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January 8, 2025

CT Gov. Lamont’s ‘north stars’ in 2025: opportunity and affordability

Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror Gov. Ned Lamont delivering the State of the State Address at the state Capitol on Feb. 7, 2024. His seventh will come today.
By Mark Pazniokas, CT Mirror

Gov. Ned Lamont intends to talk broadly in a noontime speech to legislators Wednesday about “opportunity and affordability” for the state’s residents. These, he said, are the “north stars” guiding him as the Connecticut General Assembly opens its annual session and begins its 2025-2026 term.

“As a business person, by nature, I always think about economic growth,” Lamont said. “I’m always thinking about the top line, and I have a feeling that CEOs of the state didn’t always think that way. Everybody’s always trying to divide up the pie instead of grow that economic pie. And economic growth makes a big difference.”

That’s the message Lamont delivered to the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, just after the election in November, and it’s consistent with an outline of the governor’s planned State of the State address shared Tuesday by his staff. 

Unclear was the degree to which Lamont would offer specific proposals to fuel growth and address longstanding concerns about affordability — of housing, energy and health care — and its impact on economic growth and individual opportunity.

Matt Brokman, the governor’s chief of staff, said Lamont intended to make suggestions to open the discussion with lawmakers Wednesday. Legislative proposals typically are not filed until the governor puts forth his biennial budget proposals during the first week of February.

Lamont has no plans to address rising pressure on him to revise spending caps, nor what a second Donald J. Trump administration might mean for Connecticut. His speech comes a day after the president-elect outlined his startling territorial designs on Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.

The governor’s chief spokeswoman, Julia Bergman, said Lamont plans on attending Trump’s inaugural, making him only the fourth Democratic governor to commit. Eight years ago, Lamont’s predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy, also opted to attend. At the time, Malloy was chair of the Democratic Governors Association.

The governor has been consistent in his defense of the state’s so-called “fiscal guardrails,” adopted in 2017 as part of a bipartisan budget deal.

The guardrails include a volatility provision that limits spending of revenue from quarterly income and business tax receipts, which have often fluctuated from year to year. The volatility cap requires revenues exceeding $3.15 billion from these sources be set aside for budget reserves or used to pay down debt and the state’s unfunded pension liability.

Critics say the threshold was arbitrary and set so low that it has captured $1 billion or more in six of its first seven years. Given that track record, Democratic legislative leaders ask, exactly how volatile are revenues that have come in so consistently?

In his November remarks to CBIA, Lamont indicated that the guardrails were necessary medicine for a state with a history of fiscal problems and low growth.

Chris DiPentima, the trade association’s leader, introduced Lamont at the event to raucous applause, calling him a champion of a new “public private partnership.”

“He’s also been a champion of the fiscal guardrails, which has been critical to Connecticut’s health, really critical to Connecticut resurgence,” DiPentima said. “And when I talk about resurgence, I’m talking about that positive energy that we feel not just in this room, but every day in our lives here in Connecticut.”

In a message he’s expected to repeat at the opening of the legislative session, Lamont told CBIA then his goal was to make Connecticut a state of opportunity, where college graduates want to stay, help start businesses and grow the economy.

“We’ve gone from being the second slowest growing economy in the United States of America, going back whatever it was, 10 years or something, to be faster. Not the fastest, but getting better every day,” Lamont said.

At an annual rate, Connecticut’s real gross domestic product increased by 3% and personal income rose 2.9% in the 3rd quarter of 2024, as reported in late December by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Nationally, GDP grew by 3.1% and personal income by 3.2%.

Connecticut’s jobless rate fell from 4.2% in November 2023 to 3% in November 2024, the biggest drop of any state in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“So as we continue, I hope to keep our fiscal house in order. It’s taken a while. We’re doing better. We paid down a lot of our outstanding pension debt, but it’s going to be a very complicated legislative session,” Lamont said. “It’s going to be a complicated session, because a lot of that one-time [federal] COVID money has gone away.”

The state is not expecting more money from a Trump administration. A major fear is that Trump’s animosity to the Affordable Care Act, passed during the Obama administration, could mean a retreat from a Medicaid expansion in Connecticut that had greatly reduced the ranks of the uninsured.

“We’re analyzing every day what the incoming a Trump administration is going to mean for the state,” he said.

Lamont, a Democrat who turned 71 on Friday, is crossing the mid-point of his second four-year term today, leaving open the possibility of seeking a rare third term in 2028. He has no intention of tipping his hand today.

Every legislative seat was up for election in November, when Democrats won majorities of 102-49 in the House and 25-11 in the Senate.

Two lawmakers are resigning to accept gubernatorial appointments and will not take the oath today for the two-year terms they recently won. Lamont intends to nominate Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, as a judge of the Superior Court and Rep. Christine Conley, D-Groton, to the Workers’ Compensation Commission.

The Senate will welcome two new members today; the House, 20. Democrats made net gains of one seat in the Senate and four in the House.

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