Connecticut
Post posts about what is happening in the State of Connecticut.
A Different Read of the Gallup Poll
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/04/2014 - 20:17Recently, Gallup published a poll saying Half in Illinois and Connecticut Want to Move Elsewhere. This has garnered a few different responses.
The New Haven Register put it as Nutmeggers say higher taxes, cost of living forcing them to rethink living in Connecticut. They lead with
A lot of Connecticut folks are thinking seriously about moving out of state…
However, that does not appear to be what the Gallup poll is really saying. The question that Gallup asked was
Regardless of whether you will move, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move to another state, or would you rather remain in your current state?
Depending on my mood when asked that question, there is a good chance that I’d say I would like to move. If I had the opportunity to live comfortably in a nice house on Cape Cod, I’d probably move pretty quickly. Of course, that is very different from thinking seriously about moving out of the state.
In fact, when you look at the subsequent Gallup question of whether someone is even somewhat likely to move within the next twelve months, the 49% drops down to 16%, dropping Connecticut from being number two to just barely making the top ten.
The Register then gets its spin on the poll from the organization that lobbies for businesses in Connecticut.
There are a bunch of reasons, but cost of living and the cost of doing business are big ones, according to two state economists.
“Anecdotally I hear about taxes and the high cost of living and cheaper living in other places,” said Peter Gioia, vice president and economist for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. “Some of it’s from business people; some of it’s from non-business people.
When we look at the data from the poll, however, we find very different data. In fact, nationwide, 31% of people planning to move within the next 12 months is work or business related. In Connecticut, it is only 21%. Instead, people are looking to move from Connecticut because of quality of life and cost of living reasons.
The poll does not give more detailed information about this, so I looked at some other data. According to the U.S. Census, Connecticut has the fourth most expensive housing in the nation for home owners and the seventh most expensive housing for renters. So, if people are interested in keeping people in Connecticut, perhaps we need more affordable housing. Yet I suspect that the many of the people who are concerned about the cost of living are also concerned that their property values don’t get driven down by more affordable housing in the state.
The Register article also quotes Republican Candidate for Governor, Tom Foley, saying, “I am disappointed, but not surprised, because people are attracted to places where they see opportunity and can feel optimistic”
This, of course, begs the question of opportunities to do what? Some people may be attracted to the opportunity to make a lot of money and buy a lot of stuff, but others may be more interested in opportunities to enjoy life and nature and help those around them.
I don’t expect to move to Cape Cod any time soon, there are still too many opportunities to help people around me here in Connecticut, opportunities that Mr. Foley seems not to focus on.
Meriden Daffodil Festival
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/27/2014 - 08:14Yesterday, Fiona and I went to the Meriden Daffodil Festival. The band The Foresters was supposed to play, but their set got rained out. So, instead, Fiona and I spoke with some friends, had a bite to eat at the food tent and visited the crafts fair.
I’m not a big fan of shopping, but Fiona likes to shop and I figured we could walk around for a while before heading home. It was interesting to talk with some of the merchants. Some were old established small local businesses, like Sugar Maple Farms. We talked about this year’s maple syrup season and beekeeping. While they didn’t have any at the festival, and they don’t sell it online, they do sell comb honey. I believe they also visit some of the farmers markets, which several of the vendors do.
Woodbury based Winding Drive was their selling their various jams. They had plenty of samples of very good jam and talked about making jams from local products. The story of their founding is a great small local entrepreneurial story.
Similar to the story of Winding Drive is the story of Bradley Mountain Soaps. They started making herbal and goat milk soaps due to allergies in the family and this has grown into a nice little business.
So, while we didn’t get a chance to hear a good local band, we did get a chance to sample and buy some good local wares. The Meriden Daffodil Festival continues today, so if you get a chance to stop by, visit these vendors.
Profiles in Privilege
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 04/20/2014 - 07:41In his column a couple days ago, Colin McEnroe writes about the Doug Glanville article in The Atlantic, I Was Racially Profiled in My Own Driveway. Colin asks if this was ”Cops Doing Their Job? Or Profiling?”
Colin, along with people who commented on the column, both on the Courant’s website, and on social media sites like Facebook raise some interesting questions. At what point does an officer reacting to a complaint and attempting to enforce an ill-considered law cross over into racial profiling? If the officer was just reacting to a complaint by a citizen, wasn’t he just doing his job? Unfortunately, the ‘just doing my job defense doesn’t always stand up, particularly if it is reinforcing some injustice.
Perhaps the bigger questions start with how much of a reaction is appropriate, independent of whether or not it is called profiling? Instead of talking about profiling we need to be exploring how each one of us contributes to, benefits from, and is damaged by unexplored expectations about the people around us based on their age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other factors.
Perhaps we need to explore how these unexplored expectations fit into laws, rules, regulations, and ways that our institutions operate that benefit one group of people and the expense of another group of people.
The Better Deal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/22/2014 - 09:54On Thursday, Connecticut House Republican’s Chief of Staff George Gallo resigned as the word spread about a federal investigation into how candidates used a direct mail firm out of Florida. People asked me if that wasn’t the same firm that my opponent used in 2012. It was. Yet I don’t think she is any more culpable in this than Chris Donovan was in the improprieties that took place in his Congressional campaign. It is easy to suggest that the candidate either knew, or should have known about possible illegal activity. It is too easy. It doesn’t get to the real issues. Perhaps it simply reflects one of the bigger issues.
In the Hartford Courant article about Gallo, former state GOP Chairman Chris Healy, talking about direct mail firm simply states, “we got a better deal”. A cynic might ask what that deal was. Was there any sort of illegal quid quo pro in the better deal? But this, too, perhaps doesn’t get to the real issue.
I often quote Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture in my blog, and I’ll provide a more complete version of one of my favorite quotes here:
OK, and so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely. And the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is, and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that
I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important.
And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.
What candidates want is to get elected, but most of them don’t get elected, they just get experience. This experience might help them get elected the next time around. It might turn them bitter against the system, or it might inspire something greater.
Why do we want to get elected? Hopefully, it is to make their communities better places, and this gets back to the quote from Chris Healy. What is that ‘better deal’ he spoke about?
On my campaign, we often spoke about who we would purchase our services from. We wanted to make our community a better place, and we argued whether it was better to get services from companies in the district, or if it made more sense to use less expensive companies in other parts of Connecticut. It was a difficult balance, and I don’t know how well we really did on it, but at least we didn’t spend most of our budget, a large amount of which came from a Connecticut state grant, with companies in Florida.
We also had people offer us great deals because they were friends that believed in our campaign. We sought to make sure that everyone was paid fairly for the work they did and that there was no expectation of quid quo pro, real or perceived.
Yet most importantly, the focus was on issues. I wanted to talk about health and education. I did. I wished I could have gotten into more discussions about these issues. I wish people would engage more on the issues our state faces instead of making decisions based on a few pieces of mail crafted by political consultants in Florida. I wish more political coverage in the traditional media could be about the issues, and not the horse race and the corruption.
Hopefully, I moved the needle a little bit in that direction. No, I didn’t get elected, but I got “the better deal”.
Health Equity and the 2014 CT Legislative Session
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/17/2014 - 07:21Last year, as a member of the Connecticut Health Foundation’s Health Leadership Fellows Program the group I was part of mapped out plans for bring Health Impact Assessments into Connecticut policy decisions, especially the state legislative process.
A key component of this plan was to improve the way health advocates work together during the legislative session. We set up a Google Group, CT Health Equity Bills to discuss this. As we enter another legislative session, members are encouraged to discuss upcoming bills and opportunities to testify.
I must admit, prior to becoming a CT Health Foundation fellow, I would often be asked to support various bills, and I rarely thought about these bills in terms of the impact they would have on health equity, and I suspect that many legislators don’t think about bills in terms of health equity the way I believe they should.
The Connecticut Health Foundation has published a blog post, Things We’ll Be Looking Out For During the 2014 Legislative Session. While it doesn’t address specific bills, it provides an important framework for this year’s session. I have been speaking with other organizations and hope to share thoughts about their agendas as well.
Meanwhile, I’m already getting messages from activists to support different bills. One of the first bills I received a message about was S.B. No. 23 AN ACT CONCERNING BENEFIT CORPORATIONS AND ENCOURAGING SOCIAL ENTERPRISE.. Friends have pointed me to a Change.org petition uring the senate to take up SB 23 this year.
it is early in the session and I don’t know what SB 23 is going to look like by the end of the session, but I strongly support the goal. Yet I hadn’t been thinking of this bill in terms of health equity. My gut feeling is that it won’t harm efforts for health equity and has the potential to benefit health equity efforts, but beyond that, I haven’t really thought it out much.
Then, at dinner last night, I got into a fascinating discussion with a friend from Yale’s Global Health Initiative. She was at a conference where people were talking about using a social impact exchange as a means of encouraging social entrepreneurship and investment in Haiti to deal with the issues of cholera.
While I do expect the passage of SB 23 to lead quickly to the issue of Social Impact Bonds, or the establishing of a social impact exchange, and a resulting improvement in efforts to address health equity in the state, it does seem like a step in the right direction.
Another bill I was contacted about was S.B. No. 120 AN ACT CONCERNING DYSLEXIA AND SPECIAL EDUCATION.. “To include dyslexia detection, recognition and intervention education as part of the professional development program for teachers and to amend the state IEP form to include dyslexia.”
With sponsors ranging from Sen. Bye to Rep. Cafero, this seems like a pretty straight forward broadly supported bill. Yet even with a bill like this, it is important to think about how it relates to health equity. Are there disparities in the diagnosis and treatment of dyslexia in Connecticut? How are they tracked? How will they be tracked and corrected?
A final bill for this blog post: H.B. No. 5144 AN ACT CONCERNING ACCESS TO BIRTH CERTIFICATES AND PARENTAL HEALTH INFORMATION FOR ADOPTED PERSONS., “To provide adult adopted persons, twenty-one years of age or older, access to their biological parents' health information and information in the person's original birth certificate or record.”
A friend contacted me about this bill. She was adopted as a child and does not have access to information about her biological parents. While it is easy to think of this in terms idle curiosity that an adopted child might have about their history, there are important health issues to consider. Are there biological family history information that could help the adopted child better deal with their own health? Again, I don’t know much about the health equity aspects of this. Are there disparities in access to birth and health information by adopted children along racial or ethnic lines? Would this bill help address such disparities?
Over the coming days, I expect I will hear more about these and other bills. I hope you’ll join me in thinking about the impact these bills would have on health equity in our state.
