Waterbury Real Estate - The View from the Edge
09/07/2007

A Column By Bob DeCosmo
The Politics of the Bleeding Heart Liberals! We have all heard the term before but what truly defines a “Bleeding Heart Liberal,” and what sets them apart from say a “Tree Hugging Liberal,” or just your average run of the mill “Liberal”?

Well, “Bleeding Heart Liberals” are Communists, “Tree Hugging Liberals” are Socialists and “Liberals” are Democrats who reside outside the Naugatuck Valley. Here in Waterbury the Democratic Party has its roots in labor. Waterbury was a working class blue-collar town for generations and the unions represented factory workers who needed their help. Our local democrats still care about family values and the working class but get outside the comfort of the “Valley” and the Democrats are wildly different. Just take the “Gay Marriage” issue for instance. Senator Andrew McDonald from Stamford and Mike Lawlor from East Haven are the two Democratic chairmen for the Judiciary Committee at the General Assembly. These two Democrats control one of the most powerful committees at the Connecticut Capitol. When McDonald says that 80% of Connecticut has no problem with gay marriage, he’s nuts! 80% have a problem with gay marriage yet it is this liberal spin that gets pushed in the press. Also, you buck the chairman of a committee, you have no chance of seeing one of your proposals make it out of that committee, effectively killing your legislation, and so it’s political arm-twisting at its worst. Well the liberals seem to want to put private housing owners out of business and have the government take over housing the poor people. At least that is they way it seems according to some long term State Representatives I have spoken with recently. This leads to what I describe now as a new era in Connecticut legislative history, the era of....

Robin Hood Politics, a term that I am not sure I invented but it truly strikes me as something we need to discuss. In Connecticut because liberalism is so well respected and entrenched at the General Assembly, we have transformed into a state where we attack the working class taxpayers and transform those hard-earned tax dollars into social programs that are given to our least ambitious and non-productive residents here in Connecticut. I just don’t know how much more they can take from us taxpayers when gasoline is $3.00 a gallon, electricity and heating costs average me $400 a month and everything is going up at the grocery store. We have way too many people sitting around doing nothing to contribute to our society in Connecticut and we have well entrenched politicians and bureaucrats who are making a living serving this indecency, now they are pushing the throttle harder to try to take even more taxes from us average folks. How did it get this bad? Easy, we are all at work when these special interest groups and liberals decided to invade our checkbooks. These legislative committees hold public hearings and meet during the workweek and few of us can say to the boss, “I am taking the day off to testify at the Capitol on the proposed lead paint regulations tomorrow.” Your boss will think you have just been out drinking, or just went nuts or are out looking for another job, anyway, you won’t be at that public hearing! So who actually attends these meetings? Unfortunately not many of us taxpayers, but the bureaucratic insiders who get paid for this with our taxes and the liberals with their lobbyists spewing propaganda and statistics at the committee members without rebuttal from the taxpayers. Not only are we busy at work trying to pay all these taxes and other bills, most folks think that their political voice doesn’t matter and politics is corrupt. So we get law changes that once on the books are difficult to remove because there is little constituent involvement in Connecticut. We are in big trouble here in Connecticut unless the political scales begin to equal out soon.

Blight and graffiti... well I solved the problem, but will we implement the solution?
Since last issue, I have been at it again, the tenant who tossed all the garbage over the railing last issue, still does and again my dumpster is getting packed by the neighbors. So we bought a lock and gave 2 keys to each tenant, the lock lasted a week, supposedly lost by the “garbage-tosser” on purpose and my dumpster got rolled down the block a bit to the neighbors building and filled by their tenants. Our dumpster has wheels and the one that is supplied for my neighbor’s building doesn’t and is about a 75 foot walk from their rear porch, so my dumpster is the neighborhoods choice! I started an eviction on a tenant and immediately had her caseworker and agency spokesmen on the phone with me. Apparently my tenant is an angel and I am a slumlord and when was I going to repair the window that she broke in the apartment. My lease says you break it, you fix it, but I repaired the window because this was escalating quickly for a showdown at the United Nations and landlords don’t do well in that arena. So now I pay someone to go there every week and pick up their crap which still gets tossed over the railing, remember all we had to do was cite the tenant for tossing their stuff over the railing and make them responsible for their actions, but that wasn’t how this one played out.

So anyhow on to my proposal, what I uncovered was this, Waterbury has about 5,000 arrests year to date and we add in about 200 names weekly into Tenanttrack’s database of arrest records. Some names jump out at me and I have seen the same individual arrested 5 times for drug sales and possession charges now and he’s still going strong. In another instance in the span of 12 days another individual was arrested 5 times, that’s just incredible. There are over 160 arrests so far from people living at the homeless shelter on Benedict Street and the beat goes on! I recently spoke with Joe D’Amato, a neighborhood police officer and we discussed my revelation that there is so much repeat crime and these guys are still out there. The problem is the prison system is overcrowded and these low level crimes do not get jail time. Unless we start prosecuting the individuals who are actually throwing this stuff around the blight will continue and remember what I said, the liberals who are in charge at the Capitol feel it’s very posh to prosecute property owners.

Unfortunately, we can’t guard our dumpster 24 hours a day 7 days a week to make sure our tenants are properly disposing of their rubbish and only my tenants are using my dumpster. However if we just turn to the Community Court as an option in the campaign on blight instead of just handing out dismissals and Nolle’s to these low level criminals, especially the repeat ones, maybe we can clean up our cities. Just give them all a rake, shovel and broom and have them cleaning up this mess, it’s an easy fix and we have an endless supply of free labor.

The Waterbury Mayor’s Race is on and it looks like we will have a mayoral debate on housing issues on October 23. The Waterbury Property Owners Association and the Waterbury Board of Realtors will sponsor the debate. Housing touches all of us and our neighborhoods are in deep trouble; whether it’s proposed condo developments, infrastructure neglect, drug gangs, blight, property abandonment, it’s a mess. It is time to get serious and get all the stakeholders into this mix. We will give the candidates the questions in advance to research their positions. The candidate’s responses will be graded and scored by a panel of at least 10 including; Realtors, property owners, tenants and neighborhood civic leaders, the results will be made public on who had the best answers for each question, good luck to the candidates.

Property Revaluation, oh I can’t wait to see the new tax assessments. With the housing market arguably in full retreat, what new tax values will be applied to your property and how dramatic is the shift of the tax burden from commercial to residential properties going to be. So now with the economy heading south, property values heading south and I might speculate and say a statistical revaluation based upon the high water mark in real estate values being used, this creates a poisonous recipe. In fact so poisonous if a majority of residents feel their assessments are incorrect and they can’t afford to make the higher payments, the beleaguered homeowner can appeal their new bill. My understanding is that while under appeal, that homeowner will pay only 75% of their new tax bill to the city pending the outcome of their court cases. Wouldn’t this cause the Oversight Board to come back to the city and seize operations again because if tax collections are off that much and we run into fiscal trouble again, doesn’t the Oversight Board take over again? Better wait till last minute to crunch those numbers at the assessor’s office as housing values are softening rapidly!

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