Lawmakers direct Lamont to fill vacant state jobs

As projected state employee retirements surged again Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont signed a new budget that will encourage agencies to fill positions quickly.

Nearly 4,200 employees have either retired since Jan. 1 or filed their written intentions to do so before July 1, Comptroller Natalie Braswell’s office reported. That’s up 9 percent from the retirement tally released less than two weeks ago.

That number is projected to keep growing over the next seven weeks, after which more stringent limits on state worker retirement benefits, negotiated as part of a 2017 union concessions package, take effect.

With many legislators and union leaders saying state agencies and departments face a staffing crisis, lawmakers built a new safeguard into the budget to ensure hiring remains a priority — because keeping positions open to save money has been a hallmark of the Lamont administration.

The legislature routinely orders the governor to find millions of dollars in savings once the fiscal year is underway. The new budget sets a savings target of $140 million.

Sen. Cathy Osten, DSprague, and Rep. Toni E. Walker, D-New Haven, the co-chairs of the Appropriations Committee, added policy language this year prohibiting the administration from reducing any departmental budgets as long as the state is in the black.

“We wanted to make sure we’re paying attention to what we had funded — and that everything we had funded was put out the door,” said Osten.

Those savings targets aren’t unrealistic. New programs don’t always start on time. An unanticipated flurry of competitive bidders may drive down the cost of one project or another.

But the easiest way to save money in an operation as large as state government, usually, is simply to delay filling vacant positions.

Since he took office in 2019, Lamont has far exceeded savings targets, often by leaving jobs vacant. The CT Mirror reported that Executive Branch agencies — excluding public colleges and universities — had collectively filled 25,700 of the 30,080 positions authorized for them in the state budget. The 17 percent vacancy rate is almost double where it stood just two years ago.

This has raised concerns within the legislature’s Appropriations Committee, whose members say the ongoing health crisis makes it vital to maintain service levels.

In Lamont’s first fiscal year, 2019-20, his budget office saved $544.1 million in the General Fund, more than two-and-a-half times the $209.2 million target lawmakers sought. Almost $200 million of that savings was in the Department of Social Services and driven largely by expanded federal Medicaid payments during the worst of the pandemic, but the remainder still surpassed the legislature’s goal.

The new budget that takes effect July 1 was crafted with a built-in surplus of almost $300 million, equal to a little more than 1.3 percent of the General Fund. More importantly, state revenues have been trending upward throughout the current fiscal year. Analysts say the budget will close June 30 with a $2.1 billion General Fund surplus and another $2.7 billion captured by a special revenue savings program, meaning state finances are on pace this fiscal year to close more than $4.8 billion in the black.