Mr. Shepardson, Give Back That Plate.

While you were enjoying a long weekend, The Courant’s Jon Lender exposed a sordid tale in the saga of the capture and redistribution of low digit license plates by former Governor M. Jodi Rell.  Descendants of the late Governor Charles A. Templeton, a reforming Republican who served in the state’s highest office from 1923 to 1925, were told they could not pass plate number 325 to the late governor’s great-grandson.  It was, a legislator was told” in 2007 by Commissioner of the Department of Motor Vehicles, Robert Ward., “being retired.”  He’s now a state auditor, charged with making sure power is exercised in proper, efficient ways.

Number 325 came out of retirement late last year when it was one of two peacock plates given to Rell loyalist Herb Shepardson, a paid advisor to Rell and a former Republican state party chairman.  Templeton’s grandson had written a gracious letter to Rell in 2007, noting his public service as a volunteer on an environmental task force she appointed him to and also on the Waterbury financial oversight board, not an easy assignment.  He received no reply from the ethics governor.

These motor vehicle stories can be discouraging.  Lender had a tale last week of State Treasurer Denise Nappier parking in a handicap spot in West Hartford last Tuesday evening.  Her driver appears to have browbeaten pressed a meter official into voiding the ticket.  Nappier, when caught, paid the ticket.  The incident raises a broader question: Why does she have a driver.  She can drive herself, I saw her behind the wheel of her state car Wednesday.  She lives near West Hartford, so she probably was not too tired to make her way home.  It seems, like the license plates, it’s all about collecting the accoutrements of membership in the governing class.  Connecticut’s constitutional officers don’t need drivers, and the state can no longer afford to indulge their pretensions.

When the curtain is drawn back from the myriad ways people who exercise the levers of power and influence misuse the privileges they crave and collect, it’s always a discouraging tale that emerges.

Nappier paid her fine.  Shepardson should give back that plate.