Lamont (right): Housing bill "crossed a line for a lot of folks." Looney: Veto makes reaching a final bill more difficult.
Thomas Breen file photo
Erin Boggs: Lamont's concerns "appear based more on complaints from municipalities and NIMBY advocates who do not understand what the bill says rather than legitimate issues with the proposal."
Gov. Ned Lamont caved to NIMBYs and the suburbs Monday, according to pro-housing advocates who criticized the governor for vetoing this legislative session’s landmark zoning-reform bill.
Desegregate Connecticut, the Regional Plan Association, and Open Communities Alliance (OCA) sent out those responses in email blasts after Lamont announced his plans to veto House Bill 5002.
That’s the omnibus housing bill that Democratic leadership ushered through the state House and Senate. If signed into law, the bill would have required municipalities to set goals for affordable housing, made two-to-nine unit apartment buildings “as of right” in commercial zones, and prohibited towns from rejecting new housing developments solely for a failure to conform with off-street parking regulations except for reasons of public health and safety.
“The governor’s office was directly involved in negotiating this bill,” OCA Executive Director Erin Boggs said in an email press release Monday. “His specific complaints about target numbers for each community to plan around appear based more on complaints from municipalities and NIMBY advocates who do not understand what the bill says rather than legitimate issues with the proposal, and should not have been enough to trigger a veto.”
In a separate release, DesegregateCT and the Regional Plan Association agreed — and criticized the governor in starker terms. “While we are optimistic that a bill will be passed and signed in a special session largely intact, this veto is an affirmation of the status quo and a capitulation to bad faith, fearmongering, or perhaps innocent confusion,” they wrote.
They ended their press release by looking forward to the YIMBYTown conference, slated to be held in New Haven on Sept. 14 – 16. “YIMBYtown is the national bipartisan pro-homes convention, and over 600 advocates, elected officials, academics, funders, and journalists will be eager to see what a blue state struggling with a housing shortage can accomplish. All eyes will be on Governor Lamont to demonstrate the state’s commitment to tackling this challenge and getting it right with a strong bill in the special session.”
In a Monday morning press conference in Hartford, Lamont explained his veto as stemming from concerns that the bill stripped too much zoning control away from municipal governments. (Click here to read CT Mirror’s analysis over the weekend about how 2026 reelection considerations may have played into the governor’s thinking.)
Lamont said on Monday he’d like to have a revised version of the housing bill on his desk and ready to sign later this fall after a special legislative session.
“We can do better. We will do better. We’re gonna have a better bill,” he said. (Lamont also announced Monday that he would veto a striking-workers compensation bill.)
“I think for housing to continue growing successfully, it has to be led by our towns,” Lamont continued. “It has to be led by our first selectmen. It has to be led by our mayors. I just don’t think it works if it’s us against them.”
He added that he thought the bill as passed “crossed a line for a lot of folks, in particular when it comes to dictating or suggesting the number of units you ought to have, [and] telling people you don’t have any say over the parking.”
Top state Democratic legislators disagreed.
New Haven State Sen. and President Pro Tem Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff said in a statement that they are “deeply disappointed” with Lamont’s veto. They praised Democratic and Republican governors in states as varied as Florida, Texas, California, and Montana for working to “cut red tape and increase housing supply.”
In Connecticut’s State Capitol, they said, “undue weight is placed on the opinions of some municipal officials who do not think beyond the borders of their own communities, rather than on the needs of families seeking housing.”
They said that they will continue to work with the governor on the bill, and that they are “looking forward to seeing the proposal” that Lamont is able to reach with municipal officials and their interest groups.
In a follow-up phone call, Looney said that he is not confident — but he is “still hopeful” — that the governor and the legislature will be able to reach a deal on a new housing bill during this fall’s special session, which Looney said will focus on reckoning with federal funding cuts from the Trump administration.
“We had hoped he would sign it” and then state legislators and the governor could negotiate changes to make to the bill “after the fact,” Looney told the Independent. “Now we’re back to having to create a bill all over again.”
Looney said that Senate Democrats do have some ideas for changes they’d like to see included in whatever new bill is discussed. He said he’d like the state to set up a “municipal infrastructure fund” to help towns that are willing to add more housing, but that are worried that, for example, their reliance on wells and lack of public water access make denser developments more difficult. Looney said he’d also like to see the school construction grant formula recalculated to include bonuses for towns making progress towards hitting the 10 percent-affordable-housing goal detailed in existing state law.
“I think Connecticut has been handicapped for years for having too much deference to local control on matters where state policy should predominate,” Looney said. That includes on issues like housing.
In a separate email statement, Mayor Justin Elicker described Lamont’s veto as hopefully just a “short-term setback” for the pro-housing agenda represented by HB 5002.
“Some cities and towns are just not interested in building more housing or more affordable housing,” he said, “and, while that’s unfortunate, they shouldn’t be empowered to hold back the rest of the state from providing more affordable housing opportunities to our residents.”
Unlike when Elicker recently slammed the governor for not adequately investing in public education, New Haven’s mayor was more tempered in his response Monday to the housing-bill veto. “I take Governor Lamont at his word that he’s committed to working with the General Assembly to pass a housing bill in a special legislative session this year that achieves these goals,” he concluded, “and it can’t come soon enough.”
Meanwhile, the Yankee Institute, a conservative think tank, sent out a press release Monday celebrating Lamont’s veto. The Yankee Institute criticized HB5002 as a bill that “would have imposed one-size-fits-all housing mandates, undermining the ability of Connecticut’s diverse communities to shape policies suited to their unique needs.” They called on the governor and state legislators “to allow lawmaking of this complexity to be done through an open and transparent process during the regular legislative session.”