Two Connecticut metros, Hartford and Bridgeport-Stamford, are in the Top Ten small cities for college graduates to start their careers, according to CreditDonkey, the financial education site aimed at millennials.

That contrasts with the sixth annual “Rich States, Poor States” [...]]]> Two more state-ranking lists are out and the picture is interesting.

Two Connecticut metros, Hartford and Bridgeport-Stamford, are in the Top Ten small cities for college graduates to start their careers, according to CreditDonkey, the financial education site aimed at millennials.

That contrasts with the sixth annual “Rich States, Poor States” report by the ultra-conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, ranking states by economic competitiveness. Connecticut is near the bottom, of course. We’re No. 46, largely because of lack of growth, the exodus of 102,670 people between 2002 and 2011, tax policy and costs, especially debt.

Let’s take a look at the winners and losers in this report, written by right-wing all-stars Arthur Laffer (the Reagan economist), Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal and Jonathan Williams of ALEC.

Utah, the perennial leader, is No. 1 again.  The top states read like a Republican utopia of hardscrabble nothingness — North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Idaho, Georgia, Mississippi and Florida are also part of the Top Ten. Thanks to the Yankee Institute for Public Policy, for its look at the report.

After years on top of ALEC’s business-friendly rankings, Utah must be climbing fast in median household income, the single most important measure of broad prosperity, right?

Between 2003 and 2011, according to Census data, Utah’s median grew by 12.6 percent to $55,493.  The U.S. median jumped by 15.5 percent to $50,054.

And woeful Connecticut? Median household income rose by 19 percent in those years, to $65,415 — No. 3 behind Maryland and New Hampshire. This isn’t an average, which skyrockets in Connecticut because of all the hedge-fund billionaires. It’s a median, the measure of a typical family’s income.

What we have here is a group of ideologues bent on proving that backward states with poor services, lousy schools and a hellish quality of life for working families are magnets for business.  There’s absolutely no science behind it. It’s a religion based on the twisted idea that low wages and low taxes are some kind of magic formula for success.

Certainly Connecticut wastes a lot of money, as the Yankee Institute and others — including us at The Courant — point out. And Connecticut has serious, deep-rooted fiscal troubles that make the business climate less than ideal. Job growth remains low and that hurts people looking for new opportunities.  But we’re doing something right or median income would fall.

These dozens of “business-friendly” lists that keep popping up are getting way too little scrutiny.

The CreditDonkey list is a look at three factors: median income, the average premium paid to college graduates and the cost of living. Bridgeport-Stamford is No. 1 despite high costs, because college grads in Fairfield County make twice as much as non-grads. And Hartford is No. 9, with a 73 percent college degree premium.  Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, Cal. is No. 1 and Worcester comes in at No. 7.

As always, Connecticut fares well when it comes to pay and quality of life measures. By also looking at costs, CreditDonkey is offering a slightly nuanced view of the world.

Layoffs mostly happened Tuesday but were expected to continue for some employees Wednesday, sources said.

“We are implementing changes [...]]]> ESPN is laying off employees in a cost-saving move that will affect more than 100 people in Bristol and more elsewhere, according to multiple sources, although the company did not report the size of the cutback.

Layoffs mostly happened Tuesday but were expected to continue for some employees Wednesday, sources said.

“We are implementing changes across the company to enhance our continued growth while smartly managing costs. While difficult, we are confident that it will make us more competitive, innovative and productive,” the sports television giant said in a written statement released Tuesday.

That line about continued growth might seem like pure corporate speak and in some ways it is. But ESPN, with more than 4,000 people in Bristol, continues to recruit and fill many open jobs through its active hiring web site.  That’s the nature of this type of cutback, and the hope is that some of the people laid off will land different jobs the company is filling.

Sources said the layoffs in Bristol alone would total more than 100.  Worldwide, including targeted cuts by attrition as well as layoffs, the number of job reductions would be in the low hundreds according to sources and news reports. The net effect of 2013 hiring and job eliminations by attrition was not known.

A small office in Denver was closed as part of the cuts, sources said.

ESPN has grown consistently, reaching more than 7,000 employees worldwide, spokesman Mike Soltys said Tuesday — including part-time as well as full-time employees.  The  Bristol headcount is up from earlier this year, when the network said it had just under 4,000, and would take a break from adding new buildings after the current round of expansion was done.

Tuesday’s layoffs will not push ESPN out of  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s First Five program, under which the network received a low-interest, partly forgivable loan of $17.5 million and as much as $8 million in grants and tax breaks in exchange for investing at least $25 million and adding at least 200 jobs in the five years starting August, 2011.

The layoffs are in areas and job descriptions “across the board,” Soltys said, adding that the reduction will include positions eliminated by attrition.

An employee at the sprawling Bristol campus said Tuesday there was no specific target of the cuts, and that the company was saying little to its staff.  “It’s been kind of a general head-picking,” the employee said. “The number appears to be relatively small but the problem is, you don’t know where it’s going to hit…it’s been dotted throughout the day.”

ESPN is a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co., which has also been eliminating jobs at its far-flung operations. Deadline Hollywood, an entertainment news site, said Tuesday that Disney eliminated 150 jobs at its film studio over the last several weeks.

Soltys and Andrew Doba, spokesman for Malloy, both emphasized that the layoff is not a threat to ESPN’s role as the dominant player in Connecticut’s burgeoning sports media industry.

“ESPN has been and will continue to be a key employer and economic driver for Connecticut.  They remain well on their way to meeting their hiring goals as part of the First Five program,” Doba said.

Soltys declined to say how many full-time jobs the company had added since the deal was signed. But  even during its expansions, ESPN has had significant layoffs in the past — one in 2001 and another in 2009.

The latest expansion includes ESPN’s largest and most expensive building, its Digital Center 2, which is on schedule to open next spring.

In all, the network has received more than $100 million in Connecticut state tax breaks in the last dozen years.  Even before the First Five deal, ESPN carved out a permanent, $15 million-a-year tax break with the state under an expansion agreement reached in 2000.  In addition, the network had received $50.3 million for digital infrastructure development through the state’s film and digital tax credit program as of last fall.

All those deals makes sense by the numbers as long as ESPN spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year in Connecticut. But the state’s grants, loans and tax breaks don’t exactly challenge the Bristol juggernaut to keep up its historic pace of job creation. That has helped fuel the debate about the public assistance — whether it’s needed to prod ESPN and other companies to hire.

Next year, for example, ESPN will add a Southeast Conference network with production facilities in Charlotte, N.C. — a state with a very aggressive corporate payola strategy. That project is likely to mean some added jobs in Bristol.  How many? In this job environment, the state can’t afford to risk spurning its high-profile employers.

Got more information about Tuesday’s layoffs? Please let me know at dhaar@courant.com.

Nappier, fiduciary of the $26 billion pension and trust funds, was [...]]]> Shareholder activists including state Treasurer Denise L. Nappier, who tried to force JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon to give up his chairman post, will have to be satisfied with a moral victory. Their bid fell short Tuesday at the company’s annual meeting.

Nappier, fiduciary of the $26 billion pension and trust funds, was among the ringleaders of the effort. Despite support from unions and other pension funds, the nonbinding vote to create an independent, non-employee chairman, was defeated with one-third of shares voting favoring the split.

The Connecticut funds hold 1.5 million JPMorgan shares, valued at $74.5 million as of April 30, and $38 million in JPMorgan debt, Nappier’s office said.

Management and the JPMorgan board, and of course, Dimon himself, had worked hard to defeat the measure, so the one-third rebuke is something of an accomplishment.  Still, a similar bid got 40 percent of shares a year ago, and some had hoped that the scandal of 2012, in which a London trader lost $6 billion, would lead to a larger vote for a split.

Nappier’s statement, in part:

“The Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds and many other shareholders realize that highly integrated companies such as JPMorgan Chase, in order to ensure long-term value, should be managed by a CEO overseeing the business, and an independent chairman leading the board in its oversight and evaluation of the CEO’s performance. Independent Board leadership is an important governance variable to ensure that the company looks beyond today’s profits to future growth and success.”

Nappier sent Suzanne Hopgood, a corporate governance expert, former chair and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange company, and chairwoman of the Capital Region Development Authority, to represent her office at the JPMorgan shareholder meeting in Tampa, Fla.

Questions by shareholders about the board operations lasted more than an hour, said Hopgood, who conveyed Nappier’s respect for Dimon and his abilities, but also her concerns “that he has two positions.”

“They are two very difficult, challenging jobs,” Hopgood said.

Three directors on the risk committee were re-elected with votes of between 53 percent and 59 percent, Hopgood said, which are low totals reflecting the shareholders’ concerns.

Nappier is a veteran activist in corporate governance, especially this issue — the splitting of the roles of chairman and CEO. She led a successful campaign to persuade The Walt Disney Co. to split the roles in 2005, a move the company later reversed and Nappier is trying to restore, but her bid was turned back in March.

As with all of her activism, Nappier argues that her interest is in shareholder returns, not political points.  Tuesday, she cited a 2012 report by GMI Ratings that said 5-year returns were 28 percent higher at companies with a separate CEO and board chair than at companies with a consolidated office.

Nappier’s office, citing shareholder advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services, said 21.5 percent of Standard & Poor’s 500 firms had an independent chair in 2012, up from 18 percent two years earlier.

But the region, which includes Hartford, Middlesex and Tolland counties, had the second-fasted gain in suburban poverty of any metro [...]]]> Metro Hartford’s suburbs have among the lowest poverty rates among the largest 100 U.S. urban areas and the region is in the middle of the pack in growth of suburban poverty, a new report shows.

But the region, which includes Hartford, Middlesex and Tolland counties, had the second-fasted gain in suburban poverty of any metro in the northeast from 2000 to 2011, according to the report released Monday by the Brookings Institution. The release included a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, and a web site designed to spur awareness and action, www.confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org.

Metro Hartford had a suburban poverty rate of 8.6 percent in 2011, compared with a national average of 12.1 percent. The top five were all small metro regions in Texas and California, which are poor areas in general.

Nationwide, 55 percent of all people living in poverty are in suburbs, not core cities. That’s up from 47 percent in 1970, and includes 16.4 million people.

Metro Hartford’s suburban poor, 90,198 people in 2011, account for 68 percent of the region’s total because, of course, the city of Hartford is small compared with the region.

The growth rate of poverty in the Hartford suburbs was 62 percent, ranking it No. 48 among 95 of the top 100 metros. (Data was not available for five small metros.)  Only Rochester, at 75 percent, was higher among northeast metros, and the national average was 64 percent.

New Haven was at 52 percent growth, with a suburban poverty rate of 10.3 percent, and Bridgeport-Stamford was among the lowest growth rates in the nation, at 39 percent, with the lowest of all suburban poverty rates in 2011, 5.5 percent.

Springfield had the second-lowest growth rate in the last decade, at 18 percent, but it still had one of the region’s highest rates, at 11.6 percent.

The issue of suburban poverty brings together a dizzying mass of ideas and social changes.  For example, we can’t tell from the numbers whether poverty is concentrated in the suburbs of a given metro, or spread out. New Britain, which is a city, is counted as a suburb in the Brookings report, skewing the data.

Where is the suburban poverty in Metro Hartford? The report doesn’t get that granular, but I looked at Census figures, which show that two-thirds of suburban poverty is in nine municipalities. New Britain is by far the largest with more than 14,000 people under the poverty line. The others, in order:

East Hartford

Middletown

Bristol

Manchester

West Hartford

Enfield

Mansfield

Vernon

The problem with poverty is being poor, of course, and the location doesn’t necessarily make it better or worse but the authors of the book and Washington, D.C.-based Brookings, make the case that services for the poor are focused in cities and are absent from some suburbs that are seeing a rise in poverty. So, while not as concentrated as the problems that led to the War on Poverty nearly a half-century ago, today’s poverty is in some ways harder to attack, and harder for the people living in it because they may be isolated.

“All the basic supports that helped us survive, that in many cases are legacy assets of urban societies, are blank,” said Luis Ubiñas, president of the Ford Foundation, which supports suburban poverty programs. “People are living no better off but without a safety net.”

Elizabeth Kneebone, co-author of the book, pointed out that there are programs that work in places like Seattle, Houston and Chicago, but they require regional cooperation. That’s not a strong suit in Connecticut.

The rise in the last decade is certainly not just a matter of hard times, the authors said. And it’s not just a matter of poverty spreading out from the cities to the suburbs. If that were true, urban poverty would be further down, and growth of suburban poverty would be worse than it is in the northeast — because cities such as Boston, Hartford, Providence and Springfield are smaller in area than typical cities across the country.

The fact that the rise of suburban poverty is multifaceted and complex is highlighted by the list of metro areas with the fastest rise in the last decade — a very diverse group with different reasons for the rise:

On Friday, Bossidy brought a combination of homespun advice [...]]]> Larry Bossidy was never the CEO of a Connecticut-based company, but he’s been a big force in business here and elsewhere for decades at General Electric, Allied Signal, Honeywell International and lately, as a board member at Berkshire Bank, which owns the former CBT franchise .

On Friday, Bossidy brought a combination of homespun advice and hardnosed pragmatism to an economic conference of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, at the Sheraton Hartford South in Rocky Hill.

Larry Bossidy at CBIA economic conference
Dan Haar/The Hartford Courant
May 17, 2013

The precepts he offered are basic but the execution of them is not so easy, and Bossidy has the track record to back it up.  Know yourself, be humble, reward doers, anticipate change, create systems that root out errors and, mostly, be flexible, not rigid.

“People who have their minds made up are the ones who end up falling by the wayside,” Bossidy said.

Bossidy started his career at General Electric in 1957, where he rose to be chief operating officer of GE Credit, now GE Capital, and vice chairman of the company, the right-hand man to chairman and CEO Jack Welch.  Bossidy later turned Allied Signal into a top-performing company and sold it to Honeywell, which he ran in two stints, before and after Honeywell was nearly acquired by United Technologies, then General Electric, in 2001.

“I always discouraged a lot of philosophers around my place,” said Bossidy, 78. “You want good ideas but you want to get things done.”

That’s the theme of one of the two books Bossidy co-authored after retiring from Honeywell in 2002, “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done.”  He later co-wrote “Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters to Get Things Right.”

It’s the smart, tough, results-based management style that’s at the heart of GE culture. Bossidy was close to Harry Gray, who converted the old United Aircraft Co. into United Technologies, and who greatly admired Bossidy.  Like a lot of people, I assumed Gray had tried to recruit Bossidy in the tumultuous last years of Gray’s tenure at UTC in the mid-’80s.

Not true, Bossidy told me Friday. “We were friends, but  wouldn’t have gone to a GE competitor. I woudn’t have gone to UTC.”

He’s a Red Sox fan and UTC, he said, was “the Yankees.”  That was a different era, of course, and nowadays Red Sox and Yankees players jump ship for the Benjamins all the time.

“The quality and performance of U.S. companies is a lot better than it was ten years ago,” Bossidy said.

He sees more difficulty in the economy this year and no great boom in 2014 — in contrast to Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics, who told the audience that U.S. GDP growth could reach 5 percent next year. But Bosssidy said he’s “an optimist for the country,” and that we’ll solve the problems of long-term liabilities and other major structural worries over the economy.  Yolanda Kodrzycki, a vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and director of the New England Public Policy Center, had said earlier that those concerns could hamper economic growth for years.

But Bossidy’s main message transcended business, to the realm of leadership and more broadly, humanity. It’s very hard to promote innovation and teamwork at the same time, and it’s important to remember there are no cookie-cutter solutions to tough problems.

Bossidy was in some ways very much in the mold of typical speakers at business conferences — an accomplished CEO, still with a hand in the game. But he was broader than most, something CBIA appreciated, said Peter Gioia, the association’s vice president and head of research.

For example: As the more gregarious brother of a pair of twins, Bossidy said he learned humility from his mother. She told him, “It’s not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

A spokeswoman for the mall said the break was apparently caused by construction work in or around the store, and that damage to merchandise was minimal.

Using the power of the state’s $26 billion retirement fund, Nappier on Wednesday threw her support behind a shareholder resolution calling on Caterpillar to make sure its [...]]]> State Treasurer Denise L. Nappier is ramping up her shareholder activism, joining critics of Caterpillar Inc. who are pushing the mining and construction equipment giant to exit Sudan.

Using the power of the state’s $26 billion retirement fund, Nappier on Wednesday threw her support behind a shareholder resolution calling on Caterpillar to make sure its foreign subsidiaries don’t do business with the government of Sudan.

“While Caterpillar, Inc. may not have offices or employees in Sudan, and may not sell any products directly to the government of Sudan, the fact that its foreign subsidiaries do business there is enough to trigger our concerns,” Nappier said in a written release. “As the company admits in its filing, had those sales been made by U.S. divisions they would have been in violation of U.S. law.”

Connecticut’s fund raised the issue of human rights abuses in Sudan as early as 2006, Nappier said, adding that the situation has not improved. In response to the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, Connecticut passed a law that year, at Nappier’s urging, that restricts investment in companies found to be doing business there.

Connecticut is also active in the Conflict Risk Network, a group of institutional investors with more than $6 trillion in assets, which has placed Caterpillar on its watch list.

As of May 13, the Connecticut fund held $14.4 million in Caterpillar stock and $158,000 in bonds, Nappier’s office said.
“The State of Connecticut should not condone, or even appear to condone, genocide,” she said.

As fiduciary of the fund, Nappier has often been an activist on social and humanitarian issues as well as corporate governance. She argues that her activism is part of sound financial management, helping assure that global companies adhere to accepted principles of management.

Money was less important than job security to many in the union, at a time [...]]]> It took thirteen months since the last contract expired, but local 1298 of the Communications Workers of America has reached a 4-year deal with AT&T giving raises totaling nearly 11 percent to 3,200 wireline and customer service workers in Connecticut.

Money was less important than job security to many in the union, at a time when AT&T is reducing its wireline workforce because of the decline in landline phones.  The contract, which must be ratified by members, extends some layoff protection to employees hired between 2004 and 2012. That is a guarantee of a job offer in Connecticut for workers whose jobs are eliminated, but it does not assure equal pay or a specific location within the state.

The pact is retroactive to April, 2012, and includes raises of 5 percent this year, 3 percent next year and 2.5 percent in 2015. Workers would get a $350 ratification bonus, improvements in the retirement plan and, the union said in a written statement, “minimized increases in employee contributions towards the cost of health care coverage.”

Health insurance costs were a major issue, as they are in virtually all union talks.

“Given the state of the economy and the direction of the telecommunications industry, this is the best possible contract for our members,” CWA Local 1298 president Bill Henderson said in the written release. “We fought hard and this agreement will protect our members at a time when Corporate America has labor gasping for every last breath.”

AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said Saturday the pact was the last of seven negotiated since early 2012 across the country between the telecom giant and CWA.  He declined to say whether the 1298 contract is more favorable than others, saying, “they’re all pretty similar.”

“Our objective throughout the bargaining was to reach a fair agreement that would continue to allow us to provide excellent middle-class careers for our employees and we think this contract does that,” Richter said.

A CWA contract for a small number of AT&T wireless workers in Connecticut is separate; that bargaining unit was the first in the nation under AT&T’s wireless business.

]]> http://courantblogs.com/dan-haar/att-communications-union-reach-deal-for-3200-connecticut-workers/feed/ 8 http://courantblogs.com/dan-haar/the-highest-paid-public-employee-in-every-state/ http://courantblogs.com/dan-haar/the-highest-paid-public-employee-in-every-state/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 16:28:59 +0000 Dan Haar http://courantblogs.com/dan-haar/?p=1315 Who’s the highest paid public employee in every state? Yes, it’s the coach in most cases, as a new graphic produced by Deadspin.com shows. Connecticut is the only state where the highest paid employee coaches a women’s team — UConn’s Geno Auriemma, of course. He took the top spot after Jim Calhoun retired last [...]]]>

A section of the map by Deadspin.com

Who’s the highest paid public employee in every state? Yes, it’s the coach in most cases, as a new graphic produced by Deadspin.com shows. Connecticut is the only state where the highest paid employee coaches a women’s team — UConn’s Geno Auriemma, of course. He took the top spot after Jim Calhoun retired last year.

Football is the biggest winner, but there are a few surprises. One state has a coach in a sport that’s neither football nor basketball. And one state has a top earner who’s a plastic surgeon at the medical school.

The author, Reuben Fischer-Baum, makes the case that the coaches often aren’t worth the money.  That might not be a popular opinion in Connecticut, where Auriemma just won his eighth national championship.

Auriemma

In March, Auriemma signed a 5-year contract that pays him a total of $10.8 million plus bonuses. Calhoun worked for two years under a 5-year, $13 million contract before retiring in 2012, when he made $2.3 million.

Kevin Ollie, the current UConn men’s coach, signed a deal that pays him $7 million over five years, plus bonuses.

Thanks to Bill Hosley for posting the graphic on Facebook.

From the outside, the new firearm looks identical to [...]]]> Five weeks after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed a gun control law outlawing any retail sales for the entire product line of Stag Arms, the maker of military-style rifles unveiled a new design Thursday that its owner said will not be subject to the Connecticut ban.

Stag Arms unveiled its redesigned military-style assault rifle, at bottom, and the original, at top. The two weapons look identical. (Michael McAndrews | Hartford Courant)

From the outside, the new firearm looks identical to other Stag rifles, complete with matte black finish, pistol grip and adjustable stock.  Stag owner Mark Malkowski showed a prototype of the new  rifle in the shipping room of his New Britain plant,  explaining why it’s legal.

It’s not a radical new concept. The gun fires smaller bullets, which are allowed under the new law even in a military-style rifle.

The new model will only be available in Connecticut, said Malkowski, who founded the company exactly 10 years ago. But he said he’s not in any way trying to defy the state.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “My only intention here is to sell a product in the state where I reside, to people who have supported me for a decade.”

It is, to use the phrase of Tony Terzi, my colleague at Fox CT, “compliance, not defiance.”

The main changes is that the gun has a redesigned bolt carrier, the 5-inch long, cylindrical fitting that moves the bullet from the magazine to its firing position. It carries .22-caliber bullets of the sort fired by millions of people including children at camps, rather than the longer, more powerful .223 Remington rounds used in Stag Arms’ line of AR-15 rifles.

Some .22-caliber rifles in the AR-15 platform are already on the market, made by companies including O.F. Mossberg & Sons, in North Haven. With about one-third the firing velocity and a much smaller overall size, the .22 bullets are far less lethal than the .223 rounds, which are virtually identical to the bullets widely used by soldiers in fully automatic assault rifles.

Malkowski said he intends to seek approval from the state police firearms unit, which is charged with interpreting the 139-page law. He’s certain there’s no problem, but wants to check with authorities as a courtesy, and so they’ll be able to answer questions about the guns.

The firearms unit is already plenty busy answering questions about what guns may be transferred to what customers, based on subtle issues in the law — and it must help devise systems for the state’s new rifle registration, registration of magazines that carry more than 10 rounds and increased background checks.

But even if the redesign is approved, Malkowski said, he might still move all or part of his company — which now has 200 people in a four-building complex in New Britain — to another state that does not restrict sales of his rifles.  Last week, Malkowski was at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston, where he met with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s actively wooing gunmakers from states that have enacted tighter controls.

“There’s more factors that are in place with that,” he said.

The main issue that will determine a move is how much other states offer, and how customers around the nation will react to Connecticut gunmakers in the wake of the ban. The local firearms firms, including the Colt companies, worry that sales will fall if gun owners — a famously cantankerous bunch — boycott Connecticut brands. Federal law requires all firearms to have the location of their manufacture prominently stamped on the product, and many gun-rights advocates don’t want “CT” on their firearms.

“We have seen a slowdown,” Malkowski said. “We’re not sure if it’s 100 percent affected by that.”

The slowdown, however, is from a very brisk pace that was strong throughout 2012 and gained more speed after the Newtown tragedy, with the threat of bans. Malkowski said he’s able to make just over 6,000 rifles a month, and has an 8-month backlog of orders.

The new rifles could be shipped by the end of this month, and among the first buyers is John Napierski, co-owner JOJO’s Gun Works in Southington, who ordered a few dozen. It was Napierski who sold the first-ever Stag rifle, after Malkowski founded the company in part to advance his innovation of firearms for people who aim with their left eye and shoot with their left forefinger.

“There’s a lot of buzz about the new products coming out from Stag,” Napierski said. His store previously depended on rifles that are now banned for about 40 percent of its business, but that’s been made up, he said, with custom gunsmithing.  Some stores that don’t have such a specialty are suffering.

Some people who support the law are critical of Malkowski’s effort to design around it.

“If people are going to try to design around what the ban is, then that’s violating the spirit of the law and clearly by their own statements, that’s what they’re doing,” said Ron Pinciaro, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence. “If this law had not been passed, would they be designing this weapon?”

Opponents of the law, and some who support it, say any manufacturer’s modifications to meet new rules are just plain Yankee ingenuity.

Another possible variation is a version that saws off the pistol grip. That would make the gun legal in Connecticut because the ban affects firearms that are semi-automatic, with detachable magazines and one or more military features, such as the pistol grip or a flash supressor at the end of the barrel.

On April 4, when Malloy signed the bill, Malkowski showed me a sawed-off version of an AR-15  in his office. Thursday, he was coy about whether he’ll built one of those. “We have a lot of things in development, always,” he said.

I’m in the group that thinks this is all good Yankee ingenuity because, after all, the law did not necessarily ban the most deadly weapons out there — it banned the ones that have the menacing features found on assault rifles, such as pistol grips, combined with the more powerful rounds.

Here you have two identical guns in look, features and function, one of them apparently legal because it uses a smaller caliber bullet — even though some guns that are semi-automatic, with detachable magazines and much larger, .308-caliber rounds, are still legal in Connecticut simply because they don’t have a pistol grip.

Malkowski doesn’t even consider the new version an AR-15 at all.  As proof, he heads to a back room and takes out yet another model that looks and feels like his regular line of banned firearms — except that it has an orange tip and fires tiny plastic pellets.  He licensed another company to make it a few years ago.

“It’s a toy,” Malkowski said, “but some people in law enforcement use it for training.”

The latest, .22-caliber version is definitely not a toy, but it’s just as surely not a weapon Malloy and lawmakers intended to ban. It only looks like one.

More About The AR-15:

• America’s Rifle: Rise Of The AR-15
• AN AR-15 TIMELINE: From Radical Experiment To Controversial Icon