Last week, I wrote a post about how Connecticut's purported travel ban hadn't stopped the state from incurring more than $600,000 in hotel bills in 2009. Surprisingly enough, at least one (1) reader seems to have read all the way to the end of it.

That reader is Wayne Kasacek, the assistant director of the bureau of regulation and inspection at the state Department of Agriculture, and he called on Friday afternoon with some additional detail about the $770 room charge the department racked up at a hotel called the Caribe Royale Resorts in Orlando, Florida.

The $770 bought eight nights at the hotel, Kasacek said, and he should know: he stayed there.

And Kasacek says that whatever it looks like on the database created by CTSunlight.org, his trip was far from a cushy junket. It was, he argues, a good investment by a state trying desperately to save what's left of its dairy industry.

Kasacek was in Orlando to attend a biennial meeting of the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shippers, the quasi-governmental entity that sets the regulations for businessesses that want to ship dairy products over state lines. For the four or five companies in Connecticut that do such work, having a state department representative on hand to vote on rule changes is a very big deal, Kasacek said.

"When people read that, they think you went on a state-funded trip to Disneyland," he said, referring to the CTSunlight database and also to some idiot who blogged about it.

For eight days of important work, he said, "$701 is pretty cheap, I would think."

"You might ask 136 dairy farmers, 'Is it a good thing for the state to attend things like this?'" Kasacek said. "I think you'd get the answer, 'Yes.'"

Kasacek's response will surely be dismissed as bureaucractic hind-covering by those who want to see a serious scaling back of government size and spending. But I think it's pretty instructive about the hollowness of our state discussions about spending.

I think Rell genuinely intended to tighten the state's belt with her travel ban, along with a number of other administrative changes she began to impose as the state's fiscal picture began to darken several years ago. But it's easy to call for an end to plane tickets and hotel rooms. It's a lot harder to put that knee-jerk instinct into practice in a way that's in keeping with both legal responsibility (see DCF, or the Division of Criminal Justice) and common sense.

In our conversation, Kasacek agreed with the characterization of the travel ban debate -- and, by extension, certain reporters' coverage of it -- as "simplistic."

"The state does have to look out for its interest," he said. "And unfortunately, that requires travel, it's as simple as that. I wasn't going down there to get a tan."