Happy new year!
Today marks the start of the legislative session.
As 2025 begins, we’ve recalibrated our Connecticut Families Plan, initially launched in 2022, to reflect the current landscape and meet the moment. Nestled within this plan are policy priorities for each year, which advance our vision of a Connecticut where all children achieve their full potential, regardless of family income, race, religion, or immigration status. Our Connecticut Families Plan 2.0 seeks to guide the road ahead and focuses on four key issue areas:
1) putting more money in the pockets of hardworking families;
2) growing a strong and diverse workforce;
3) ensuring affordable housing and child care are accessible in every town across our state; and
4) promoting safe, healthy and just communities for all.
While our Connecticut Families Plan is a comprehensive 5-year roadmap, lawmakers can enact an array of policies this year to help eradicate poverty and advance family economic security.
A topic of great debate this year will be the state’s fiscal controls or what politicians and pundits refer to as “fiscal guardrails.” These fiscal mechanisms were intended to prevent feast or famine spending and address mounting debt dating back to the 1930s. Between FY 2018 and FY 2024, the state’s surplus has equaled over $12.5 billion. However, 70% of the surplus has gone to make additional payments (beyond what’s required) toward unfunded retirement liabilities because of the fiscal controls passed in 2017 and their reauthorization in 2023. This means that even though we have billions in surplus dollars, programs and services that provide financial relief and support to our state’s children and families can’t be funded with those surplus dollars.
Starting in February, we’ll be visiting different towns across the state to engage in community conversations about the state’s fiscal controls: what they are, what they mean for people, and what we can collectively do to make sure our hard-earned tax dollars are being spent in the most responsible way in practice not just in theory.
We’re doing this because:
- we know that families are seeing the state tout the savings and the surplus, and yet they’re struggling;
- Connecticut’s status quo, a status quo that’s created one of the widest income and wealth divides in the country, hasn’t been working for a much bigger segment of the population than many of our elected officials would like to think;
- although progress has been made, the progress hasn’t fixed the array of broken systems residents are forced to contend with every day; and
- most importantly, we’re doing this because we know that change is possible.
The promise of Connecticut is that it can be a state of opportunity and prosperity for all, but we’re not there yet. So, we must keep working toward that better future. This will require all of us to be bold and brave, especially as forces in Washington, DC attempt to break the progress we have worked so hard to achieve. However, the truth is we have the ingenuity and the resources in this state to keep the promise alive. If we want to, we can embark on a new economic chapter in Connecticut that moves beyond the status quo to build a multi-racial economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged and lucky few. But this is a choice. There is no neutrality.
My hope for the new year is that you choose to be in the fight for economic justice with us.
In solidarity,
Emily Byrne, Executive Director