Lamont, CT Lawmakers To Kick Off Special Session This Week

CONNECTICUT — State legislators will return to Hartford this week for the start of a special session, announced over the weekend.

Gov. Ned Lamont, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney, and Speaker of the House Matt Ritter announced Saturday that the Connecticut General Assembly would reconvene Wednesday "on several matters that require timely action."

"There are certain statutory changes that are scheduled to take effect over the coming months that we believe should be adjusted to protect the public from tax increases," the governor and the lawmakers said in a joint statement. “We are scheduling this particular special session now so that we can prevent that tax increase and get other minor and timely adjustments signed into law.”

On the agenda for the special session are the following topics:

• Preventing a tax increase that would otherwise take effect this fall by continuing to classify commercial vehicles as motor vehicles, and clarifying that current law allows municipalities to establish mill rates on motor vehicles that are lower than mill rates on real property and personal property other than motor vehicles;
• Promoting transparency and competition in municipally-administered school construction projects by restoring a ban on construction managers self-performing subcontracting work;
• Making Connecticut a more attractive place for innovative financial services companies to establish a significant presence by expressly allowing banks holding a certain charter to accept and hold non-retail deposits and secure deposit insurance from the FDIC and by updating the name of that charter;
• Reducing the administrative costs of the state’s publicly available retirement savings program by authorizing the State Comptroller to enter into cooperative agreements with other states that have similar programs;
• Providing more certainty to the state’s vibrant insurance industry by establishing that the annual assessment on domestic insurance companies to fund certain insurance-related state offices and programs should be calculated based on those companies’ total taxes, prior to any adjustment for tax credits, from the year immediately preceding the prior calendar year instead of the prior calendar year itself;
• Relieving employers, including tax-exempt organizations, that kept employees on payroll throughout the pandemic and received the federal Employee Retention Credit from the burden of interest payments attributable to the timing and complexities of a new federal program rather than any willful underpayment by the taxpayer;
• Supporting the preservation and redevelopment of historic properties by streamlining the process by which the State Historic Preservation Office reviews those properties; and
• Amending the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority to permit the Authority to acquire water companies outside its current service area.

A proclamation calling the legislature into special session has been filed with the Office of the Secretary of the State and is online here.