Mayor Issues Storm Safety Message for "Sandy"

An Important Safety Message from Mayor Tim O’Brien 

 Dear New Britain resident,

Ø  Hurricane Sandy is approaching Connecticut. This is a large, dangerous storm that will impact New Britain, for a period of 24 to 36 hours beginning Monday.

Please be advised of the following:

Ø   New Britain, is expecting high winds of 40 - 60 MPH and heavy rain.

Ø   Downed trees, power outages and flooding are expected with this storm.

New Information

·         Due to this storm, all public and private schools will be closed on Monday and Tuesday.   

·         There will be no trash or recycling collection for Tuesday morning pick-up.

·         The Senior Citizen Center on Pearl St. will open Monday morning at 8 am as a shelter.

Please do these things today:

•       Bring inside all lawn furniture, cooking grills and trash bins.

•       Be prepared to be self-sufficient in your home for 72 hours.

•       Have food, water, flashlights and a battery operated radio available.

•       Charge all cell phones.

•       Check on elderly and at risk neighbors and relatives.

•       Stay informed, listen to storm information, and please take action now.

      Please remember these things for your families’ safety: 

•       Do not use candles for lighting, use flashlights.

•       Do not use propane or charcoal grills indoors for any reason.

•       Stay away from downed power lines.

•       Call 860-826-3000, to report fallen trees, fallen wires and flooding.

•       Call 9-1-1 for police, fire and medical emergencies.

Updates will continue to be available at www.newbritainct.gov as the city continues our work for you during the storm.

Posted at Mayor Tim O'Brien's Blog

Absentee Landlord Licenses, Fees Exist In Many Communities

Updated November 21, 2012: Legitimate concerns about the city’s licensing of absentee landlords (all owner-occupied dwellings are excluded) have been drowned out by a phony anti-government coalition fueled by out-of-town interests and a failed GOP leadership seeking once again to use divisiveness for political gain.   The well-publicized and well-financed campaign of distortion is  now replete with paid protestors, intimidation of tenants and outrageous lies about the ordinance and who would be affected by it.

The absentee landlord lobby frets and whines that if this happens in New Britain, it will spread to other communities.  What they don’t want you to know is licensing and fees for absentee owners and investment properties exist from the Redwood forests to the New York highlands as a means of maintaining housing stock and improving landlord and tenant relations.  As the following post from NB Politicus noted in early October  the absentee landlord law suit flies in the face of similar ordinances in Connecticut and around the country, including laws that go far beyond what has been proposed for New Britain.

On October 4th, New Britain's Common Council adopted new fee ordinances on landlords owning non-owner occupied, multi-unit apartments  --  policies designed to raise an alternative source of revenue as well as to strengthen anti-blight enforcement in multi-unit housing.

The $150 per unit flat fee represented a compromise over an earlier proposal that the Council's Planning and Development committee left on the table. It will raise an estimated $1 million on rental properties with absentee owners.

A second ordinance known as a "hot-spot fee" would charge landlords $500 when emergency and public safety personnel are called to an apartment house five or more times in a year.  It is expected to generate another $1 million.

The combined measures can avert some service cuts and improve the anti-blight efforts as Mayor O'Brien and the Council seek to fill a $4 million hole growing out of  the structural deficits identified in the last fiscal year when O'Brien took office.  Clearly, they are not a panacea for the budget woes that stem from nearly a decade of gimmickry and one-short revenues of prior administrations. The license fee  is part of a strategy to avoid regressive taxation in tough fiscal times: raising the property tax  always falls disproportionately on homeowners and those least able to afford it.

The Common Council's actions occurred amid a raucous and at times churlish crowd of opponents prominently led by the statewide landlord lobbying group which opposes the fees and previously opposed tougher anti-blight measures that the O'Brien Administration has adopted.

According to press reports, Bob De Cosmo, president of the Waterbury-based Connecticut Property Owners, said his group will file a class-action lawsuit against the city.  In an effort to bully and intimidate city councillors DeCosmo was quoted as saying "we will be looking into suing each individual council member that voted for this illegal tax."

The hollow threat of a legal fight over the modest New Britain flat fee flies in the face of policies and fees that are found in many other  communities throughout the country and that have been on the books for a good long time.

In Connecticut, for example, Stamford has an annual fee structure on multi-family units tied to housing code enforcement: a $60 fee and $30 per additional unit for three to nine apartments; $75 and $40 per additional unit for 10 to 39 apartments, and; $200 fee and $60 per unit for 40 or more apartments. Sounds doubtful absentee landlords will dump their New Britain properties to go buy dwellings downstate.  Nor will they pull up stakes and go to places like Gainesville, FL, North Chicago IL, Burlington, NJ, Cedar Rapids IA, Salt Lake City UT, Minneapolis, MN (and many more). They'll find landlord fees and licenses and charges for rental units in all of them.

One other thing municipalities here in Connecticut and elsewhere have as a sensible part of housing policy is a Certificate of Occupancy ordinance. That was lost to New Britain in the 1980s when Tom Bozek was the Council majority leader.  It would be a feather in the cap to Mayor O'Brien and the Council to restore the CO ordinance, not just for fees but to fairly handle the rights and responsibilities of landlords and tenants.

The Mayor and Common Council clearly didn't deserve the insults and push back at the Council meeting from some of the attendees, particularly absentee landlords who need to learn a lesson in shared sacrifice without diminishing a return on their investments. They need to be responsible members of this community whether they live here or not.

Add City of New Britain To McMahon's Bad Debts

It's not  the tax windfall that municipal government is looking for these days,  but last week's uncovering of Vince and Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon's bankruptcy records by the Day of New London shows the City of New Britain was one of the creditors.

Included on a list of debts to banks, stores, the phone company, unions, individuals and the IRS is an item from April 30, 1976 showing the McMahons stiffed the city where they once lived $988.22.  The debt to the Town of West Hartford was considerably higher at $9,729.96. These are paltry sums compared to hundreds of thousands owed the IRS and banks,  but are part of the record of a rags-to-riches narrative -- riches made possible by taking over a family wrestling enterprise and using sleaze to make a fortune.

The press revelations led Mrs. McMahon's campaign to announce that she and her wrestling mogul husband will now repay some of the  debts with interest to individuals if they can find them. Under bankruptcy laws, however,  debtors may often "discharge" government taxes owed under statutes of limitations and the timing of court actions. Debtors like the McMahons are often  given a pass on tax debts to reorganize and start anew without the liability. The McMahons maintain that they paid back taxes and nearly half of the money owed but have not produced any documents to show when debts were paid prior to the revelations reported in recent days.

The Day, whose reporter J.C. Reindl uncovered the debt list in IRS archives, editorialized on September 21st that McMahon's move to finally pay creditors is the "most insincere"  stunt of the 2012 campaign. It went on to lambaste McMahon for her hypocrisy:

The old adage about not tossing stones from a glass house seems to apply. The McMahon campaign has had great fun poking Mr. Murphy about news reports of his fiscal missteps over the past 10 years - being late on mortgage, rent and car tax payments. But he did pay, and his debts were paltry compared to the McMahons' 1976 meltdown. Then came word Friday the McMahons were late on paying taxes on their Stamford penthouse. Oops!

On the heels of the McMahons' mea culpa to creditors they had long ago stiffed and forgotten, Linda and Vince (as noted in the Day editorial) were  hit with a new tax delinquency this month on their "penthouse" in Stamford, according to a story in the Hartford Courant.

Meanwhile, the McMahon campaign, on a track to spend $100 million over two campaigns to buy a U.S. Senate seat, continues its saturation ad campaign on the housing debts of Cong. Chris Murphy -- all of which were reconciled and  paid in full. 

She refuses to meet with journalists and editorial boards and has limited her exposure in debates with Murphy, avoiding exchanges on issues that should be front and center in this senate race.

McMahon, who hides her Republican affiliation in paid advertising, is also running as fast and far away from the Republican-Romney-Ryan agenda that she would most certainly support in the Senate to protect her wealth and keep her taxes low -- WHEN SHE PAYS THEM.

Debunking Romney's 47% Assertion

Myth Four: It's poor people who are the biggest freeloaders. What's especially galling about conservative attacks on "takers" is that they focus exclusively on lower income groups and leave out all the subsidies to middle and upper income households. Yes, tax breaks for the working poor -- like the EITC -- have been expanded, but they still pale in comparison to the giveaways to better off groups. The three biggest tax breaks in FY 2014, according to Congressional Research Service, will be as follows: $164 billion for employer-provided health insurance, $162 billion for retirement savings (mainly 401ks), and $99.8 billion for the home mortgage interest deduction. Needless to say, most poor people don't benefit from these giant breaks because they don't have employer-provided health insurance, 401ks, or own homes. Meanwhile, the EITC will cost $58 billion in FY 2014.
Beating up on the economic losers is not new in America. It was popular in the late 19th century, when Social Darwinism was in vogue. But today such attacks have moved to the very heart of the conservative project. 

Excerpted from DEMOS - The Policy Weblog at  Freeloader Fabrications

CT News Junkie | Echo From Floor As DeLauro Calls For Pay Equity

CT News Junkie | Echo From Floor As DeLauro Calls For Pay Equity

The Race to the Bottom - August 27th Post From Other Words

 The Race to the Bottom - IPS

The Race to the Bottom

The American middle class isn't the envy of the world anymore.

By William A. Collins

Labor had
Its happy day;
Now that time
Has flown away.

Is the love of money the root of all evil? OK, so Jesus may have played down bigotry and megalomania when he said that, but overall his observation holds true 2,000 years later.

Labor relations are a contemporary battleground for greed. Man's inhumanity takes many forms. But we all have to work, and that means interactions between owners and toilers generate a lot of conflict.

Happily, a few nations have acted to help workers get a fair shake. Western Europe, shaken today by waves of economic turmoil, got the hang of it a century or so ago. The United States jumped on the worker bandwagon after the Great Depression. Our very successful experiment with employee rights, which have been gradually dismantled for years, ushered in the heyday of the American middle class.

Communism promised millions some hope for a fair shake, but it relied too heavily on repression meted out in the name of the people. Japan later picked up the concept of worker equity, followed by Taiwan and South Korea.

Hellish Working Conditions, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

Today, Brazil, Argentina, and other Latin American nations are reshaping their economic systems to be more labor-friendly.

Most U.S. leaders don't worry about worker rights anymore. They believe that government has no business in business. We're gradually privatizing whatever public services we can. Across the nation, public schools and prisons are increasingly run by private companies.

And mercenaries and other "military contractors" have replaced hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in our endless wars.

This privatization push is a key part of the trend toward exporting jobs and attracting immigrant workers who will accept conditions that most Americans thought they had long ago transcended. It's called "the race to the bottom."

Under our cherished old system, championed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the government set standards that all employers had to obey. Minimum wages, safety conditions, child labor laws, limits on the length of a permissible workday, and the freedom to form unions and collectively bargain — all these rights were supposed to be protected by law.

This system once worked commendably. By the 1960s, the American middle class was the envy of the world. No more. After big employers transferred millions of industrial and service jobs overseas, and technological advances rendered millions more jobs obsolete, we've got a surplus of workers. Wages have plummeted to the point that many autoworkers aren't middle-class anymore. Unions are a vanishing breed, especially in the private sector.

Nothing much has changed, of course, for agricultural workers. They've long enjoyed virtually no protections at all, lest they drive up the price of food. The same goes for domestic workers, like caretakers and housekeepers, whose exploitation is a growing problem as our population ages and more mothers work outside the home.

As much as I'd like to point to some silver lining to relieve all this despair, I'm just not seeing any faint glow on the horizon. If anything, things look worse now that the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling has stripped many previous limits on the torrent of corporate cash that can flood political campaigns. As a result, very wealthy companies and individuals are positioned to tighten their control over Congress, as well as state and federal governments.

What would Jesus say?

OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. otherwords.org

Campaign Stop: Cong. Murphy at Mickey D's Jazz Night in Hard Hittin':

NEW BRITAIN - Another Wednesday night. Another evening with a packed house for jazz and dancing at the West Main Street McDonald's in New Britain for seniors who turn the fast food restaurant into a night club every week.

Shortly after 7 p.m. Sam Kimball and musician friends, including members of The Rockin' Heartbeats, started up with Jazz standards and kept going.

This week  Cong. Chris Murphy, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, moved comfortably from table to table,  talking with New Britain constituents and listening to their concerns after a long day of campaigning and meeting with constituents.

Murphy, who's represented New Britain for three terms in the House, has come to the New Britain McDonald's in past campaigns.  It's a place where he draws energy and encouragement from older voters, some of whom told him they're not buying the paid televised snake oil from the lady wrestling executive. Murphy's well-heeled opponent from Greenwich, who once lived in New Britain,  avoids speaking to newspapers and continues to hide behind misleading commercials in hopes of buying a Senate seat. You're not likely to find her at Mickey D's on Jazz Night either. Having a conversation with real people and answering unscripted questions is something her handlers won't allow.