Connecticut $350M Budget Hole Closed: What You Need to Know

The General Assembly passed a bill in special session that cuts $350 million to balance the state’s $20 billion budget for the fiscal year.

Lawmakers made the votes mostly across party lines with no Republicans voting in favor of the bill and very few Democrats opposing it either, according to the Hartford Courant.

Key Changes:

• $72 million in line item cuts from state agencies.
• Gov. Dannel Malloy has power to cut up to $93 million more.
• $30 million in each of the next two years from hospitals.
• $30 million of $63 million restored from hospital cuts.
• $193 million cut from 2017 budget.
• $10 million in corporate tax cuts for current fiscal year and $19 million for next year.

State Rep. Laura Devlin (R- Fairfield) said the budget is full of gimmicks including one-time revenue sources and diversions of funds.

“It’s even worse than Republicans projected,” Devlin said about the deficit that followed after the budget was passed in June. “...the deficits warned about came faster than even we had anticipated.”

Republicans and Democrat lawmakers, along with Gov. Dannel Malloy, negotiated for several weeks to balance the budget.

Malloy said while the vote wasn’t bipartisan, the conversation leading up to it was.

“I appreciate the willingness of Democrats and Republicans to engage in this important discussion, one that I hope will continue in the months and years ahead,” he said in a statement. “The legislation passed tonight is not perfect, but it helps make progress for the State of Connecticut this fiscal year and beyond.”

Not all Democrats were as cordial about the almost-entirely partisan vote.

House Speaker Brendan Sharkey (D-Hamden) said Republicans were unwilling to compromise and showed they were not up to the challenge of leading, according to CT News Junkie.

Senator Beth Bye (D-West Hartford) said that the public needs to know the General Assembly is carefully controlling state spending.

“Today’s cuts to current services – combined with the $600 million in cuts to current services that we made last spring – total nearly $1 billion in reductions that we have made to existing state services over the past six months,” she said.

Read the full Courant report here.

Read the full CT News Junkie report here.

Image: “Connecticut State Capitol, Hartford” by jglazer75/Wikipedia Commons