Thumbs up, thumbs down
Thumbs up to the UConn women’s basketball team. The season didn’t end the way anyone in Connecticut hoped it would, with a shocking loss to Arizona in the Final Four on Friday. For a program with 11 national championships, the standards of success are absurdly high. But it shouldn’t be lost how much this year’s team accomplished, under uniquely difficult pandemic-influenced circumstances. And because the team has no seniors and a stellar group of incoming recruits, next year could be something special. Regardless of the disappointing finish, UConn made lockdown a little more pleasant for thousands of fans this year.
Thumbs up to the burgeoning competition between Sikorsky Airport, in Stratford, and New Haven’s Tweed Airport over which will be the dominant transportation hub of southwestern Connecticut. Each one has selling points and areas in need of improvement, but what matters most is that one emerges as the focal point of support from the state and federal governments. For Connecticut to compete on a national level, it needs a workable option for air travel at its economic center without relying on New York City. Whichever airport comes out on top will go a long way toward securing the state’s economic future.
Thumbs down to corporate tax incentives. A recent study in the journal Public Administration Review found that many states, including Connecticut, that used incentives as an economic development tool often ended up in worse condition financially than they started. The new data comes in the context of the departure of Blue Sky Studios from Greenwich, a product of corporate mergers, and a state auditor’s complaint that the company was awarded some $49 million in incentives that never should have happened. With so many states offering such tax incentives, none are positioned to bypass them at risk of being left behind, and so they continue to be a main economic planning tool.
Thumbs down to another rise in COVID-19 hospitalizations in Connecticut. Equally concerning is that the positivity rate in the state stubbornly remains above 3 percent. The death toll has not stopped either, and stood at 7,904 on Monday. Five hundred patients hospitalized for a single disease is still a formidable figure, and a reminder that there’s a big difference between progress and an end to this crisis.
Thumbs up to the many Connecticut residents continuing to embrace the opportunity to get vaccinated. On Thursday, as the last age group of adults became eligible to register, 100,000 appointments were made. There are still far too many residents with medical challenges facing a crowded line, but the fervor to get shots suggests the majority of Connecticut residents are doing the right thing to get their lives back to normal. Hopefully, the system will continue to get streamlines so vaccines can be distributed rapidly.