LWVCT CONVENTION 2011 NOW HISTORY - BUT PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP IDEA IS GROWING IN CT
The Call to Convention 2011 here



WATCH NOW - Best seen using Internet Explorer
http://www.lwvweston.org/LWVCT5-21-11Gelinas.wmv (150MB, 56 mins 43 secs)



Nicole Gelinas explained the meaning of "P.P.P." or public-private partnership...

PROS AND CONS OF PRIVATIZATION
Address by Nicole Gelinas to the 2011 LWVCT Convention

Plus presentation of LWVCT Awards to Local Leagues, and individuals of more than 50-year membership



PICTURE STORY OF LWVCT CONVENTION 2011

The League of Women Voters of Connecticut, Inc. Convention 2011 took place Saturday, May 21, 2011 at the Graduate Club, New Haven, CT.  After a morning  Plenary Session, luncheon  and our keynote speaker came next...


INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS
LWVCT President Cheryl Dunson introduced our distinguished keynote speaker, Ms. Gelinas, and the topic.


NEW HAVEN AVIANS (not visible in picture) offered comments
After an excellent lunch, the delegates and visitors listened intently to privatization report.  The birds may have been saying it was a less expensive way to do local projects - "cheap"


PPP's BEGAN ACROSS THE POND
Ms. Gelinas defined PPP for the League.  She has studied the PPP model over the last 10 years or so.


LWV QUESTIONS & MS. GELINAS' ANSWERS FOLLOWED

Then it was back to business and the AFTERNOON PLENARY SESSION (see below).  Election of Officers (who had been nominated in the morning Plenary Session) followed, plus other parts of the agenda related to program, and then LWVCT was delighted to entertain 2nd Vice President of the League of Women Voters of the United States and our Liaison, Judy Davis.  Ms. Davis answered four questions that had been submitted to her prior to Convention by the LWVCT Board.  In addition, further matters were brought up by League members present.


Q&A
LWVUS VP Judy Davis answers questions. 

LWVUS in the news...
Voter Group Flexes Muscle in Ads Aimed at Senators
NYTIMES
By CARL HULSE
May 25, 2011

WASHINGTON — The League of Women Voters is typically thought of as an earnest, civic-minded organization best known for hosting sober candidate debates and distributing studious voter guides to keep the citizenry informed.

But two senators facing elections discovered this month that the group had decided to take its informational role to an entirely new level. Senators Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, and Scott P. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, found themselves on the receiving end of a hard-hitting, big-money television campaign taking them to task for votes to limit the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The league-sponsored ads showed a new willingness by the nearly century-old group to flex political muscle. At the same time, the sharp tone of the commercials set off internal dissension, got league officials called to the Capitol for a dressing-down from Democrats, and had politicians looking at the group in a whole new light.

“I was shocked,” said Ms. McCaskill, who like Mr. Brown was accused of favoring polluters over people in an ad featuring an asthmatic little girl struggling to breathe. “My mom was the president of the League of Women Voters in Lebanon, Missouri, when I was a little girl. To me, they have always been about civic engagement and debates.”

League officials and their allies say the ads were a natural outgrowth of the group’s historic advocacy role on issues like clean air, which the league has championed for decades. Leaders of the organization said the campaign was reminiscent of its origins, when founding members spoke out for voting rights.

“The women who fought for suffrage and won were not shrinking violets,” said Judy Duffy, a Minnesotan who is chairwoman of the national league’s advocacy committee.

She acknowledged, though, that the group had decided to rev up its message machine after deciding that its more conventional approaches of letter-writing and visits to Capitol Hill were not working when it came to clean air issues.

She said league leaders were motivated by what they perceived as a shift from treating air pollution as a health threat to one based more on the economic impact of new rules.

“We had a variety of our normal kinds of advocacy but the message wasn’t being delivered,” she said. “We took advantage of the opportunity to kind of step out of our box.”

That step was a big one, resulting in the league’s acting at the end of April to buy two weeks of ads for approximately $1.5 million to take on two high-profile senators facing the voters next year, an approach calculated to grab attention. And it did.

Mr. Brown and his allies answered back to what they saw as an ambush, assembling a video that he posted on a campaign site. It accused the league of serving as a front for liberal special interests and sought to undermine the group’s credibility.

“Remember when the League of Women Voters used to be a nonpartisan group?” it asked. “Now they have gone to the gutter with their negative ads against Scott Brown.”

Eric Fehrnstrom, a political adviser to Mr. Brown, said the league had squandered its hard-earned reputation for unbiased and nonpartisan voter education in order to go after Mr. Brown.

“It fell to us to correct the record about their misleading attack,” he said.

Senate Democrats were not happy, either, with the campaign against Ms. McCaskill, who faces a difficult re-election campaign next year.

Representatives of the league and other environmental organizations that participate in a coalition in support of the Clean Air Act were summoned to the office of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, to be told that the attack on Ms. McCaskill was not helpful.

Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters and an ally of the league, said the reaction was so vehement because the advertising sponsored by the league, with its long-standing reputation, packed more of a punch than would a campaign sponsored by a conventional environmental group.

“They are a great messenger,” he said.

Both parties are quick to point out that the league, which supports transparency in political fund-raising, has not been willing to reveal the source of the money for the ad campaign.

“I don’t know how a good-government organization can say with a straight face that they are not part of the problem if they are unwilling to reveal who is paying for the ad,” Ms. McCaskill said.

League officials said they would meet disclosure requirements in their annual report next year.

One person familiar with the ads said the money was a result of fund-raising efforts and did not have a single source.

Ms. McCaskill and others also suggested that the advertising initiative could limit participation by political candidates in league activities like debates.

There were internal repercussions as well. A chapter president in Massachusetts resigned her post, and other members in the two states have raised strong objections to the ads, which have ended their run.

Ms. Duffy called the turmoil within the group regrettable. But she said she was hearing from many members — including mothers and grandmothers of asthmatic children — who were “delighted that we are stepping out of our normal advocacy and making a strong statement.”

“We thought this was an opportunity to be heard above the din,” she said.


Pre-Convention...

Nicole Gelinas

League convention features Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow

Press release by Connecticut League of Women Voters

The Connecticut League of Women Voters’ 2011 State Convention, on Saturday, May 21, 2011 at The Graduate Club in New Haven, features Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Nicole Gelinas, as its guest speaker. Every 2 years delegates from local Leagues in Connecticut convene for workshops, networking, and election of state board members. This year, Ms. Gelinas will present the convention with a keynote address on the pros and cons of privatization.

Ms. Gelinas is an accomplished author and a contributing editor of City Journal, described as the nation’s premier urban policy magazine. She writes on urban economics and finance, municipal and corporate finance, and business issues. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder and a member of the New York Society of Securities Analysts. Her most recent book, After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington was published in November 2009. Commentators have called it a “standout” and “an instant classic” — one of the best analyses of the country’s 2008 financial meltdown.

Gelinas has published analysis and opinion pieces in the op-ed pages of the country’s leading publications, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Herald.

For more information, contact the League of Women Voters at 203/288-7996 or online at www.lwvct.org.


CONVENTION 2011

Saturday, May 21st, 2011
8:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
New Haven Graduate Club
155 Elm Street, New Haven, CT 06511


8:00-8:30: REGISTRATION and continental breakfast; Board members available for questions

8:30 -10:45 Morning PLENARY SESSION, Presiding: Cheryl Dunson, President, LWVCT
•    Announcements/Welcome
•    Adoption of Rules
•    Credentials Report
•    Minutes of 2009 Convention
•    President’s Report
•    Report of Nominating Committee (Presentation of Slate)
•    Presentation of Proposed Bylaws Changes: questions for clarification only
•    Presentation of CT Budget: questions for clarification only
•    PI Team Report
•    Presentation of Proposed Program: questions for clarification only

10:45-11:45 LOCAL LEAGUE NETWORKING SESSION

LUNCHEON 12:00 noon-2:00 p.m.
12:30 -1:15: Speaker: Nicole Gelinas, of the Manhattan Institute, on privatization.
1:15-1:30 Recognition of 50-year members
1:30-2:00 p.m. Awards

2:00-4:00 Afternoon PLENARY SESSION.
•    Bylaws debate and adoption
•    Budget debate and adoption
•    Program debate and adoption
•    Election of Officers and Board
•    News From National: Report by LWVUS Liaison Judy Davis
•    President’s Address/Remarks
•    Directions to the Board

Please return one copy for each registrant to LWVCT, 1890 Dixwell Avenue, suite 203, Hamden, CT 06514-3183.  Checks should be made out to “LWVCT, Inc.”
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yes! I’d like to attend Convention 2011:

Name__________________________________ League______________________________

E-Mail__________________________________

Amount Enclosed ($45 for first delegate, $42 each additional attendee) $_____________

□ No one from my League can come, but we’ll permit a member in good standing of another League to represent us.





Click here to watch a C-SPAN2 presentation by our speaker (from 2009)



Catch our speaker's regular columns at the New York POST online
Budget weirdness

New York POST
By NICOLE GELINAS
Last Updated: 4:11 AM, May 9, 2011
Posted: 10:49 PM, May 8, 2011

Last Friday, Mayor Bloomberg updated his budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts in July: The city will spend some $49.7 billion of its own money. With state and federal cash, the total is $68.9 billion. The city's part is 11 percent more than this year -- in part because the mayor is just too nice to stick up for taxpayers against Gotham's public-workers' unions.

The immediate problem is that taxes and other revenues will net the city just $46.5 billion next year -- $3.2 billion less than the $49.7 billion the mayor means to spend. That's a huge gap -- nearly 6.9 percent.

More worrisome, it's our fourth straight year of big budget gaps. The rafts keeping city government afloat since 2009 are Wall Street bailouts, which have pushed up bank profits, plus the Obama stimulus.

But that windfall is gone. Though New York has weathered the recession better than the rest of the country, a healthy economy won't pay for our high spending. We'd need a permanent bubble for that.

So we've got to do something to cut costs. That means tackling soaring expenses like Medicaid and debt costs -- and also pensions and other worker and retiree benefits (mainly health). Next year, pensions and worker benefits will eat up 35 percent of city revenues -- $16.4 billion.

The mayor is right to say that we can't afford this stuff. He deserve credit, too, for being upfront about Gotham's massive pension burden, paying the $8.4 billion contribution to the fund this year, for example, rather than weasel his way out of it, as state and local governments from New Jersey to Illinois have done.

He's right to oppose the City Council proposal to raid a $2 billion "surplus" -- money that's needed to pay for future health benefits -- to give unions more cash now.

The mayor is right, too, to take a page from MTA chief Jay Walder's playbook, directing his deputies to save money by slashing real estate, merging help desks and squeezing outside contractors for some savings. But Bloomberg is going about "fixing" the big-ticket problems strangely.

Start with his claim that the problem isn't that the city spends too much, but that Washington and Albany spend too little. He made the point strongly Friday, pointing to "deep disinvestment in New York City by the state and federal governments."

When the mayor took office, the feds paid 15 percent of our budget; today it's 10 percent. And the state's down from 21 percent to 17 percent. If they'd kept up, "then spending . . . would cost local taxpayers $6.1 billion less" next year, the mayor noted.

Sorry: They're spending less as a share simply because the city has vastly increased its outlays. Why should state and federal taxpayers go along for the ride?

Bloomberg has upped education spending, for example, by 108 percent, more than three times the inflation rate (and that's before adding in the growth in teacher-pension costs). Nor did the feds make us spend so much on public-employee benefits -- and up until 2008, the mayor freely gave out raises without demanding big changes to these benefits in return.

As for the state, the mayor says that if he doesn't get more from Albany, he'll lay off 4,100 teachers. But where is Gov. Cuomo supposed to get the money? Instead of throwing around threats, the city and state should be working to do more with less in education.

Bloomberg is also implicitly "threatening" the teachers union -- saying that if he doesn't get union cooperation on cost-cutting, he'll go ahead with the layoffs. Sorry, the union shouldn't get to decide what services the taxpayers will get for their money -- that's the mayor's job, along with controlling costs to pay for it.

The mayor's on slightly firmer ground complaining about the state on pensions -- since the governor and Legislature do set pension rules for public workers, regularly adding to Gotham's pension costs.

Yet the mayor's "answer" here is weird, too. He wants Albany to give him the right to bargain with unions over pensions for future workers. As he put it Friday: "As [some] states try to walk away from their unions, not have unions, we want to negotiate more with our unions."

Come on: He's always had the right to bargain wages and health care for today's workers -- and that hasn't done the taxpayers any more good. Better to ask Albany to remove health benefits from the collective-bargaining process, so that the city can ask workers to pay premiums as it sees fit to control costs. That's what Massachusetts is doing, and it would save the city a good $500 million, enough to keep the teachers.

The mayor's strategy adds up to one thing: twisting himself in knots to acknowledge the city's untenable fiscal situation while avoiding a head-on fight with labor. But sometimes peace -- and cognitive dissonance -- is unaffordable.

LWVCT CONVENTION 2007
University of New Haven, Bartels Hall
June 16, 2007

VIDEO of Convention 2007, complete version available:  please e-mail LWV of  Weston for more information.

TO WATCH THE ONE-HOUR HIGHLIGHTS VERSION ON YOUR COMPUTER, IN WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER FORMAT, PLEASE CLICK APPROPRIATE LINK BELOW:

For CABLE/DSL connection (137mB):

http://www.aboutweston.com/LWVCT6-16-07AbridgedCableVersion.wmv


For Dial-Up connection (22.4mB):

http://www.aboutweston.com/LWVCT6-16-07AbridgedModemVersion.wmv





Mayor Emanuel Refuses to Pay $14 Million Meter Parking Bill
Yahoo!
By Rachel Bogart
May 4, 2012

According to WLS, Chicago is disputing a $14 million bill from the company running its parking meters. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has actively spoken against the charges being billed by Chicago Parking Meters, saying the bills are inaccurate and the company failed to properly document the charges and the city will not be paying. The company has said the bill is for parking spaces that the city took out of service.

* The parking meter company is saying it lost revenue when the city took meters of out service in 2011 during city-sponsored events and festivals, street repairs and other activities, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

* Chicago's deal with Chicago Parking Meters stems from an agreement in 2008 under former Mayor Richard Daley in which the city's 36,000 meters were privatized and the company was given the right to all meter revenues until 2084.

* NBC Chicago reported this is the second time Mayor Emanuel has disputed charges to the city by the meter company. The city is fighting $13.5 million in charges that were billed because of free parking given to handicap individuals.

* Chicago Parking Meters raked in over $80 million from the city's parking meters last year and the company exceeded the financial revenue projections initially made by experts.

* CBS Local noted the mayor also criticized the original 2008 deal, stating it was a bad idea and it is currently being reviewed.

* Alderman Pat Dowell is also agreeing with Mayor Emanuel and supporting a renegotiation of the initial deal, a deal in which Chicago was paid about $1.2 billion for the 99-year lease of the meters.

* Since the agreement was formed, parking meter rates across the city have seen a major increase and more increases are slated over the next five years. By next year, it will cost drivers $6.50 an hour to park in the Loop on all days of the week with the company ending all free Sunday and holiday parking.

$7 Billion Public-Private Plan in Chicago Aims to Fix Transit, Schools and Parks
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, NYTIMES
March 29, 2012

Chicago is embarking on a $7 billion plan to transform the city’s infrastructure from the skies above to the pipes underground.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is planning to announce the initiative Thursday. It includes projects to expand the city’s largest airport and improve its streets, water system, schools, community colleges, parks and commuter rail network. The city estimates that these initiatives will create 30,000 jobs over the next three years.

At a time when the nation is only beginning to pull itself painfully and delicately out of a deep recession, and when cities and states are cutting essential services and wondering how to keep the courthouses open and the lights on, an infrastructure proposal for a single city with an estimated cost in the billions — with a “b” — is audacious. Mr. Emanuel, in an interview, suggested that nothing less than this “integrated, comprehensive approach” will do for what he calls “building a new Chicago.”

With the plan, Chicago is taking a leading role among cities and states struggling to keep their infrastructure from crumbling further but frustrated with legislative gridlock in Washington, said Robert Puentes, director of the metropolitan infrastructure initiative at the Brookings Institution.

“There is tremendous interest in doing something different — people aren’t waiting for the federal government to raise the gasoline tax or pass the carbon tax and have money raining down,” he said. He cited successful campaigns in “can-do states” that include Colorado, Washington, Arizona and Virginia to finance economic development projects with public-private partnerships, and Los Angeles’ vote in support of a major transportation referendum in 2008.

Mr. Emanuel, who served in the White House in two administrations and as a member of Congress, said “I will not tie this city’s future to the dysfunction in Washington and Springfield.”

In the speech, to be delivered at the Chicagoland Laborers’ Training and Apprentice Center, Mr. Emanuel will describe the financing for the sprawling plan. Some of it will come from the newly created Chicago Infrastructure Trust, an initiative announced this month by Mayor Emanuel and former President Bill Clinton, who has long had an interest in infrastructure and energy efficiency. The fund, a nonprofit corporation, pools outside investment and applies it to a wide range of possible projects.

Other funds will come from cost cutting, some from the savings in energy and water use from retrofitting buildings, and some from user fees, but “none of these funds will come from an increase in property or sales taxes,” according to the speech. A copy was provided to The New York Times through the mayor’s office. Depending on the project, some of the investment would be paid back through interest on loans, others through profit sharing.

Still, economic development efforts in the past have tended to disappoint, Mr. Puentes noted, because they tended to pay businesses to relocate or threw money into projects like stadiums. Some public-private partnership projects have been criticized as giveaways to the private businesses that take them over — including two prominent cases in Chicago itself, the privatized Chicago Skyway and the city’s parking meter system, which obligate the city to leases that span generations. Mr. Emanuel says that the city has learned an important lesson, and that “I am not leasing anything,” or selling off the city’s assets, he said in an interview. “I’m using private capital to improve a public entity that stays public.”

The investments, by any measure, are enormous, and they are intended to tackle enormous problems for this aging city. “You can’t have a 21st-century economy on a 20th-century foundation without holding yourself back,” Mr. Emanuel said. The projects include $1 billion for the Chicago Transit Authority to renovate more than 100 stations and eliminate “slow zones” that cost riders an estimated 11,000 hours of delays every day. O’Hare International Airport will receive $1.4 billion over the next three years to expand capacity.

Underground, the city will take on the challenge of fixing its water system, which suffered 3,800 leaks last year. That means replacing 900 miles of pipe that is more than 100 years old and replacing or relining 750 miles of sewer lines, among other projects estimated at $1.4 billion. Projects would be coordinated so that a street dug up to repair pipes could get broadband cables and other work done at the same time so that the streets would not be resurfaced only to be dug up again soon after.

Mr. Emanuel is also planning to spend nearly $300 million to buy 180 acres of new parkland and to build playgrounds, basketball courts and sports fields, as well as nature trails and bike and running paths.

Jorge Ramirez, the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, said he applauds the plan as an official concerned with jobs, but also as an investor in the trust through union pension funds. Instead of investing pension funds outside the city, “you bring it back here,” creating jobs locally and getting a good rate of return. “Smart,” he said.

Some suggest that the initiative will have to prove itself to overcome the skepticism that comes naturally to longtime observers of the Chicago political scene. “It’s totally within reason for Chicagoans to be skeptical,” said Celeste Meiffren, field director for Illinois PIRG, an advocacy organization. “That being said, it does seem that a lot of these projects are pretty worthwhile. If the mayor provides a lot of information to us as residents and taxpayers, gives us an opportunity to weigh in on these projects and involves our aldermen too — and makes sure we receive a fair value — it’ll address a lot of the concerns we have here.”

In his speech, Mr. Emanuel evokes the Great Fire of 1871, which left 100,000 people homeless, and which led to what he calls the city’s “second birth”: $50 million in new buildings completed a year after the fire and a building boom that put the city back on the map and saw it host a Republican National Convention just nine years later.

“Chicago’s identity was not forged by the Great Fire,” he said, “but by the great fortitude of its people in its aftermath.” Rebuilding now, he suggested in an interview, is just as important: “The decisions we make in the next two or three years determine what Chicago will look like in the next 20 or 30 years.”

And not just Chicago, said Mr. Puentes of Brookings. If the program is successful, it will be imitated, he said; “This is not just a Chicago story.”


Governor wins limited approval to expand public-private partnerships

Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR
October 27, 2011

The consensus jobs bill signed into law Thursday gives the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy the ability he sought to expand public-private partnerships on some types of state construction projects, a provision state employee unions fought to eliminate.

As a compromise, the final bill includes labor protections that unions sought in the measure enacted in special session Wednesday, then signed a day later with great fanfare. These include prevailing wage guarantees and oversight by legislative panels and  the State Contracting Standards Board.

With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the governor and unions professed Thursday to be pleased with the public-private partnership language, which officials say is necessary in an era of diminishing federal dollars to leverage private capital.

Malloy said the modified language both addressed concerns of labor and leaves the state positioned to launch important capital projects.

"Quite frankly we were looking for ways to capture the power of the free market, the investing market," he said after signing the bill.

The legislation authorizes the executive branch, including quasi-public agencies, to enter into agreement with private entities to "finance, design, construct, develop, operate or maintain" certain facilities.

A private company or group of companies might be retained to perform some, or several of these functions. This raised red flags with unions, who noted that, depending on the type of project, state employees might perform design, construction, inspection or operation roles.

The types of projects that can follow the public-private-partnership model, commonly referred to as P-3, include: educational, health, early child care and housing facilities; transportation systems, ports and other transit-oriented developments; and any other facility specially designated by the legislature.

The statute permits the governor to approve up to five public-private partnerships between now and Jan. 1, 2015.

But the legislature also stipulated that any such partnerships are subject to review by their Appropriations and Finance, Revenue and Bonding committees, as well as by the contracting standards board, and these partnerships must demonstrate new job growth.

Administration officials have said the P-3 approach would complement ongoing efforts to expand state bonding for capital construction projects, boosting a hard-hit industry.

State agencies overseeing capital projects typically coordinate design, construction and inspection services separately, often relying on a variety of companies to perform those roles. They also, depending on the project, may employ state engineers, other designers and inspectors.

Under the P-3 concept, the administration would have more flexibility to deal with one private entity, such as a construction company that would either provide its own design and inspection services, or coordinate with other businesses to provide them.

Malloy said these partnerships are well-suited for financed initiatives that are repaid with revenues from that project. For example, if Connecticut wished to borrow funds to construct a new parking garage, it could hire a company or companies to design, construct and operate the garage -- all under one contract. The company would then provide payments to cover the debt service with profits from the garage receipts.

But labor unions countered that unless government oversight of all aspects of a public project is carefully maintained, they typically ended in botched work and cost-overruns. Such partnerships don't always guarantee fair wages, they said.

Labor was circumspect in discussing P-3, commenting only be email.

"We have argued for years that state government needs to be part of the solution to the sagging economy by helping to spur economic growth and rebuilding the critical public structures upon which our economy depends," wrote Larry Dorman, a spokesman for a coalition of state-employee labor unions.

"By establishing legislative oversight and ensuring the participation of the state contracting standards board -- both of which are critical to the success not just of public-private partnerships, but of the broader effort to create good middle class jobs -- this legislation is an opportunity to do just that," he wrote.

Senate President Pro Tem Donald E Williams Jr., D-Brooklyn, said legislators worked with the governor to recognize labor's concerns while also acknowledging that these partnerships are a good way to leverage more private investments in job-creating capital projects.

"The language did narrow as the negotiations went on," he said. "But we also have to get ready for reductions in federal aid. We want to be ahead of the curve and that means looking at innovative partnerships that bring private investments that may be critical to some government services in the future.

Sen. Edith G. Prague, D-Columbia, co-chairwoman of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, said unions "had very valid concerns" about the need to preserve state oversight of such partnerships, adding she expects this issue to continue to be studied closely by the General Assembly in the near future.

"We do need to protect our investments," Prague said. "I will be watching these partnerships very closely."