Connecticut’s legislative session ends this week. What will the final hours look like for lawmakers?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas to discuss his article, “As CT legislature enters final stretch, Lamont makes a surprise visit,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Mark’s story here.
WSHU: Lawmakers know exactly how long a Connecticut legislative session is going to last. So why does it seem that there's always a scramble to get bills passed towards the end of a session? What's responsible for that dynamic, and how is it playing out this year?
MP: That is the perennial question. The short answer is that the legislative session is designed to be front-loaded with committee work. If you picture the legislature as one giant funnel, and when they all gather in January, the first weeks and even months are focused on developing bills, subjecting them to public hearings and then finally having those committees report them to the floor of the House and Senate. A further complication is that anything that involves spending significant amounts of money really has to wait for the budget deal to be put together. So all these things conspire to produce what we see every year, which is a lot of bills getting done in the last two weeks, if not the last three days of every legislative session.
WSHU: So, how's the log jam this year? What looks as if it's going to be able to make it through in the final days and final hours, and what seems to be falling by the wayside?
MP: Let's start with what is going to happen. There is a budget deal. There appears to be an agreement, a bipartisan agreement on a major energy bill that would lower our electric rates, not dramatically, but a little bit. That is going to happen. There are a lot of other bills that just will die from inaction, because that's the nature of the beast. If they haven't happened yet, and there is a partisan disagreement, it is very difficult to get anything through, because Connecticut does have a tradition of unlimited debate, and of course, that means in the last days of the session, the balance of power shifts a little bit to the Republican minorities.
WSHU: The Republican minority only holds about a third of the seats. How come they have so much power at the end of a session?
MP: It is because of this tradition, which is not absolute. I will say, for example, if the Republicans decided to talk for three days to kill a budget, the Democrats would certainly take advantage of a little-used rule, which is the ability to call the question to end debate and force a vote. Again, there is some nuance here as to the relationship between the parties that is very different from what you see in Washington, which is pure power politics. The tradition in Connecticut has been different. It's always a test of will that survives. Because, as you say, quite correctly, the Democrats do hold slightly more than two-thirds of all the seats. So they really can do whatever they wish, assuming the Democrats all hang together. And there are certainly some factions. There are some fiscal moderates, for example, who may be more aligned with the Republicans on certain fiscal issues, but that's the dynamic. It is one that's evolved over time. It is something, by the way, the Democratic leaders use to their own advantage, because there are certain things they perhaps do not wish to take up ...
WSHU: ... which their members are very interested in.
MP: Correct. And they play off of what the Republicans would do. They also play off what the governor wants or doesn't want. So there's always that kind of three-handed game of chess going on, particularly at the end here.
WSHU: One of the bills that the public is very interested in is the energy bill, because our energy prices are so high in Connecticut and lawmakers have been talking since the beginning of the session that they'll do something about this. What exactly is the position on that?
MP: The state and its Public Utilities Regulatory Authority only have control over maybe a third or a little bit more of our electric bill, because Connecticut largely deregulated the generation of electric power at the end of the 90s. And so that means what is regulated is really the delivery system of how that power gets to our homes and our businesses. One of the Republicans' big issues is something called the public benefits charge, which has a variety of public policy initiatives that we pay for on our electric bill. Some of it has to do with encouraging clean energy. Some of it has to do with making sure poor people don't lose their power if they can't pay their bills. And then there's a big one: to keep Millstone nuclear financially viable. They treat that power in a different way. They guarantee a certain amount of stability, which, most of the time, costs us more than it would on the open market. Occasionally, we get a break. It depends on the prices of natural gas, which is what's used to generate the rest of the electricity in Connecticut.
But the other big issue for the Republicans is language to clarify that the chair of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, who has been a very controversial figure. She's been very aggressive in trying to control costs. They want to ensure that her unilateral powers are limited, that she cannot, by herself, determine she's going to be a one-person regulatory body on rate cases and some other key things. And that is one of the things that certainly the House Republican leader is insisting that that be addressed, and if it's not addressed, he has the ability to block passage, but he has indicated to us he believes that that will be satisfactorily involved resolved, and therefore there will be action on an energy bill.
WSHU: Now we do have a budget deal. What was that budget deal dependent on? How did they close the gap between the governor and the Democrats?
MP: Okay, this will get quickly in the weeds, but one of the holdups was that the Democratic majority in the legislature wanted a child tax credit; there is a compromise that would use the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a much more limited vehicle as far as the income qualifications. The original type of child tax credit would have benefited families earning up to $200,000 a year, the Earned Income Tax Credit, which they are essentially bolstering, that applies to lower-income folks. You know, you're talking in the $60,000 and $70,000 range, I believe, is the final number. So that was one change.
Then, we get into the machinations over whether or not this budget meets the letter and the spirit of the law on Connecticut's various spending caps and revenue caps. And the Republicans are insisting that there are gimmicks that are getting this budget around some of those limits, although they do abide by the law. This is an argument that we see over and over again about how you abide by these volatility caps, a spending cap that has resulted in some huge budget. The budget reserves a lot of money to pay pension debt, but kind of starves some other very important needs. For example, Connecticut's Medicaid reimbursement rates for certain medical providers really haven't changed since 2007-2008 and as a result, if you are on Medicaid, and oh, by the way, about 40% of the children born in this state are born to families who get their health care through Medicaid, it can be very difficult to get certain medical providers given the low rates.
So those are some of the tensions you see, as far as the governor who who describes himself as a fiscal centrist and really wants to maintain Connecticut's fiscal discipline that we've seen in the last five, six years, and not go back to the years of spending In which there were there was great neglect of the pension funds. There was no money that went into those pension funds. Governor Lamont is committed to really maintaining some of the reforms, some of which began during the administration of Governor Dannell Malloy. Back then the state finally started every year, no matter how bad the budget was, to make the annual required contributions to the pensions. But you know, Connecticut's fiscal problems go back decades when they were paying pensions on a pay-as-you-go basis instead of doing the smart thing, which is setting money aside, investing in the market and having those funds grow.
WSHU: Wow. Okay, and the bottom line for most voters is, are we going to end up with any new taxes in this budget?
MP: So there are some business taxes. Some of them are a little complex, something called the unitary tax, which is not applied to every business. It has to do with multi-state businesses, and how these taxes are calculated, and we will very quickly exhaust my ability to explain what that is, so let's leave it there.
WSHU: But most politicians will be able to say to their constituents this year, we didn't raise taxes on you, right?
MP: Right. Most people pay attention to the sales tax and their income tax and on those two very important measures, no, there will not be increases.
