by John Dankosky – In the coming weeks, we’ll be examining life after prison on Where We Live. It’s prompted by an extraordinary series by WNPR’s Jeff Cohen that I hope you’re hearing. He’s been talking to guys out of prison on parole, and the parole officers who check in on them. It’s a way to put a human face on the stats we’ve been seeing – an increase in prisoners out of jail and under state supervision. Great radio…and worth a listen.
Michael Ledbetter (Photo: Hartford Police Department)
by John Dankosky – It’s been one of our favorite topics, but now it seems that everyone’s excited about prospects for high speed rail in Connecticut. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was back in Connecticut to give his stamp of approval to the state’s efforts to connect Springfield and New Haven. As WNPR’s Jeff Cohen reports, LaHood was “optimistic.”Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror went further, calling the Secretary’s visit a “face-saving pat on the back” for a state that’s been a big loser in federal funding recently. LaHood also uttered a phrase not heard around these parts much:
“Connecticut has its act together”
Meanwhile, Pat Scully at the blog “The Hanging Shad” says that the state’s plan to build a Hartford to New Britain busway should be scrapped for more rail development:
“Yes, we’ve already spent millions on the busway and it’s expected that a federal grant of $220 million for the project will come through soon but neither is a reason to keep after building a roadway we will be stuck with forever and most importantly, nobody will ride.”
Scully says it’s “throwing good money after bad” – but from what we know, that money can only be used for the busway project. The state’s not likely to forfeit it – even if the plan doesn’t fit with a larger “vision” for rail in the state.
According to UConn’s Fred Carstensen and the CBIA‘s Pete Gioia, The $726 million dollar gap in next year’s budget is being filled with too many one-time tricks, including federal stimulus dollars that might not be flowing to the states, and an economic recovery that might be slow to reach Connecticut. (Find out more in this story by The Connecticut Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf)
Then, even if we find a way to fill this gap, the economists say there’s always the 2012 budget hole to deal with. That stands at 3.88 billion, and could swell to 6 billion by some estimates. So, what to do?
Gioia said that state lawmakers need to make big changes – soon.
“They’re doing things the same way because they’ve always done them that way. Perhaps because it’s easier, perhaps because of inertia. And they’re not rolling up their sleeves, looking at what are the basic fundamentals of what we’re doing. And saying ‘We’ve got to do it different, we’ve got to do it smarter,’ and that over the long term produces significant savings, with the the least amount of damage to people who really do need services. “
Gioia suggested an overhaul of long-term care that he estimates could save $600 million a year in Medicaid payments by providing more at home-care. Carstensen says he sees another big savings in the criminal justice system through drug courts and other alternatives to incarceration.
“We have phenomenal incarceration rates, we put non-violent offenders in prison, which makes them into lifetime criminals…a phenomenal recidivism rate. Costs us over 40-thousand a year for each one. Probably of the current population, probably 7000 don’t even need to be there, because they’re non-violent offenders and never had a violent incident. We could probably save $200-million a year just on reforming the way we handle the corrections system.”
Senate President Don Williams told the economists that the state does need to get an early start on the multi-billion dollar deficit that’s looming in 2012, and has proposed agency consolidations that would have a long-term effect – but not produce savings right away.
Williams said that one big change could be the “sunsetting” of some of the state’s many corporate tax incentives – many of which he called “dinosaurs” that don’t generate any real economic benefit for the state. That’s something Carstensen agrees with – he talked about a 2005 study that showed “that the corporate tax rate reductions, and the credit and exemption programs enacted in the early 1990s have been a mixed and small success for the Connecticut economy.”
The economists also addressed calls to raise income taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents – an idea Gioia said was subject to the “volatility” of the economy. But Jamey Bell of Connecticut Voices for Children called in to say that more tax revenue is part of a “balanced” approach to rebuilding a sustainable budget (Voices has their own economic development and budgeting ideas online here).
Mostly, the business economist and the academic economist agreed on the biggest systemic problem: Connecticut’s not doing enough to create more jobs, and is losing out to more aggressive states like Minnesota, Oregon, and Tennessee which have robust programs to court business and bring in federal dollars.
Gioia even suggested an alternative to the state’s long-standing (and well-earned) moniker “The Land of Steady Habits.” He calls it “The State That Walks Backwards.”
Imagination Conversation at UConn Greater Hartford (from left) Producer Libby Conn, Steve Dahlberg, Scott Noppe-Brandon, John Dankosky- photo by Catie Talarski
by John Dankosky – I am, by nature, both highly skeptical and wildly enthusiastic about conversations like the one we had last night in West Hartford. It was an “Imagination Conversation” sponsored by Lincoln Center Institute, and recorded for Friday’s Where We Live. That organization is putting on similar events in all 50 states, but they usually don’t take the form of a radio show.
Catie encapsulated the basic idea in this blog post, as we hoped to continue a discussion of the way creativity and imagination can be used in schools, civic life, politics, business and city planning.
That’s a pretty tall order – and, as I say, I’m pretty skeptical of the applicability of ideas as open-ended as “imagination.”
We largely steered clear of the fields we’ve previously plowed: How to make cities more vibrant by bringing in more “creative capital.” We also made a pretty good case that business, government and science are all places where creativity and imagination are sometimes more welcome than in the traditional arts communities we often think of.
The evening also included a very profitable networking session before and after the event, and an artist doing live
Artist John O'Donnell and his live "imagining" of the conversation
sketches onstage to correspond with our conversation (an animation of this, I hear, is to come). A group of very sharp visiting entrepreneurs from Kenya gave our discussion a global feel, and a Simsbury high school student brought things into perspective as she talked about the need to be able to speak openly about scary ideas – something most schools don’t stomach.
You’ll be able to listen for yourself on Friday morning, and I’m very interested to hear your feedback. Did we help explain why creativity and imagination are important? Are there ways they can be better integrated into our daily lives?
This is not a gang war that we’re seeing. Instead, it’s individuals with personal conflicts, settling disputes with firearms.
The profiles of the men are similar, most have criminal histories, many are probably gang members, but officials believe only 2 of the killings were actually related to gang activity.
They say the problems are domestic violence, robbery, drugs and a large number of parolees, out of prison without supports for them to get back into society.
The majority of these cases took place in the “criminal corridor” that Limon is trying to target.
This corridor runs through the neighborhoods of Dixwell, Newhallville, West River, Dwight and the Hill. Extra cops were there between 7 at night and 3 in the morning. But, its an expensive operation, and not really sustainable at that level for long. Limon says the idea is to stabilize things on the streets in the short term and then pull back the numbers and continue the process of building trust with residents.
Chief Limon also wants to bring another crime-fighting tactic from Chicago. He say hi-tech surveillance cameras helped to reduce violent crime and narcotics activity. He’d like to try the same thing in New Haven.
“You’re able to determine where the crime is occurring. We’re able to IP network those crime cameras right to either a squad car or right directly to a monitoring center.”
Chicago has one of the most extensive anti-crime camera systems in the country, with surveillance on light poles, skyscrapers, and on buses. Some cameras include gunshot detection technology, and can locate and zoom in the direction of where shots are fired. New Haven Mayor John DeStefano has already raised the idea of cameras to identify license plates of drivers who run red lights. The American Civil Liberties Union has opposed the use of these cameras, citing privacy concerns.
One big concern Limon is taking seriously? Why the investigations into these killings is taking so long. He’s just arrived from Chicago and says things move faster there – not so fast that unwarranted arrests are made – but, he says the pace is quicker. So he told Diane he’s making a point of investigating why crimes take longer to solve here in New Haven.
What about some of the long-standing problems plaguing the city, like distrust of the police in the neighborhoods? Chief Limon told Diane that he understands there’s work to be done, in building relationships with the community. He talked about helping neighbors and residents feel safe enough to come forward and talk to cops, or begin by talking to intermediaries like pastors. He told her that students should feel safe enough to talk with teachers and counselors about what they see, so cops and residents feel like they’re on the same side working to prevent violence.
The road back is long, though. It was just two years ago when New Haven’s former top narcotics cops was sentenced taking bribes and stealing drug money from crime scenes. Only a year before that, you had some residents in the Edgewood neighborhood involved in nightly armed citizen patrols because they felt like they needed to retake control of their neighborhood, and felt the New haven police weren’t stepping up to the plate.
Unlike past spurts of violence in Hartford, where State Police are regularly called in to work with local officials, Mayor Destefano says he has no plans to ask for help from the state.
For our show today, we wanted to do something a little different; we wanted to focus on some smaller ideas in some of the narrower areas of human thinking—little things like the origins of life and our universe, like the quest to move the frontiers of exploration farther outward, like the effort to better understand, oh, everything around us, everything that’s ever been, and everything that might ever be.
After some heavy brainstorming, it occurred to us that the way to better understand these smaller, attention-starved details might be to do a show on NASA and on the space sciences. President Obama—as always, looking out for Where We Live‘s needs—was nice enough to schedule a big Space Forum for tomorrow at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The point that I’m ham-fistedly trying to make here is that the things that NASA has done and is doing are BIG things—BIG ideas, BIG achievements, with BIG thinking at their hearts. And when an administration begins the process of drastically altering the face of an agency like that, we should probably pay attention.
The president’s new budget, while actually increasing funding for NASA by about $6 billion over the next five years, seeks to end the Constellation program, while emphasizing private industry and internationalization going forward. Critics of the plan see it creating a void for NASA and the space industry both in pragmatic areas like jobs and in lofty, abstract areas like vision.
Our friend, National Public Radio NASA expert and Alabama Public Radio news director Pat Duggins, joined us to help try to sort this all out and summed up the questions and concerns nicely:
NASA expert extraordinaire Pat Duggins
The big repercussions of all of this are that in Florida, for example, they’re estimating that 7,000 jobs are going to be lost with the end of the Space Shuttle program. And then in Alabama, the Hunstville Marshall Space Flight Center is developing Orion and Ares—that’s the Moon program that’s getting cut—and they’re worried about 2,000 jobs being lost there.
So, I think that Mr. Obama is really going to have a tough audience when he shows up at the Kennedy Space Center tomorrow to lay out his plan. I mean, he thinks he knows what he’s doing. And a lot of people are worried about the loss of jobs, the loss of being able to put human beings up into orbit with a NASA spacecraft for at least five to seven years—we’re going to have to rely on the Russians for that.
Everything is in flux right now, and that’s what’s so very jarring for the men and women who work for NASA.
And planetary geologist and Wesleyan professor Dr. Martha Gilmore, whose interests lie both in the pure science and in the lofty ideals, sees hope in the president’s budget and thinks that we, as a species, don’t ultimately have a choice about some of these issues:
Dr. Martha Gilmore—photo by Chion Wolf
I believe that we absolutely should [be going to the Moon and then on to Mars]. These planets are very important for our understanding of the evolution of the solar system, the evolution of our own planet, and for perhaps the most important question of our time, which is, how did life evolve in the solar system, and how did we come to be here?
So, it is absolutely essential that we continue our exploration of these planets. The manner in which we do it is open to debate. And certainly, Mr. Obama has given a vote of confidence to NASA by increasing the NASA budget overall—which is not a given—and therefore continuing funding for the very successful robotic program and spacecraft that we have on the way or in orbit right now, which are bringing back amazing data for us to study.
Now, humans can do things that robots can’t. And the future of exploration willinclude humans to get the greatest scientific return, and to satisfy our curiosity as a species and the need for exploration that is so inherent to us.
BIG ideas. BIG thinking. And the possibility of big changes.
We’ll continue to follow the story on WNPR with the president’s speech tomorrow and the debate over his plan and budget that’s sure to follow.
This past November, Where We Live paired with Real Art Ways to explore Hartford’s Creative Class:Can Hartford, the former insurance capital of the world, support a creative class? What (and who) is already here – and how can we connect them? How does the greater Hartford region contribute to Hartford’s creative landscape? What are the elements of a dynamic city – and where should Hartford focus its energy? What are the city’s barriers to a bustling creative economy?
We had a great conversation with artists, community leaders and residents of Hartford. Coming up on Monday April 19, we’re continuing the conversation on Creativity with Scott Noppe-Brandon, the Executive Director of the Lincoln Center Institute. He’s on a mission to have “Imagination Conversations” in 50 states over two years. All of the Conversations will be documented and final proposals for nationwide educational reform will be made at a national Imagination Summit in New York in the summer or fall of 2011. At the Summit, Imagination Conversation findings and an action agenda will be presented to public policy makers, educators, legislators and the media in an effort to make cultivation of imagination a key element in our schools.
Steve Dahlberg, head of the International Centre for Creativity and Imagination has been instrumental in bringing this Imagination Conversation to Connecticut. This Conversation will focus on the role of imagination in education, creative community and economic development, and creative leadership in organizations. It seeks to build a relevant imagination-fueled agenda for the state to pursue. ICCI will coordinate follow-up action that emerges from this conversation, as well as additional future conversations.
The Conversation, moderated by John Dankosky, will feature Scott Noppe-Brandon along with leaders from an array of fields — government, business, science, education, and the arts — to explore the ways they experience and promote imagination in their work and communities. The goal of the Conversation is to present imagination as a key cognitive capacity, one that leads to creativity and innovation; and to help build awareness of imagination as a key skill in work and in life.
The Imagination Conversation will be in the auditorium of the Library Building at the University of Connecticut Greater Hartford Campus, 1800 Asylum Ave., West Hartford, Conn., 06117. The event begins with networking at 6 p.m. and the Imagination Conversation at 7 p.m. More details, along with parking and registration information, are available at: http://www.appliedimagination.org
The taped broadcast will air on Where We Live Friday April 23, 9-10AM.
by John Dankosky - Listen this week for coverage of jury selection in the trial of Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez from WNPR’s Jeff Cohen. Jeff provided the most comprehensive coverage of the mayor’s legal problems while reporting for the Hartford Courant. Now, he’ll be reporting for us. You can keep up to date on his Capital Region Report blog, and listen for a debrief of the first day of jury selection on WNPR’s All Things Considered.
by Jeff Cohen and John Dankosky - Republican candidate for governor Tom Foley was on WNPR’s Where We Live Friday and said that the state isn’t doing enough to stimulate economic development.
Tom Foley - photo by Libby Conn
“I would certainly do more than the current governor’s doing on that front. We kind of lack a long-term policy for economic development in the state. There’s a lot there I just don’t think that Hartford is pulling that together and pitching it and trying to give employers a good experience here.”
Foley, a former U S ambassador to Ireland, is a businessman who specialized in buying failing businesses and turning them around. Ask what he would do to turn around the state’s budget, Foley took education dollars off of the table.
“We need more funds in education, not less. So, to the extent that we need to reduce the size and cost of our state government, I don’t think it should come in the area of education.”
And while Foley said he isn’t convinced that consolidating state agencies is a money saver, he did say that he would take a closer look at how the state pays for its social services.
