Editorial Roundup: New England

Editorials from around New England:

CONNECTICUT

No winners in politicizing trans athletes

Stamford Advocate

Feb. 28

One of the problems with sports - and there are many - is that competition conditions people to take sides.

We crown Super Bowl, basketball and Olympic champions with such overinflated fanfare that every runner-up is parked in the category of loser.

On a scholastic level, sports can be a training ground for teamwork and setting goals. It can relieve stress and provide health benefits of mind and body. It can provide lessons in graciously accepting defeat, something everyone faces in life.

A recent scuffle between high school hockey dads in Stamford was a regrettable example of the perils of taking competition too seriously. The problem of overzealous parents in the stands of youth sports seems to chase every generation.

Now there is a more topical spin on sports gone awry. Three high school athletes are suing the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference along with some boards of education to keep transgender athletes from competing against them.

The three runners claim unfair competition could cost them college scholarships, as two transgender competitors have reportedly claimed 15 titles previously held by nine girls.

It’s a conflict that calls for poise and thoughtful consideration. Instead, it has been politicized.

Next month, the Connecticut Republican Party plans to present a “Courage Award” to the trio, deeming them “brave girls” who are “leading the charge to save women’s sports!”

We don’t discount that it wasn’t easy for Chelsea Mitchell, Alanna Smith, and Selina Soule to raise their hands in protest, but it is a repellent choice on the part of the GOP to leverage them with an award at a party fundraiser.

Connecticut Democratic Party Chair Nancy Wyman dubbed the response of her Republican counterparts “beyond shameful.”

The transgender athletes, Terry Miller of Bloomfield High School and Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell High School, have asked that they be named defendants in the lawsuit, a true act of, yes, courage. They have had the support of Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Terry and Andraya are girls,” said Robin McHaelen, executive director of the Hartford-based LGBTQ advocacy group Our True Colors Inc .

The lawsuit refers to them as “biological boys.”

Once again, sports has divided the human species - in this case teenagers - into boxes labeled “winners” and “losers.”

Assuming scholarships will be lost isn’t giving much credit to recruiters in athletic departments, who know how to interpret times recorded in high school track meets. It’s not as if superstars haven’t been recruited from high school lineups with losing records.

We can sympathize with families who only want a level playing field, especially since that field would be different in states where transgender athletes would be barred from the same competition. But Miller and Yearwood played by the rules they were given.

Responding to defeat with a lawsuit is misguided. Leveraging teenagers for political gain is simply repulsive.

There is no reason to take sides when both merit a measure of empathy. Winning can’t be everything.

Online: https://bit.ly/2TnKUpP

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MAINE

Benefits should reflect sacrifices of Maine’s crime analysts

Portland Press Herald

Feb. 28

In recognition of the intensity of their work, and of the sacrifices they make in their service, public safety officers are eligible for an earlier pension plan than other state workers. The superior retirement not only rewards them for their role in keeping Mainers safe, but also serves to attract and retain candidates who could find less extreme, and perhaps more lucrative, work elsewhere.

We argued last year that civilian employees in the Maine State Police crime lab and Computer Crimes Unit deserve the same status.

A bill before the Legislature would do just that – it passed last year but was held over for funding. It has not been included in Gov. Mills’ supplemental budget, which is under review now. As legislators decide how to spend $127 million, these workers should get their consideration.

They’ve earned it. These civilian employees are integral to the investigative process, and they deal with some of the ugliest facets of the worst crimes our state sees.

In doing so, they take on a significant burden. They process crime scenes or review endless photographic and video evidence of child sexual assault. It is essential to finding justice for victims and perhaps stopping the suffering of others – but it leaves a lasting scar.

It is work that even an experienced and hardened state trooper would have trouble with. David Armstrong, who spent 27 years as a trooper before moving to the Computer Crimes Unit, told lawmakers the cases he handles now “are the most horrific cases of my entire career.”

Police, he said, only have to witness enough to know that a crime has occurred. Analysts have to go through footage of child pornography frame by frame. “I cannot help but feel some level of guilt that I am secretly grateful that I am not doing that part of the investigation,” he testified.

The experience is not something they can leave at work, either.

“I recall time after time that I have come home from work in an angry mood and have such a short fuse for my husband and children because of the burnout I feel from work and the anger I am filled with after seeing adults abuse these children,” Jill Armstrong, a forensic analyst at the computer unit, told legislators.

After a while, Armstrong says, it can be a struggle to give her child a bath or to be intimate with her husband.

Brandi Caron, a DNA analyst at the crime lab, said the same. “Moments of motherhood that should be precious memories like my son’s first bath was instead contaminated by the memory of a case involving an infant whose mother drugged and drowned him in a tub,” she testified.

“The images and smells never leave you,” a forensic chemist told lawmakers. “I will never trust a man other than her father with my precious girl,” a 13-year veteran of the Computer Crimes Unit testified.

These jobs are difficult but necessary. They are not for everyone, and they are not for the long haul. The benefits they offer should reflect that.

There are a lot of worthy items competing for a place in the supplemental budget. At around $45,000 a year, the cost of moving these few civilian employees to a better retirement plan is one of the least expensive. It deserves lawmakers’ consideration.

Online: https://bit.ly/3clhbq3

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MASSACHUSETTS

Providence Behavioral Health decision to end inpatient services will harm most vulnerable in Western Mass.

The Republican of Springfield

Feb. 28

The decision by Providence Behavioral Health Hospital to discontinue inpatient psychiatric services in Holyoke will create a vacuum in Western Massachusetts and impact the most vulnerable and stigmatized of our society - those battling mental illness.

While licensed for 74 inpatient psychiatry beds, Providence Hospital has regularly operated at less than 60 beds for adult, geriatric and pediatric patients over the past two years due to what it described as “persistent provider shortages that have now become critical.”

Attracting and retaining qualified staffing is critical for any organization, especially a hospital.

Further, it is widely known that behavioral health is an expensive, labor intensive service and does not generate the revenue other forms of care provide.

Providence Hospital’s parent company, Trinity Health, is well-schooled in this.

As one of the nation’s largest Catholic healthcare systems, Trinity Health includes 92 hospitals across 22 states and employs 129,000 people, including 7,500 employed physicians and other clinical staff. Its annual operating revenues exceed $19 billion.

Beyond the dollars and cents of the decision, there are other factors to consider.

There is a shortage of inpatient psychiatry beds in Western Massachusetts, especially those for pediatric patients.

The decision to close inpatient psychiatric services at Providence Hospital will leave both Central and Western Massachusetts without any inpatient pediatric psychiatric beds.

Parents of troubled, or suicidal teens unable to find hospitalization in Holyoke will be forced to seek inpatient care in Salem or Manchester, Conn.

This will create a hardship on working and low income families.

Providence Hospital’s decision could not come at a worse time.

Baystate Health had been working with a for-profit US HealthVest LLC, on a proposed $30 million inpatient behavioral health hospital in Holyoke at the former Geriatric Authority site a few miles from the Providence hospital. However, that deal ended in the fall and Baystate is currently evaluating potential partners.

The nurses union, UAW 2322, has proposed legislation that would make it harder for hospitals to close or to eliminate services.

“Hospital corporations such as Trinity Health, Baystate Health, Partners Healthcare, UMass Memorial Health Care and Steward Healthcare have closed at least 30 hospitals or hospital units over the last 11 years,” the union said in a news release. “At least 11 of these were deemed ‘essential services’ by the state Department of Public Health, but executives closed them anyway.”

Online: https://bit.ly/2VD65Hj

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

Voters should uphold Maine’s vaccination law

Foster’s Daily Democrat

Feb. 25

Smallpox, polio, the measles, whooping cough and other contagious diseases may today seem to many Americans like quaint threats from a bygone era.

Infections that once sickened, maimed and killed us have effectively been banished from our communities through aggressive and well-coordinated public health campaigns. The cornerstone of those efforts over the past century and a half has been widespread vaccination.

All the while, debate has raged over the proper balance between the interests of communal health and individual rights. When should the government require vaccination? Who should be permitted to opt out? And to what extent should objections based on sincere philosophical or religious beliefs be accommodated? These questions are neither simple nor easily answered, considering our commitment to freedoms of conscience.

“But,” as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 115 years ago in a decision that affirmed a smallpox vaccination mandate in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.”

There are times when the government has good enough reason to curtail individual liberty, in a limited fashion, to advance the common good. That principle justified Cambridge’s smallpox vaccination mandate at the dawn of the 20th Century. It has justified vaccination requirements in U.S. schools since. And it justifies the law signed last year by Gov. Janet Mills to tighten Maine’s vaccination requirements.

Maine has historically imposed certain vaccination requirements in schools and health care facilities but allowed exemptions for medical, religious or philosophical reasons. The new law, which takes effect Sept. 1, 2021, keeps the medical exemptions but eliminates the ability to opt out for religious or philosophical reasons. Maine is one of five states to have eliminated such non-medical exemptions.

Mainers unhappy with the new law launched a ballot referendum to repeal it. If a majority of voters mark “yes” on their referendum ballots when they go to the polls this Tuesday, March 3, then the referendum will succeed and the state’s religious and philosophical exemptions will be restored. In our view, however, Maine people should vote “no” and uphold the new law, to protect the most vulnerable among us.

Not everyone is healthy enough to be immunized. Some vaccines aren’t recommended for people who are pregnant, living with HIV or otherwise immuno-compromised, for example, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But vulnerable people are shielded from infection when enough healthy people in their communities have been vaccinated. This is the concept known as “herd immunity.”

The vaccination rate needed to attain herd immunity depends on how contagious a given infection is. Epidemiologists estimate that a highly contagious disease, such as the measles, could require a 95% immunization rate. But the current rate of philosophical and religious exemptions cited by Maine students makes it difficult to meet that threshhold.

An estimated 93.8% of Maine kindergartners in the 2018-2019 school year had received at least two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, as required, according to a survey report from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. About 5.2% of kindergartners had secured an MMR exemption, whether for medical, religious or philosophical reasons, and another 1% had records missing.

Overall, an estimated 5.6% of Maine kindergartners cited a non-medical exemption for one or more vaccines that year, according to the report. That rate, which has been climbing in recent years, remains consistently higher than the national average. It’s worth noting, though, that Maine’s statewide average isn’t evenly distributed, so certain communities and certain schools have especially high rates of non-medical exemptions. This needs to end.

We do not take lightly the concerns of those who object to this new law, but we believe the circumstances at hand warrant such a policy, to keep the horrors of these contagious diseases in the past.

Online: https://bit.ly/2vePiQ1

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RHODE ISLAND

Change airport’s name, already

The Providence Journal

Feb. 25

We’ve had two years of fighting over semantics. The Rhode Island General Assembly should listen to the experts and change the name of the state’s largest airport from T.F. Green to Rhode Island International Airport.

Iftikhar Ahmad, CEO of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation, says that this name change would help improve traffic at the airport.

We can’t determine absolutely whether that is true. But at least a name change would remove one of the excuses for its struggling performance.

At the heart of the name game is a gnawing problem for the airport: More people want to fly out than fly in (see “T.F. Green seeks to boost inbound traffic,” news, Feb. 22, by Patrick Anderson, as well as our podcast interview with Mr. Ahmad, “The Insiders with Ed Achorn”).

Consider the flights between T.F. Green and Ireland that ended last year. Norweigian Air jets leaving T.F. Green were on average more than 70% full. When they returned to Rhode Island, only 30% of the seats were filled.

As Mr. Anderson noted, “locals are using the airport to fly elsewhere much more often than people in other markets are flying here to visit.”

Mr. Ahmad believes that imbalance is to blame for a recent slippage in service, which had climbed after his arrival in 2016. The airport’s name is one explanation, he says.

Outside of Rhode Island (and maybe inside), few people know who Theodore F. Green was. Answer: A Depression-era Democratic governor of Rhode Island and longtime U.S. senator who died way back in 1966.

People around the country don’t know where T.F. Green is. “T.F. Green could be in Spokane, Washington, or Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It could be in Reno, Nevada,” Mr. Ahmad said.

In 2017, officials at the Bob Hope Airport in Southern California faced a similar challenge. The name of a superstar comedian from an earlier generation did not connect potential users to the airport’s advantages. It accordingly became Hollywood Burbank Airport to increase recognition of its location to out-of-staters.

Granted, many poorly educated Americans do not know what or where Rhode Island is. (One common error is to confuse it with Long Island, in New York.) But literate people who tend to fly are apt to be aware that Rhode Island is one of the 50 states, known for its sandy beaches, colonial towns and the Gilded Age magnificence of Newport.

Providence International Airport might conceivably work better as a name. But it appears that leaders in Warwick, where the airport is located, are so intensely parochial that they will not endure that.

The House approved the name change. The Senate should as well. Let’s get something done and move on, folks.

Of course, the thing that would really drive traffic to our airport is a vibrant economy attracting business travelers, instead of one of the nation’s worst business climates. We have written, year after year, about what that would take: a more competitive tax and regulatory structure, more efficient government and much stronger public schools.

Online: https://bit.ly/2wRVuO8

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VERMONT

Time is right to legalize, regulate, tax cannabis sales in Vermont

The Brattleboro Reformer

On Wednesday, the Vermont House of Representatives voted in favor (90-54) of a bill that would legalize, regulate, and tax cannabis sales for adults 21 and older. S.54 was scheduled for a final House vote Thursday and if, as expected, it passes there, it will return to the Senate, which has already approved a different version of the bill in a 23-5 vote.

The House and Senate will have to agree on a final version of the bill before it can proceed to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk. Scott has said he’s open to considering the legislation as long as it contains several key provisions, including carving out 30 percent of future tax revenues for prevention efforts and setting aside money for after-school programs. Scott also doesn’t believe police should need court warrants to conduct saliva testing for suspected intoxicated drivers; the current bill would require warrants.

Vermont legalized possession and cultivation of cannabis for adults in 2018. If the new bill is enacted, Vermont would join the 10 states that have laws regulating and taxing cannabis for adult use, including nearby Massachusetts, which became the first state on the East Coast with regulated recreational marijuana stores in November 2018, some as nearby as Greenfield, Turners Falls and Williamstown.

An overwhelming 76 percent of Vermont residents support allowing adults 21 and over to purchase cannabis from regulated, tax-paying small businesses, according to a recent poll conducted by Public Policy Polling.

Supporters of S.54 argue that Vermont’s current approach - allowing people to grow and possess limited amounts of marijuana without giving them the ability to purchase it - has only strengthened the black market, while preventing the state from taking in much-needed tax revenues.

Some lawmakers, including Democrats, understandably harbor concerns over health impacts and the potential for more youth usage.

Critics of S.54 have two main objections: Small growers say the proposal presents too many barriers to the legal market; others say the legislation does not rectify decades of marijuana criminalization that has disproportionately impacted people of color.

Lawmakers say they have included adequate protections for small businesses, and a separate bill addresses the criminalization issue.

The House bill places a 14 percent excise tax and a 6 percent sales tax on cannabis sales. According to an estimate from the Joint Fiscal Office, the state could expect to see about $13 million in tax revenue about four years after dispensaries start selling to consumers in 2022. Of that amount, $8.9 million would be sent to the general fund, and $3.8 million would go to the education fund.

Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, said it’s important to keep the tax rate low, to keep the price of the drug down and discourage people from relying on the black market.

In Massachusetts, the combined tax rate on the substance can be as high as 20 percent. During the first full year of recreational marijuana business in Massachusetts, dispensaries made more than $420 million in sales, resulting in approximately $71.4 million in taxes during the calendar year.

Several Vermont towns, including Dover in Windham County, have taken preemptive action to ban dispensaries, but it’s unclear whether those bans will hold up under future legislation. We have to believe that certain small farmers and business entrepreneurs in southern Vermont would welcome the opportunity to jump into a potentially lucrative market which could complement business and tourism efforts in towns such as Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Wilmington and Bennington.

It makes little sense that an adult can possess and grow marijuana in Vermont but cannot purchase or sell it legally, under controlled and limited circumstances, in this state. It’s time to rectify that situation - to the benefit of small businesses, consumers and the state’s tax coffers.

Online: https://bit.ly/39dkc9W

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