Bipartisan State Budget Deal Implodes

Hartford—New Haven is counting on the state to send it an extra $31 million this year, but those funds could be in danger, especially now that a compromise budget between Democrats and Republicans has stalled at the 11th hour.

After caucusing for five hours behind closed doors Tuesday, the chairwomen of the state legislature’s Appropriations Committee, which recommends how the state should spend its money, came back into a hearing room at just after 3 p.m. here to announce that after months of meetings and negotiations there would be no vote on a proposed new two-year $41 million budget. (Read here to learn more about some of the details of the legislator’s compromise plan, which included 5.2 and 1.8 percent spending increases over the next two years, a total of $403 million more than proposed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy; and $1.57 billion in labor concessions. The legislators’ compromise plan would have also eliminated Malloy’s proposal to allow cities to tax not-for-profits hospitals’ real estate.)

Legislators were already expected to have trouble crafting a budget this year while facing a $1.7 billion projected deficit and struggling to meet a state judge’s order to change how they fund education. New Haven, meanwhile, will be voting on a new city budget that at this point counts on that $31 million increase in state aid over last year, a goal that legislators privately say will be a challenge to meet.

Soon after Tuesday’s failure of the state Appropriations Committee to take up the compromise budget plan, in dueling press conferences, the finger-pointing on both sides of the aisle began.

House Democrats, who hold a slim majority over Republicans after the last election, and a one-vote majority on the Appropriations Committee, suggested that they were blindsided by their Republican counterparts, whom they said helped create the compromise budget.

When it came time to vote to move that compromise budget along, Republicans refused to vote for the package. Republicans said Democrats shouldn’t be shocked that they’re not supporting a budget that they believe will need tax increases to afford, or that they plan to put out their own version of a budget.

House Minority Leader Themis Klarides said Republicans have been up front about putting their own budget together, just as they’ve done over the last 10 years.

“I don’t know how much clearer we can make that,” she said. ​“Then they claim that it was a bipartisan negotiation. My ranking member from appropriations wasn’t even involved in the negotiations.”

Klarides said that she believes that the Democrats were desperate and didn’t have the votes to get a version of the budget out of committee. New Haven State Rep. and Appropriations Co-Chair Toni Walker disputed Klarides’ version of events, saying she couldn’t ask House members of the committee to vote on a compromise bill that ultimately certain members who clamored for input refused to support it in the end.

“We have the votes,” Walker said. ​“But the members felt like we were negotiating with them and right when we’re getting ready to pass it, they said, ​‘We can’t give you any votes.’”

With the budget in flux, Walker said New Haven is in the same position as all the other towns.

“We’re at a standstill until we get together,” she said. ​“We have to see what happens with [the Finance Committee] and we have to see from there how we blend [what finance comes up with for funding] into appropriations.”

New Haven State Sen. Marty Looney said while it was disappointing to learn that the Republicans ​“never really had any intention of participating in a positive vote,” he said he’s still holding out hope that a budget can get out of committee by Thursday at 5 p.m., which is the deadline for reporting out bills.

While House leaders squabbled over the bipartisan implosion, the governor expressed in a statement his disappointment in both parties for not producing a budget ​“that makes responsible progress toward addressing our fiscal challenges.”

​“For now, the only balanced budget proposal is the one I put on the table in February,” Malloy said in the statement. ” I will continue to share and discuss that plan publicly, listen to new ideas, and work toward a substantial cost-saving agreement with our state employees. What I will not do is sign a budget focused on taxes rather than spending cuts. I will not push off this year’s problems onto future generations. And I will not support a budget filled with gimmicks or unsupported revenue projections.

​“In short, the status quo won’t do,” he added. ​“We cannot be all things to all people. We have to live within our means by making real, fundamental changes to how we budget. Deferring hard decisions only makes them harder. Let’s get to work.”

Waiting For Next Steps

Several New Haven legislators said they were prepared Tuesday to vote for a compromise budget had it come to that, even though they had reservations about some of the provisions.

State Rep. Pat Dillon said that she disagreed with some of the cuts specifically to health care and youth programs. ​“There are a number of investments that have been made on the tax credit side of the budget that has gone, ostensibly, to job creation in the corporate community,” she said. ​“The cuts have been coming on the nonprofit side.”

She said that hurts New Haven, which has an economy heavily dependent upon not-for-profits, and every cut to such organizations impacts a job that helps people stay in the workforce.

“Even if theoretically you believe that cuts to nonprofits and investments in banks and manufacturing are the right thing — it’s good for some towns, it doesn’t help us,” she said.

Despite her misgivings, she said she was prepared to support the final product Monday. So was State Sen. Gary Winfield, who said ​“hate” wasn’t too strong a word to describe how he felt about the compromise budget plan. His Democrat counterparts in the House expressed surprise Tuesday that Republicans wouldn’t support the plan and would come out with their own budget. But Winfield said he knew in January that Republicans would do exactly what they did Tuesday. (And he said so during a Fox 61 Real Story segment in February.)

“The Republicans are always part of the negotiations prior to the negotiations with the governor,” he said. ​“Always. The subcommittee process always includes Republicans. Now, whether they choose to participate, or not, that’s not for me to say. But they’re always part of it. We always make cuts that they want to have happen. It doesn’t mean we make every cut, but there’s always stuff in the budget that they wanted. At the end, they don’t vote for the budget in the committee. So, I assumed that they would be part of the process, and then they wouldn’t vote for it.”

What’s a bit different this time is the decision to keep trying to negotiate as time runs out. That decision keeps everything, including items in the budget that impact New Haven, in flux.

“Politically, I hate the budget that was in front of us today,” he said. ​“But I would have voted for that budget because I don’t think we could simply say I’m not voting for a budget. I think we come here to vote for a budget and that’s what I would have done.”

He said there are things in the compromise budget that would protect programs like Care4Kids, which is facing significant cuts in the governor’s proposed budget. The program — which subsidizes day care costs for low to moderate-income families — would be protected under the proposed compromise budget for at least one year, with a possibility of funding it in the second year.

“Care4Kids, under a budget that I don’t see as a winning budget, is funded,” he said. ​“I hate the budget, but I think of that as a victory. And there are other things in the budget that are like that, but nobody is saying that. They’re just saying, ​‘Well, it doesn’t do what I want it to do.’ It doesn’t do what Gary wants it to do either, but Gary’s going to vote for it.”

State Rep. Robyn Porter said that while the current state of the compromise budget puts things in flux for New Haven, she believes that the committee will meet its deadline and it will look out for the interests of cities and towns.

“I think that the objective always is to make sure we take care of the towns and cities and to make sure we do it equitably,” she said. ​“It’s my hope that with things being on hold, that we can go back to the bargaining table and truly come up with something bipartisan and have bipartisan support.

“And if we’re not going to have bipartisan support and we’re going to put forth a budget that is going to be ours, then it should be ours,” Porter added. ​“It should represent the things that are important to us and the people who voted us into office — our constituents. It should be a true representation of how we’re making an effort to aid what’s going on in the towns and cities.”

The 2017 Agenda