CT lawmakers seek to resurrect the Program Review and Investigations Committee
HBJ PHOTO | DAVID KRECHEVSKY
The State Capitol in Hartford.
Eight years after the state General Assembly defunded it, lawmakers are considering a bill to revive the Program Review and Investigations Committee.
House Bill 5422 was originally sponsored by Rep. Aundre Bumgardner (D-Groton), Rep. Christie M. Carpino (R-Cromwell) and Rep. Mary M. Mushinsky (D-Wallingford). The bill was raised and drafted by the legislature’s Joint Committee on Government Administration and Elections (GAE). Carpino is a member of that committee, while Bumgardner and Mushinsky are not.
The bill charges the Program Review and Investigations Committee with examining state agencies and programs to determine whether they are effective, receiving study requests from legislative staff and elected officials and undertaking studies on its own initiative.
Following a public hearing in March, in which no one spoke in opposition to the bill, it was unanimously approved by GAE.
The bill, which has since been amended, appeared briefly on the House calendar but was subsequently sent to the Appropriations Committee, where it awaits a vote. It likely faces a big obstacle, though, one similar to the reason the committee was shut down — cost.
The program review committee existed for more than 40 years, from 1973 through 2016, before the legislature eliminated its funding during the budget crisis in fiscal year 2016-17, when the state faced a deficit of about $1 billion.
Funding for the program review committee was cut in budget revisions for fiscal 2017 that were approved during a May special session that year. Different legislation during that same special session eliminated statutory references to the committee’s powers and duties.
Reviving the committee won’t be cheap. According to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA), reestablishing the committee will cost about $1.2 million in both fiscal year 2026 and fiscal 2027 for legislative management, with a corresponding “fringe benefit” cost for the state Comptroller’s Office of $482,016 for each fiscal year.
According to OFA, to meet the bill’s requirements, the program review committee will have to hire 12 staff members, including a director, two chief analysts, eight analysts and one administrative assistant.
The Appropriations Committee in April approved a two-year, $55.5 billion budget that spends millions of dollars more than was proposed by Gov. Ned Lamont and exceeds the spending cap.
Still, the bill to revive the program review committee has support on both sides of the aisle and from the public.
In testimony submitted for the public hearing in March, Sara Mendillo, government affairs and economic development coordinator for the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce, said her organization strongly supports reviving the committee.
“This bill aims to reinstate a critical committee that played a key role in reviewing state programs and conducting investigations into government operations,” Mendillo stated, adding that reestablishing the committee “is a crucial step toward improving the transparency and accountability of our state government.”
Ben Shaiken, director of government relations for the Connecticut Community Nonprofit Alliance, also submitted testimony supporting the bill, noting that during its previous tenure, the committee published over 300 studies, “including many valuable insights about the state’s human services infrastructure.”
“In recent years, the legislature has created a myriad of working groups, taskforces, councils and other bodies to research issues and provide reports and recommendations … to aid in the creation of future legislation and research solutions to problems,” Shaiken added. “Many of these are valuable, but much of their work could be supplanted or supplemented by the re-establishment of a PRI Committee.”
The Appropriations Committee did not act on the bill during its meeting on Monday.
There is a related bill, HB 7184, that in part would require the Office of Legislative Management to study the feasibility of “reestablishing the duties, responsibilities and staffing of the former Legislative Program Review and Investigations Committee.” That bill also was referred to the Appropriations Committee, which has not yet acted on it.
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