HARTFORD — On Thursday, Republican legislative leaders offered up their ideas on how to close Connecticut’s budget gap and ways to make structural changes for the long term.
The General Assembly’s minority party presented its concepts behind closed doors today to Democratic legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy. No details were provided, but Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano said social services cuts were not proposed. Changes affecting state employees were suggested.
The Republicans plan to publicly release their budget modification ideas on Friday.
Lawmakers and Malloy are trying to reach agreement on how to reduce an estimated shortfall of $350 million to $370 million in the $20 billion budget. A special legislative session could be scheduled for December.
House Democrats in the past few weeks have suggested a 2.5-percent across-the-board budget reduction.
Later in the evening, more details were released on the ideas proposed by Malloy and Democrats. The options ranged from reducing funding for mental health services and municipal aid to closing a prison.
Fasano, along with House Republican Leader Themis Klarides, released the following statement about the budget modifications discussed on Thursday to clarify some points:
Statements made in a CT Mirror report today about Republican proposals to address the state budget shortfall are misleading. We want to correctly describe our proposals. Republicans have offered over $370 million worth of modifications to close the current year’s deficit, while also restoring funding that was cut to Medicaid, those with developmental disabilities, and many of the most vulnerable individuals.
We have outlined a proposal that does not rely on any labor concessions to close the fiscal year 2016 deficit. Our proposals do include long-term structural recommendations given the looming $2.9 billion deficit projected for the out years. Our long-term proposals include some modest labor changes, as well as ideas such as capping excessive bonding, avoiding the additional tax increase that will be needed to support the governor’s transportation plan, and ceasing certain state operations where costs to taxpayers are extreme.
We were very cognizant not to overburden state employees as we acknowledge that state employees are not the sole reason the state is in the mess that it’s in. To say otherwise is a mischaracterization, and not supported by the documents examined by CT Mirror.
