Rep. Urban: Get off your Amistad hobby horse

I magine how useless it would be to have state Rep. Diana Urban at your family kitchen table, if the financial wolves were at the door.

Cancel the vacation! Take away junior’s tuition assistance! Sell dad’s car! Those are some suggestions you might expect to hear on how to balance a badly broken household budget, but not from Urban.

From the reality-challenged Democrat from North Stonington, you might hear some useless savings suggestion, like shutting off the bathroom nightlight, which she doesn’t like anyway, or maybe switching to store-brand cereal.

Indeed, Urban’s only public suggestion this week for tackling the latest hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars hole in the state budget is to cut $263,000 slated for the schooner Amistad, Connecticut’s final contribution to the historic ship replica it created. Earth to Urban: The savings of cutting the Amistad would have an almost mathematically incalculable impact on the bloated budget deficit.

Honestly, if it weren’t so pathetic, this shameful representation of the region’s interests in the General Assembly would be funny.

Worse, I see it as Urban’s pandering, once again, to racist-tinged criticism, masquerading as fiscal austerity, of the state’s commitment, made long ago, to remember and retell a story so crucial to the history of black people in Connecticut, the historic unshackling of slavery, the freeing of African captives put on trial here.

Let’s not forget that the creation of the Amistad was the result of a statewide, bipartisan commitment, a swelling of Connecticut pride, that particularly benefited eastern Connecticut, and the fine shipwrights that built the schooner at Mystic Seaport.

First, let’s unpack some of the baggage of Urban’s latest ego-driven budget rhetoric.

The $263,000 is the last payment from the state to Amistad. There is zero, zip, nothing in next year’s budget. This is already the end of the funding line for Amistad. Everyone else understands this is a subsidy the state can no longer afford.

But Urban couldn’t help but again climb onto her Amistad hobby horse, a budget whine she has managed to turn into a headline-grabbing art form.

If the North Stonington representative were paying any attention, she would know, like the rest of us, that the schooner Amistad was wrestled away, under court supervision, from the operators of a now-defunct nonprofit that had spirited the ship out of the state while continuing to collect state subsidies.

The ship itself, ably recovered with a legal intervention by state Attorney

General George Jepsen, is now run by a newly organized nonprofit that has made clear it understands it needs to create a new future for the teaching vessel that will no longer include state funding.

I will give Rep. Urban credit for her early Amistad-related criticism of state officials, after this newspaper broke the story that the nonprofit that previously had controlled the ship had lost its tax-free nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service after not filing tax returns for three years. The state ignored the obvious unraveling of the nonprofit it had been funding for way too long.

In hindsight, though, it appears the North Stonington representative was perhaps more concerned that any money was dedicated to the ship and its teaching mission than worried about the lack of accountability from the defunct nonprofit.

Even now, with the ship in safe hands, with a commitment to carry on the original mission, one conceived of to tell the great story of Connecticut’s role in abolishing slavery, without any more state funding, Rep. Urban continues to criticize.

Could it be because she has so few black constituents?

Pity Connecticut’s legislators, who will soon return to the budget battlefield to try to find a way to close an ever-widening deficit, and to help cash-starved Medicare recipients in the state.

They will have to do it without help from Rep. Urban, who seems only to want to make the state budget problems all about herself.