It has been a busy long weekend for legislative and budget-related news! Some of these articles highlight the perspectives and work of Connecticut Voices for Children.  Today, Susan Campbell of the Hartford Courant calls for quick passage of a bill currently before the Connecticut House that would help ensure that children who are separated while in foster care can visit each other regularly.

During their nearly 16 years in Connecticut's foster care system, sisters Ariana and Tiana Alicea often went months without seeing one another.

When Ariana was 6, and Tiana 4, their mother was arrested, and their father was nowhere around, so the girls were placed in a foster home together. They were soon separated, a not-infrequent occurrence among siblings in the state system, and only rarely saw each another, though they very much wanted to.

Learn more about this bill on our blog!

Sunday's Courant featured an op-ed by CT Voices' Senior Policy Fellow Wade Gibson on the need to address Connecticut's state revenue problems with revenue solutions that don't sacrifice our children's future:

The temptation now for many policy-makers will be to cut education, transportation and other public services even further. But that would be the wrong choice, costing the state dearly in the long run. There's an old truth in farming that Connecticut's earliest settlers knew: Don't eat your seed corn. If you do, there will be nothing to plant next year.

In an investigative story, Bill Cummings of the Hearst Newspapers takes a look at the tax and loan subsidies used to try to lure businesses to the state over the last decade and finds that much of the funds have not produced the promised jobs.  The story also quotes from Connecticut Voices' 2011 report on the need for evaluation of the effectiveness of business tax subsidies.

Connecticut Voices for Children, in a 2011 report, noted that tax credits offered by the state increased from $5.2 million in 1987 to $138 million in 2008. The research and advocacy group was not impressed with the effort, posing the question: "If the credits were repealed and the additional revenue then invested in, say, upgrading our rail infrastructure, might there be greater return on our investment?"