Federation of Connecticut Taxpayer Organizations

The Hill recently reported that Repealing health law would mean more benefits for members of ... Congress noting that �Congress Repealing President Obama�s healthcare law would let members of Congress keep their government-subsidized insurance coverage after they retire � a benefit they lost under the health law.�� The Affordable Care Act � specifically, a Republican amendment to the Affordable Care Act � kicked members of Congress and their aides out of the healthcare program for federal employees.�� Instead, lawmakers and staff have to get coverage through the insurance exchanges created by the healthcare law. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who championed that provision, said it ensures that lawmakers live under the same rules as their constituents. �Now, as the House prepares to vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, some Democrats are arguing that repeal would reinstate a two-tiered system that gives lawmakers a leg up.�

To date, Connecticut has received� $192 Million in federal funds to implement the law, as noted within Health Care Law Stands: What It Means For CT And You.� Check out more on healthcare issues at http://c-hit.newhavenindependent.org/health.

State Employee Pensions of $100,000 and More

http://www.ctact.org\upload\home\PensionNew.xls

Recently,� the Hartford Courant reported Jon Lender: State Faces 5-Year Backlog Of 12,800 Pension Audits. �Therein, Lender notes: �Upon leaving state service, state retirees receive an �estimated monthly benefit� � a calculation based on several factors, including years of service. �The comptroller's office then conducts an audit on each retiree's benefits to �confirm that all factors have been accurately calculated,� Lembo said. �If any benefit change is necessary, the state will either reduce any payment that was over-estimated, and deduct any money owed back to the state, or increase any benefit that was underestimated, including back pay and interest,� Lembo said. �The error rate � the difference between estimated and post-audited � for state pensions is about 1 percent, with most of those cases having been initially underestimated.�� When those underpayments are finally corrected, interest is paid on the money the retirees should have been receiving from the beginning. �That interest totaled $449,139, $860,204, and $602,083 for the past three fiscal years � a total of $1,911,426, according to the comptroller's office. �The backlog was �particularly exacerbated,� Lembo said, by the 2009 early retirement incentive and a �retirement surge� that followed the 2011 concessions agreement between state employee unions and the newly arrived administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. �From July to October of 2011, the retirement division of Lembo's office handled 1,680 retirements.�

You can check the pensions of State employees at http://transparency.ct.gov/html/searchPensions.asp

And Salaries, Wages and Benefits at� http://transparency.ct.gov/html/searchPayroll.asp

And there could soon be another pension to calculate as �Ray Soucy, the former state union official who has been identified as a central co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel thousands of dollars into House Speaker Christopher Donovan's congressional campaign from hidden donors, has applied for a disability retirement as he faces possible disciplinary proceedings� as noted within the following article by Jon Lender on July 5� Figure Identified In Campaign Scheme Seeks Disability Retirement From State Job .�

Lender goes on to note that �Soucy of Naugatuck, applied effective July 1 to retire from his job as a correctional industries supervisor at the Cheshire state prison complex, according to officials from the Department of Correction and the office of State Comptroller Kevin Lembo.� �Soucy has been on leave from the job since April 29, three days after a federal law-enforcement affidavit says that a person it called Co-Conspirator 1 � abbreviated as CC-1, whom sources later identified as Soucy � was persuaded to cooperate with investigators looking into the alleged campaign financing scheme by means including allowing them to record his conversations with others. �Correction officers generally can retire after 20 years on the job at a lifetime pension amounting to half of their salaries � based on an average of their highest three years' pay. Soucy's average salary in the past three years was $63,914, according to the retirement application he filed June 22 with Lembo's office.�

So what would Ray Soucy, the Third Alleged Co-Conspirator Identified In Donovan ... - Advocacy, have said to Twardy if he had been interviewed prior to the release of Twardy�s report.� We will never know as it was reported by �Christopher Keating of the Hartford Courant in his article captioned Twardy Report: Donovan Had No Knowledge Of Illegal Contributions; Could Not Interview Braddock, Nassi, Jordan, Soucy, Waterfall that Twardy lacked subpoena power.��

And one primary question remains outstanding�.. What did Christopher Donovan and/or his campaign committee pay for Twardy�s report?��

In June, the Day of New London newspaper criticized� Christopher Donovan for invoking the �Know-Nothing Defense� strategy as they suggested in their article Donovan needs to provide answers, following the arrest of Donovan�s Campaign Committee Finance Director Robert Braddock, Jr.�

It now appears that both Donovan and Attorney Stan Twardy,� are both invoking the Know Nothing Defense as they refuse to disclose the cost of the report as Jon Lender of the Courant notes�� Questions Remaining In Donovan FBI Probe; Still No Price For ...Twardy Report.�� Lender reports that� �John Droney, a longtime partner in the firm of Levy & Droney in Farmington, said the final cost could be �easily more�� than $250,000 because of the amount of work completed��.�I can�t speak for Twardy and Day Pitney,�� said Droney. �If it was my office and I had 10 people working on the file, I would know to the penny how much it is to date.�� Droney said that Twardy must charge the full price for the legal work because anything below the full price would be considered an illegal campaign contribution.�

But here is what we do know as just reported by CTNewsJunkie.com following the filing of reports with the State Elections Enforcement Commission which reveal that GOP Donors Identified As Two Naugatuck Residents. ��The three $1,000 checks that were returned came from Anne Soucy and Walter Dambowsky of Naugatuck. �Two were made out to the House Republican Campaign Committee and one was made New Horizons PAC. �Soucy lives at the same address as Ray Soucy, the former correction officer and union official, who has been identified by news reports as co-conspirator one in the Braddock arrest complaint. Mrs. Soucy declined comment Monday by hanging up the phone.�Dambowsky, also of Naugatuck, is a state investigator and volunteers as an auxiliary state trooper, according to the state police. Calls to Dambowsky�s phone number went unanswered.�

Affordable Housing Could Soon be Built In The Affluent Suburbs of Connecticut -� Those living in Connecticut�s affluent suburbs may not have paid much attention in February to Governor Malloy Pledges More Than Half Billion Dollars for Housing; Advocates . �But now they are as developers are focusing on State Statutue 8-30G.� This� 1990 law spurs affordable housing development, and anxiety because local zoning laws are overridden if a town has less than 10 percent of its housing stock designated as affordable.� Such is the case in Ridgefield where 39 new units are to be built with a portion dedicated to affordable housing.

Robert Reich, in his article captioned Scandal of scandals: Barclays corruption probe digs up new dirt asks the following ��.�� What�s the most basic service banks provide? �Borrow money and lend it out.�� Reich offers the following ��. �Suppose the bankers are manipulating the interest rate so they can place bets with the money you lend or repay them � bets that will pay off big for them because they have inside information on what the market is really predicting, which they�re not sharing with you. �That would be a mammoth violation of public trust. �And it would amount to a rip-off of almost cosmic proportion � trillions of dollars that you and I and other average people would otherwise have received or saved on our lending and borrowing that have been going instead to the bankers. �It would make the other abuses of trust we�ve witnessed look like child�s play by comparison. �Sad to say, there�s reason to believe this has been going on, or something very much like it. This is what the emerging scandal over �Libor� (short for �London interbank offered rate�) is all about. Libor is the benchmark for trillions of dollars of loans worldwide � mortgage loans, small-business loans, personal loans. �It�s compiled by averaging the rates at which the major banks say they borrow. �So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclay�s, a big London-based bank that just paid $453 million to U.S. and British bank regulators, whose top executives have been forced to resign, and whose traders� emails give a chilling picture of how easily they got their colleagues to rig interest rates in order to make big bucks. (Robert Diamond, Jr., the former Barclay CEO who was forced to resign, said the emails made him �physically ill� � perhaps because they so patently reveal the corruption.) �But Wall Street has almost surely been involved in the same practice, including the usual suspects � JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America � because every major bank participates in setting the Libor rate, and Barclay�s couldn�t have rigged it without their witting involvement.�

Visit the Federation�s Website for Previous Publications

http://ctact.org/