The Democratic President of the Connecticut Senate says written copies of the bipartisan budget agreement reached last week might be available as soon as Tuesday. Senator Martin Looney said this after meeting with members of his Democratic caucus on Monday afternoon.
Looney said Republican and Democratic legislative leaders were to meet through the night to resolve the numbers for the second year of the two-year budget based on the tentative framework they had agreed to last week.
“We do want to finalize it tonight. We want to be able to in effect have a handshake by tonight so that we can get to work on the actual printing of the document and all that goes with that.”
Looney says legislative leaders are still planning to have the General Assembly vote on the two-year $40-billion budget plan this week. Connecticut has been without a budget for nearly four months.
Last week Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy said he was skeptical that the legislative leaders were able to close a projected $3.5 billion budget deficit and achieve a balanced budget without resorting to gimmicks.
Malloy had said he wouldn’t meet with Democratic legislative leaders to talk about the budget until he had a written document he could review. He had vetoed an earlier Republican-backed budget claiming it was unbalanced.
