Fasano: We Found $275 Million!

That unfinished business involves a ​“joint labor-management committee” set up four years ago to find cost savings, said the Republican, State Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano (pictured).

Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy last week invited Fasano and other Republican leaders into ​“the room” — a.k.a. the governor’s office — to try to find a bipartisan path out of a newly-discovered deficit in this fiscal year. That deficit is anywhere from $118 million to $330 million, depending on whom you ask. Democratic and Republican legislative leaders have begun the meetings with Malloy in the quest to erase the deficit without raising taxes.

“I believe we’re in this room based on good faith,” Fasano, who grew up in New Haven and now lives in North Haven, said in an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. ​“We want to do the right thing.”

He said the above in between accusing the governor of ​“leading us down a hole” by ​“not being forthright” — echoing accusations Malloy (see video) has made about Fasano and his party posturing on the deficit without offering concrete solutions.

Fasano said a concrete suggestion for filling much of the gap lies in the labor-management committee, which the state formed in 2011. Malloy was in the first year of his first term then. He was tackling a $3 billion deficit inherited from his predecessor. He pushed through a share-the-pain deal: Taxpayers would contribute $1 billion in the form of higher taxes, legislators contributed $1 billion in budget cuts, and labor unions agreed to $1 billion in concessions.

More than a quarter of those concessions weren’t spelled out. Instead, they were to be hammered out in meetings of … the new labor-management committee.

Which met once, Fasano said.

“They voted for a chairman and a co-chairman,” then ​“never met again,” Fasano said; since then, the biparitsan Office of Fiscal Analysis has calculated that $275 million of expected labor savings have never materialized. Fasano said the Republicans are urging that committee to meet again four years later and complete the job. That’s not asking for new labor concessions, he argued.

“We’re saying, ​‘OK, the [bipartisan] OFA said you shorted the deal by $275 million. A deal’s a deal. I’m not asking you to give more. Just hold up your end. We’re not going to tell you how to do it. But do it.’”

Democratic and labor leaders responded that it’s not that simple to find all that money.

Adam Joseph, a spokesman for Martin Looney, president of the Democratic state senate, said all sides recognize that some labor concessions are on the table in these discussions, including the possibility of retirement incentives for state workers who have reached retirement age. (The governor has come out against early-retirement incentives, which save money in the short term but cost more in the long term, since workers who take the incentives stop paying into the system and start collecting.) But Joseph argued there’s no simple $275 million magic bullet in labor savings waiting to solve the problem.

Labor has continued to offer budget-saving ideas since the 2011 deal, out of which ​“hard sacrifices in wages and benefits continue to provide $1 billion a year in savings to the budget, about 30 times on a percentage basis what the state has asked from the multimillion and billionaires who are the only ones moving forward in this tough economy,” argued Dan Livingston, chief negotiator for state government unions.

Livingston suggested that officials look at taxing the wealthy more in the budget talks.

“Instead of always seeking still more from already overburdened middle class families — whether public service worked, or their friends and neighbors in Connecticut’s struggling communities — politicians should look to those whose slick lobbyists always place last when fair sacrifice is requested,” he argued. ​“The fact is, because the richest 1 percent in Connecticut pay state and local taxes at about half the rate of the rest of us, residents aren’t getting the vital services they need. Deal with that in an open and straightforward way, and we eliminate Connecticut’s revenue problem and have the resources we need to address the critical problems facing working and middle class families.”

Whatever happens on the labor question, Fasano said he is determined to roll back the $63.4 million in Medicaid reimbursement cuts to hospitals that Malloy made in an early round of rescissions to deal with the budget deficit. Click here to read more about that issue.

And click here to read a plan the state Republicans released in April to tackle the budget.

Click on the above sound file or download it to hear the full interview with Len Fasano, which included discussion of Fasano’s and Looney’s bipartisan health-care reform initiative this past year as well as Fasano’s call for Republicans to tackle urban issues in the spirit of the late Jack Kemp. Click here to read a Republican urban-policy agenda Fasano’s office released this term …

… and click here to read about a visit he made earlier this year to New Haven to speak with criminal justice reform advocates (in video).