New Fairfield state Representative Richard Smith says the Republican alternative budget proposal checks all of the boxes for addressing the root cause of Connecticut's fiscal catastrophe. He says the plan maintains the property tax credit and restores critical municipal aid for cities and towns.
Danbury Senator Mike McLachlan called it a blueprint for navigating Connecticut out of the cycle of deficits, job losses, and population decline. He says the legislature must restore confidence in the state’s ability to govern responsibly and that means producing a budget where Connecticut lives within its means.
Newtown state Representative Mitch Bolinsky touted the plan as being transparent, without the trick of moving liabilities off the balance sheet. He called for streamlining state government and making hard decisions about wasteful or wastefully run programs. Bolinsky notes that the budget proposal preserves Newtown's 2018 educational cost grants and increases them by about $500,000 in 2019, before entering a ten-year transition into a functional ECS formula in 2020. Sharing in the cost of state-negotiated teachers' pensions, is off the table under the plan as well.
Danbury Representative Michael Ferguson says the plan spares already financially strained and overtaxed groups by not relying on toll revenue or taxing hospitals. He says the plan would restore confidence in Connecticut at a time when the state finds itself in a historically dismal fiscal crisis.
Brookfield Representative Stephen Harding called it a positive first step. He says the state must mitigate the $1.7 billion deficit without raising taxes on an already overburdened population and provide the proper funding to local schools.
Monroe state Representative JP Sredzinski says the Republican alternative budget proposal maintains most, if not all, municipal funding and does not raise taxes. He added that Connecticut's fiscal crisis requires immediate action and severe, long-term structural changes to the budget. Sredzinski says for too long there has been too much spending, and has been coupled with the two largest tax increases in state history.
