 2000
825,032

new haven 2007
845,494

plus 20,462

http://www.census.gov/popest/counties/tables/CO-EST2007-01-09.xls

Posted by: on whalley | April 17, 2008 10:19 AM

RE: more people coming into New Haven

I never said people were fleeing New Haven. In fact I said more and more people as they are driven further into poverty and dependence will be moving into New Haven.

It's not a good thing when a structure containing hundreds of "affordable housing" rooms is built and filled. It means an awful lot of poor people have been drawn/forced into the city.

Posted by: fac Chek | April 17, 2008 1:22 PM

Robn:
On Whalley:

Correction, that's New Haven County. An estimated increase of 20,462 persons, right?

However, as far as New Haven city is concerned:

New Haven city, Connecticut

Total Population

July 1, 2006
124,001

July 1, 2005
124,451

July 1, 2004
124,440

July 1, 2003
124,492

July 1, 2002
124,123

July 1, 2001
123,806

July 1, 2000
123,774

April 1, 2000 (Estimates Base)
123,777

April 1, 2000 (Census 2000)
123,626

Source: US Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program.

An increase of only 375 persons between 2000 and 2006.

I hope this info adds clarity to the question...!

Posted by: cedarhillresident | April 17, 2008 1:51 PM

Ned
my brother is a line man for Metro North. He does take the train. He drive to the train station and parks his car and takes the train somtimes up to an 1 hour to 2 hours away depending on where he goes. He starts his day at 5:30 to travel to his job (back breaking job). gets home around eight at night and does this 6 days a week. I think that employee parking lot is a good thing it encourages them to take the train. His day would be alot shorter if he drove everyday.

Posted by: DingDong | April 19, 2008 11:18 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-freakonomics-t.html

"If a typical car gets 20 miles to the gallon, then the proper tax would be about $2 per gallon." This, moreover, is a conservative estimate since only three kinds of externalities are included (and there are many more).