Better buy those “forever” stamps now, because first class postage is going up by a penny in May. First class stamps will be 42 cents. You can still buy the forever stamps at 41 cents until May, and save a penny. More details on the other tweaks to the rates are at the USPS.gov site.

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Nationally there are several themes that keep recurring. The first big story is how the subprime mortgage crisis is only the tip of the ice berg. Apparently, it’s not just the subprime mortgage holders seeing a rise in foreclosures. The so called prime mortgages, often sold to “flipper” real estate investors are starting to alarm the financial market watchers. If there’s no secondary market to sell real estate backed securities, the availability of credit will shrink leading to less real estate transactions.

Which leads to the next big story emerging, which is the nationwide municipal budget meltdown. The LA Times ran a story yesterday about the impact on principally, high growth areas:

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The democratization of access to data continues to disturb those who discover that no area is left unmashed and repurposed. Mashing, a term very web 2.0, is when an application such as Google Maps is used to display data from another application. Let’s look at an example of this, chicagocrime.org. Everything you wanted to know about a crime in Chicago, right there in a google map. There are hundreds of others, crime just being one of those more easily produced since many police departments use GIS tools to combat crime. Another one, zillow.com, takes real estate sales data and listings and maps it out for you.

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On the surface, anything that takes a step towards property tax relief for the beleaguered homeowner seems like a good thing. Who wouldn’t support a check against the never ending rise in taxes. But, you can’t have policy decisions created in a vacuum and where Rell’s proposal falls short is exactly along the lines of not thinking about the realities outside the old Hoover thinking.

The problem with Hartford telling towns the maximum that they could raise taxes is that it would pit the various mandates that Hartford imposes, like the state Educational mandates, at an unfair advantage over the things a municipality might like to do. To meet a proposed 3% cap would lead to fierce budget battles pitting schools versus other municipal services, battles we already see now.

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According to Mayor Moccia, there may be 1900 subprime loans in Norwalk that could be caught in the tightening credit squeeze affecting interest rates. Not all loans are at risk, but potentially some are, and the city is ready to step forward and help. From the Hour:

“I want to ensure that everyone who may face this problem is aware of the programs available,” Moccia said. “Norwalk has over 1,900 subprime loans with a value of over $600 million dollars. While not all families with these mortgages are facing payment problems, based on best estimates, approximately 10 percent could be.”

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Antares was riding high, they were being touted as a smart growth, economic boosting, real estate development guru. Now, according to the Advocate, they are showing signs of cracks caused by the financial market exposures to bad sub prime mortgage lending. The Advocate reports:

After showing signs of trouble when it scrapped condominium conversion plans for two of the largest apartment complexes in town, a Greenwich developer has defaulted on a loan, signaling more woes for the beleaguered project, according to a public notice published yesterday.

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The Census Bureau recently released population estimates for Fairfield County and claimed that the population has declined since 2005. Apparently Census bureau estimators don’t travel much by car. The basics, according to the Connecticut Post, in 2005 Fairfield County’s population clocked in at 901,086 and they are now saying that 2006 is 900,440. The 1k loss doesn’t affect our standing as the most populous county in Connecticut. But that is likely because Hartford and New Haven counties also saw slipping numbers.

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When Rell vetoed the GAAP bill, she was essentially prolonging the long history of Connecticut government to ignore fiscal reality and continue talking about the mythical surplus. It seems unlikely that the legislature under the Democratic majority will override the veto. Brian Lockhart’s article digs through the issue:

Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the General Assembly’s Democratic majority abandoned proposed income tax increases this legislative session after learning the state’s surplus had reached $1 billion.

But it turns out the state is simultaneously $1 billion in the red.

Connecticut keeps two sets of books - one for budgeting purposes and the other for accounting purposes.

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How did I miss this one? Ah, one of those friday press releases perhaps. Governor Rell vetoed the bill that would have made Connecticut leap into the reality based community and account for revenues the way they should be, after they’ve been collected. Instead Rell had this to say:

Governor M. Jodi Rell today vetoed a bill that would have authorized the State Comptroller to prescribe the use of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Current law requires the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) to prescribe the use of GAAP.

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Nancy Wyman gets it right when he levelled criticism at the new budget agreed to by the legislature. From the Courant:

“Using the great majority of this one-time windfall to fund ongoing programs is a very questionable financial practice,” she said in a written statementThe legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis has projected that the state could see budget deficits totaling $1.7 billion from fiscal years 2010 to 2012.

“This year’s enormous surplus was created mainly by workers through the payroll tax and investors through the capital gains tax,” Wyman said. “Government should be using that surplus money to safeguard the taxpayers’ financial future, not on a one-year spending spree.”

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