Editorial Roundup: New England

Hearst Connecticut Media. March 8, 2023.

Editorial: 2 sides of CT’s criminal identity. Murder in the suburbs and illegal guns in cities.

Nothing about updating laws involving guns — both illegal and legal — is ever simple.

The very act of urban mayors in Connecticut working together to get illegal guns off their streets feels like progress. The mayors are focusing on disarming repeat offenders they believe are responsible for most of the state’s gun violence. Resistance is always expected when it comes to changing gun laws. In this case, the loudest blowback came from a fellow Democrat, state Sen. Gary Winfield, during a 12-hour hearing Monday.

The approach taken by the mayors of Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford and Waterbury seems practical. Far too often, those repeat offenders are committing crimes with guns while out on probation or bail. The mayors’ objective is to increase the penalties in such circumstances.

Winfield essentially told the mayors to take a reality check about their own cities. He argued that many people carry illegal firearms for protection, and would suffer legal consequences from a law that is too broadly written.

The danger of such rhetoric is that everyone can walk away from the table. These discussions are supposed to be difficult, and it’s the responsibility of elected officials not to balk at the hard work.

But it’s not just the illegal guns that have muddied the discourse. Elsewhere in Connecticut, leaders at domestic violence agencies are trying to ensure people under restraining orders don’t have easy access to guns.

Under existing laws, alleged abusers are supposed to sell firearms or surrender them to police while under a restraining order. But there doesn’t appear to be a system for tracking those weapons. At a time when every detail of our lives seems to be tracked whether we like it or not, this gap appears to exist for a lack of effort.

Advocates say two Connecticut women — Traci-Marie Jones of Bethel, and Julie Minogue of Milford — were recently killed by guns that should have been taken away from their killers.

Illegal guns in inner cities and murders in the suburbs represent two sides of Connecticut’s criminal identity. Crimes involving domestic violence consume one-third of the state’s judicial caseload.

The latter types of crimes have motivated a different alliance, the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, to propose that a single body be formed to focus on refining the state’s laws on such matters.

Victims in Connecticut are served by the state’s 18 domestic violence agencies, with two state councils. The proposed Domestic Violence Criminal Justice Response and Enhancement Advisory Council would be a proactive agency combining the missions of the councils, and would examine existing policies for gaps.

Somewhere at the top of that list are gun issues. It can’t simply be left to a document informing someone hit with a restraining order that they need to surrender their weapon.

The formation of the new coalition is in the initial stages, but offers the promise of tracking cases from beginning to end. In any eventual form, it would likely take over the role of making recommendations to the Judiciary Committee.

Judiciary is one place where all gun legislation eventually meets. One of the co-chairs is Winfield, who challenged the mayors on illegal guns.

Everyone involved with trying to initiate change deserves credit for the effort. Eventually, though, Connecticut needs to figure out how to do a better job of knowing where its guns are.

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Portland Press Herald. March 2, 2023.

Editorial: Maine delegation needs to be louder on asylum seeker work authorization

Recent reporting proves our state, in particular, can’t wait any longer for a rule change.

Around this time last year, this editorial board commended Rep. Chellie Pingree for her introduction of the Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act, which sought to make a person seeking asylum eligible to work 30 days after filing their asylum application.

Sen. Susan Collins had introduced a similar bill in the Senate, Sen. Angus King was a co-sponsor.

One year on, the wait to work is still at least 150 days long. With King back in the co-sponsor seat, both Pingree and Collins are trying again. And the steady stream of asylum seekers arriving in Portland, fast becoming overwhelmed, has resulted in families with nowhere else to go staying in shelters that are so crowded they are forced to sleep sitting upright in chairs.

Central to the self-sufficiency hoped for by newcomers to Maine is the ability to work a job and support themselves.

This is no longer a concept particularly mired in political disagreement – the persistence of the pandemic-hastened labor shortage has broken down some traditional opposition.

In a polarized Congress, even if consensus can’t be reached on grounds of dignity and fairness, one would think the growing, obvious economic imperative couldn’t really be resisted. But you’d be wrong.

“I can’t even begin to explain why it is that any bill that has the word ‘immigration’ or ‘asylum’ in it becomes sort of like a hot potato,” Pingree told the Press Herald in February.

“These are people who are legally here in the country. Why are we slowing down the process, especially once you have finished your legal application? You have to wait no matter what. Why would we say, ‘You can’t work while you’re waiting’?”

Pingree, Collins and King have a big task ahead. For the good of Maine and everybody who lives here, our congressional delegation has no choice but to prioritize this work and keep going with the “full-court press” Pingree has referred to.

At the state level, state Sen. Eric Brakey is working on a bill that would request a waiver from the federal government to permit asylum seekers to work as soon as they file their asylum claims. While seeking this kind of flexibility is absolutely the right idea, it’s too soon to say if the proposal is workable.

Even if it is, federal movement on the question is still the major target.

Having failed to develop and enact system-wide immigration reform, the Biden administration has recently moved to dramatically crack down on asylum at the border.

Just as nothing has been done to expedite work authorization, nothing has been done to improve the processing of asylum claims, which can take upward of five years, or to update other outdated laws.

The scale of the dysfunction has also led to a grave irony. As The New York Times revealed in a major investigation published last week, thousands of migrant children have been put to work in factories and plants across America. In violation of child labor laws, they are doing treacherously inappropriate jobs for long hours. They are often alone, without their families, having arrived as unaccompanied minors. Their stories are alarming and incredibly sad.

While the existence of this “shadow workforce” is its own scandal, we were reminded of a recent statement by Kristen Dow, Portland’s director of health and human services. “We really need to help these families and the city of Portland at this point needs help, too,” Dow told the paper. “As a state we need to figure out with these children, who are our future, what we want to be for them and how we want to play a role in their history.”

The ability to legally get to work would greatly help migrant communities. Plenty of jobs are out there. Congress needs to open them up to be done.

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Bangor Daily News. March 7, 2023.

Editorial: It’s time for Maine to fine drivers who don’t clear snow off their vehicles

For years, state lawmakers have considered but failed to act on legislation to require Mainers to clear snow and ice off their cars. It is time to stop shoveling this issue down the road and follow the lead of other states like New Hampshire.

Our “Live free or die” neighbors have managed to balance personal freedom with public safety for more than 20 years by requiring their motorists to clean off their vehicles. Those who don’t, including commercial vehicle operators, are subject to fines. So despite protestations from various industries, it is clearly possible to take this public safety step without grinding commerce to a halt. People being killed or injured by snow and ice flying off trucks does not need to be a cost of doing business.

Tragically, it took such a death to pass this law in New Hampshire. A young woman named Jessica Smith was killed in 1999 when ice fell from a tractor trailer and caused a crash.

“It takes not even five minutes to clean off your car,” Lisa Smith, Jessica’s mother, told a New Hampshire TV station in 2015. “It can take three seconds to kill somebody.”

Anyone who has driven on Maine roads after a winter storm, particularly the highway, knows that slippery conditions aren’t the only potential danger. If you’ve ever been stuck behind a car or truck with a pile of snow still on the roof, and seen it fly off at higher speeds, you know how much damage it can cause. This failure to clean off a car after a winter storm can put others in danger, plain and simple. The legal solution might not be totally simple, but the Maine Legislature has spent years wading through the details.

So LD 522, introduced by Democratic Rep. Bruce White and the newest iteration in this debate, should finally make it across the finish line. The bill would impose fines between $150 and $500 for people driving on public roadways with unsecured snow or ice on their vehicles more than 48 hours after a storm. Unlike previous efforts, it does not exempt commercial vehicles from the requirements and the potential fines, and rightly so.

Margaret Trebilcock of Topsham testified to lawmakers on March 2 about an 18-inch chunk of ice that she says flew off a car in front of her last winter and struck her windshield while she was driving home from grocery shopping. She included a picture of that smashed damaged windshield in her testimony — it wasn’t pretty, and even with insurance, the repairs and a rental car cost her about $700.

“This is just one example of what can happen on Maine roads when people neglect to clean off their cars. I am sure the person in front of me did not leave home intending to cause so much damage. Nonetheless, they did. The driver never stopped,” Trebilcock told lawmakers. “I have no idea whether they even saw what happened as a result of their lack of attention to clearing off their car. The outcome was that I was left ‘holding the bag’ for their negligence. Supporting LD 522 will provide clear expectations to Mainers regarding their responsibility to operate their vehicles on our public roadways after storms. It is unfortunate that we need a law to regulate behavior toward making roads safer for all, but the fact remains that until we do, accidents like mine will continue to happen.”

Barb Wood, a former legislator from Portland, shared her past experience running L.L. Bean’s distribution center and her belief that cleaning snow and ice off trucks was still the right thing to do, even if it wasn’t the law.

“I knew there would be an expense to deal with the big rigs at L.L. Bean. But at L.L. Bean safety is really the utmost. So we built a structure, fondly called a ‘sky plow,’ that tractor-trailers drive under and is at the height to scrape snow off the roof. It can also be adjusted to different heights,” Wood testified.

So it’s not a matter of technology. School districts have a similar option with their school buses.

Other states have figured out how to do this. Private industry and schools have figured out ways to balance operational realities, along with the safety of their drivers and other drivers on the road. After years of debate, Maine lawmakers must now figure out how to do the same. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel — or the shovel or ice scraper — to do so.

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Boston Globe. March 8, 2023.

Editorial: Marijuana consumers deserve to know what they’re smoking (or eating)

Labeling on cannabis products is often inaccurate. It’s time to improve state oversight.

When a customer buys marijuana at a dispensary, they have a right to know what they’re putting in their body. That was the premise of allowing a legal market in Massachusetts, where marijuana products are supposed to be rigorously tested and accurately labeled.

However, in reality, customers do not know the properties of the marijuana they buy because labels are inaccurate and misleading. Levels of THC potency — a measure of the psychoactive compound that causes a high — are often inflated to entice buyers. And contaminants may be present despite testing results that say otherwise.

That was the conclusion of an investigation published by CommonWealth in December.

A major reason for the discrepancies, according to that investigation, is that while products must undergo testing, there are not sufficient standards governing how samples are selected, what testing methods are most accurate, and how to calibrate testing machines. There is even a lack of basic systems like how to calculate total THC. Because dispensaries and growers can shop between testing labs, labs are incentivized to use methods that report the results their clients want — high potency levels and less contamination — even if they are not the most scientifically accurate.

On Friday, the research subcommittee of the Cannabis Advisory Board, which makes recommendations to the state Cannabis Control Commission that oversees state marijuana regulations, considered a slate of reforms that would impose stricter standards and oversight on marijuana testing labs. The proposed actions to improve oversight were informed by a survey of cannabis testing labs, growers, consumers, patients, and industry workers.

The proposals would go a long way toward informing and protecting consumers, building trust about product safety, and standardizing an industry that is now the Wild West, with little oversight and little ability to weed out bad actors.

As Cannabis Control Commissioner Kimberly Roy, the commission’s liaison to the subcommittee, pointed out, the benefit of a legal market is the assurance of safe products. “At the end of the day, it’s the testing that sets us apart from the legacy market,” Roy said.

The proposal recommends that the Cannabis Control Commission adopt a standard for what is THC and how to calculate and label it. Currently, labs include different cannabinoids, chemicals in the marijuana plant, under the category of THC and use different methods for calculating potency.

Accuracy in labeling is important both to know the likely effect of the drug and to ensure a fair price, since customers are often willing to pay more for products with higher THC levels.

The proposal would promote transparency by making lab testing data public. The Cannabis Control Commission currently only collects that data internally, through the tracking system labs use to report test results. Releasing the data would let someone see, for example, how often each lab fails a sample for a particular test, which could help determine if a lab is conducting a test improperly.

The recommendations would urge state regulators to begin a secret shopping program, in which regulators buy products off the shelf and test them, which is already authorized under state law. Roy implied at the meeting that the commission is already using this program when necessary. It should not be left up to journalists and independent researchers to discover discrepancies between labeling and reality.

The recommendations would require quarterly audits of labs, so the Cannabis Control Commission would need to hire individuals with the scientific skill sets necessary to understand and monitor lab operations.

The subcommittee will also consider forming an ongoing working group to discuss what other protocols and regulations need revisions. The Cannabis Control Commission would also, under the proposal, consider the feasibility of creating a lab to set standards against which other labs can be measured, by looking at similar efforts in California, Michigan, and Maryland.

Dan Delaney, a lobbyist and the executive director of the Association of Cannabis Testing Laboratories, which formed in late December and represents about half of the state’s dozen cannabis labs, said the labs support more oversight and hope regulators take the recommendations seriously. Labs have reported losing business when a dispensary takes their product to another lab that reports higher potency numbers or passes more products. “The reason we formed the Association of Testing Labs is we were concerned about lab shopping and concerned about mislabeling,” Delaney said. “The only way to combat that is to have more oversight and more visible oversight so there’s a deterrent effect.”

The subcommittee plans to vote on the recommendations in April. While details may be changed before the April 7 meeting based on public comments, the basic premise of the recommendations — clearer standards and definitions, greater transparency, and improved oversight — must not change. The recommendations should be approved and sent to the Cannabis Control Commission, which should incorporate them into state regulations.

The federal government requires accurate labeling of food and drugs. In the absence of federal cannabis laws, it is up to states to ensure that testing and labeling of cannabis products is just as rigorous.

Medical marijuana patients depend on accurate labeling to get effective medicine, and recreational users deserve to know what they are consuming.

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Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. March 7, 2023.

Editorial: Making cents

Our votes have been cast. Across Vermont, budgets have been considered; public officials have been elected; and, in some cases, a new course has been charted for a community.

Yet the issues facing lawmakers at the State House, as well as on local boards, means managing wisely. Public funds need to be leveraged; gaps and mismanagement cannot keep falling on the backs of taxpayers. Notably, we need to know what the stressors are on our economy, here in Vermont and beyond.

This is a tough time of year to make fiscal decisions. At the state and local level, we never have all the factors that go into the taxation equation. And, traditionally, the first quarter of any year is a crawl compared to the other three.

Yet indicators suggest that the U.S. economy made some modest gains during the past two months, but the Fed remains skittish. In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell was expected to warn Congress this week that the central bank will have to raise interest rates even higher than it’s previously signaled if inflation keeps running hot. That could be problematic as warmer temperatures start to appear on the thermometer, and consumers itching to take up projects might be tamped down.

According to recent published reports, for a few weeks in late January and early February, the U.S. economy seemed to have reached “a rare sweet spot. Inflation was steadily slowing from painful heights. And growth and hiring remained surprisingly sturdy despite ever-higher interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve,” according to The Associated Press.

“The financial markets roared their approval in the first six weeks of 2023, with stock prices surging on expectations that the Fed might soon pause and eventually reverse the series of aggressive rate hikes it began nearly a year ago. … Then something went wrong,” one article points out.

Mid-February, the government said it closely watched the consumer price index had surge 0.5% from December to January — five times the increase from November to December. Over the next week and a half, two more government releases told essentially the same story: The Fed’s fight to curb inflation wasn’t even close to being won, the AP reported.

That continues to have a ripple effect, Here are a few areas to consider:

Jobs: The remarkable strength of the U.S. job market has defied expectations throughout the economic tumult of the COVID years. It is reported that 2021 and 2022 were the two best years for hiring in U.S. government records dating to 1940. Job creation was expected to slow this year. Not so far. In January, employers added 517,000 jobs, far surpassing December’s 260,000 gain. They likely added nearly 208,000 more in February, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.

Housing: The Fed’s rate hikes, which so far have had only a limited effect on the overall economy, have walloped housing. Residential real estate depends on the willingness of people to borrow for what’s typically the costliest purchase of their lives. As the Fed continually jacked up interest rates last year, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage topped 7% last fall. According to AP, sales of existing homes have dropped for a record 12 straight months, according to the National Association of Realtors. The government’s recent GDP report showed that investment in housing plunged at an annual rate of nearly 26% from October through December, after having tumbled 18% from April through June and 27% from July through September.

Inflation: Inflation may prove harder to slow than it was initially thought, economists warn. Households have increasingly shifted spending away from physical goods to experiences. Inflationary pressures, too, have shifted from goods toward services, where price acceleration can be harder to tame, according to AP. In part, that’s because chronic labor shortages at stores, restaurants, hotels and other service-sector industries have led many employers in those industries to keep raising pay to attract or retain workers. Those employers, in turn, have generally raised prices to make up for their higher labor costs, thereby fueling inflation even more.

Overall economy: According to published reports, the economy regained its footing last summer after enduring an anemic first half of 2022. The GDP contracted from January through March last year and again from April through June. GDP grew at a 3.2% annual rate from July through September; a 2.7% rate from October through December. Steady consumer spending contributed heavily to the growth. Economists still foresee a recession sometime this year — they were always skeptical of a soft landing — but now see it coming later than they’d expected.

It remains a mixed bag: We continue to spend, shrugging off higher interest rates and prices.

But it comes down to a bottom line: Like our communities, we all need to watch the signs and be mindful of our spending, mounting debt and an eye toward long-term budgeting. The rocky economy does not show signs of easing, so we all — from the state down to the individual — need to make smart decisions, or risk facing some hard consequences until things can turn around.

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