Lawmakers look to 2022
Agenda for upcoming session likely to include COVID rules, climate change, juvenile justice
The COVID-plagued 2021 legislative session will linger into 2022, with similar public-access obstacles for state lawmakers who hope to build on a variety of accomplishments, from combating the effects of climate change, to expanding criminal-justice initiatives, promoting regionalism, extending child tax credits, protecting data privacy and increasing government transparency.
Here is a look at several of the state legislative issues that occupied 2021 and promise to play an even bigger role in 2022, an election year for all 187 lawmakers and all six Constitutional state offices including governor. But first, an overview of the coronavirus effects on the upcoming session itself.
A partly closed Capitol again?
Lawmakers are expected to regain control in February over coronavirus rules when nearly two years of emergency powers by Gov. Ned Lamont are set to expire.
The first question: Access to the state Capitol and the Legislative Office Building will again be dictated by COVID, and leaders in the General Assembly will be closely watching infection and hospitalization rates as they navigate toward the Feb. 9 opening of the short, budget-adjustment session that ends on May 4.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are being told to narrow the scope of their legislative ambitions, which may be reduced drastically if the General Assembly goes remote for a second consecutive year after the curtailed session of 2020.
But on the bright side, 2021 proved both the popularity and efficacy of allowing the public to testify remotely, saving them time, trouble and gasoline.
“No matter what we do, I believe Zoom will still be part of the public hearing process,” said Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. “There is still a need for in-person testimony, but
this year, Zoom made the Capitol more accessible.”
At this point in the pandemic, Ritter said in an interview, the Capitol complex could not support 1,000 people coming in to testify at a public hearing, and it is too early to predict what the state of public health and safety will be in early February.
“Remote public hearings worked very well in providing access and was a lot easier for people who wanted to testify because they didn’t have to burn their entire day,” said Joe DeLong, executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which lobbies for towns and cities.
“The COVID malaise is continuing to hang over the Capitol, which is too bad because government is a people business and there has to be some level of direct interaction,” said House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, RNorth Branford.
Candelora warned that there remain challenges with Zoom access, but with the spread of the omicron variant, remote hearings on proposed legislation seem inevitable, at least in the short run. In particular, virtual hearings by their nature can expand the realm of testimony beyond residents of Connecticut.
“How do you limit access to public hearings without running afoul of open government?” Candelora asked.
Climate change
DeLong said he finds some degree of comfort in knowing that CCM membership, representatives of the 169 cities and towns, agree on the threat of climate change and the need for the state to support resiliency programs. “Climate resiliency is far more partisan at the national level than local level,” he said.
Still, the failure of the General Assembly to approve joining the Transportation and Climate Initiative was a disappointment to some progressive lawmakers.
The multistate compact, which Lamont supported, would have created a capand-trade-style system in which the petroleum industry would pay for emissions rights. That would have raised an average of about $100 million in Connecticut for programs to clean the air, reduce reliance on driving and prepare for accelerating weather emergencies — but could have raised gasoline prices by about 5 cents a gallon, perhaps more.
While the state is dependent on federal support to continue climate-change resiliency — in particular President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation that is stalled in the U.S. Senate and might be dead — state Sen. Christine Cohen, DGuilford, co-chairwoman of the Environment Committee, has many related goals for the 12-week session.
“We need some real, sustainable, climate action,” Cohen said in a phone interview. “I just am really frustrated by the fact that we have not been able to do that much with the climate. It’s really time to practice what we preach here.”
Cohen wants the legislature to consider fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty trucks, which Lamont addressed recently in a farreaching executive order. “I think a lot of what he has in there is a good combination of short-term items, then goals that the legislature can come in and work on,” Cohen said.
She would like to work more on diverting food waste from the state’s incinerators, particularly with the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority plant in Hartford scheduled to close next summer.
“What we really need to focus on is waste reduction,” she said, noting that the expansion of the state’s nearly 50-year-old bottledeposit law last year that will raise deposits to 10 cents in 2024, should be expanded further.
Cohen also wants to see an expansion of the ban on PFAS, the forever chemical that was banned from firefighting foam in a bill that Gov. Ned Lamont signed into law last July.
Juvenile Justice
State Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, a top Republican on the law-writing Judiciary Committee, has a half-dozen priorities to bring to the upcoming session. Three of them are in the controversial realm of juvenile justice and highprofile car thefts that were at the center of bipartisan talks — which were cut off this year between Republicans and Democrats, who have a 96-53 majority in the House and a 23-13 edge in the Senate.
Fishbein, a lawyer, said the current six-hour limit on holding youths after their arrest is too soon to conduct investigations, so he will propose extending it — as Republicans sought throughout 2021. He will also propose revising the statute on larceny of a motor vehicle to include different levels of severity, with luxury cars given greater weight than others.
And Fishbein said he will also propose adjudicating youths where they were arrested rather than where they live, taking the onus of travel off of victims and police, in, say, the case of a car stolen in Westport by a Bridgeport teen arrested in Stamford.
State Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, RStratford, agreed that criminal justice issues will be major goals for his caucus, as well as continuing changes in providing lower-cost health care.
Citing the recent arrest and resignation of a House member from West Haven, Kelly said he wants a closer eye on federal relief money coming into the state for infrastructure.
“We have to make sure there is better accountability in the deployment of those funds to make sure those projects get designed and move through the process and get built,” Kelly said. “It’s important for the Connecticut economy.”
State Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said gun violence which escalated in Connecticut’s cities during the pandemic, is a major challenge. “Clearly, we haven’t figured out how to deal with the firearms on the street,” he said in an interview.
Winfield anticipates Republicans will pick up their arguments from last summer on tougher criminal-justice laws. “We’ll center ourselves on what is true and untrue,” Winfield said. “We often look at the issue of crime and say that that’s the problem, but it’s the symptom of another problem. You can say, ‘well, don’t commit crimes.’ You really deal with crime when you understand trauma. If you increase the likelihood of putting young people in prison, they are less likely to fulfill potential, and it make people less safe. There should also be a way to fit back into society.”
State Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, the other co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said there are no easy answers to youth crime, which increased throughout the nation during the pandemic along with the proliferation of gun violence, mostly in cities.
“I think we have to start with the fact that Connecticut remains the fourthsafest state in the country and the bipartisan juvenile reforms we’ve taken over the last 10 years have resulted in a precipitous drop in youth crime,” Stafstrom said in an interview.
“There has been an uptick particularly in property crime during the pandemic, and the Republicans and I have very different ideas on how to address that. The notion that we can arrest and incarcerate our way out of a temporary uptick in crime is a fallacy. Simply increasing sentences backfires and in fact leads to more recidivism and crime, not less.”
The answer is to invest in services and support to keep kids in school and provide more after-school activities while dealing with backlogs in the judicial system through technology, he said.
“The biggest uptick in crime is gun violence,” Stafstrom said, point toward Republicans in the U.S. Congress who oppose national gun-safety measures including background checks. “How does a 16-year-old get a gun in the first place?” Stafstrom said. “The illegal guns in Connecticut are either brought in from out of state from states with less-restrictive gun laws, or stolen from homes and cars.”
‘Behavioral health will dominate the session’
Candelora, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, agree that while progress was made this year with bills targeting children’s mental health in the pandemic and behavioral health, including the declaration that racism is a public health crisis, actually addressing the issues is just beginning.
“Mental health and behavioral health will dominate the session,” Candelora predicted. “We have a lot of work to do on the educational model. Our online learning platforms are inadequate and our COVID-19 guidelines are out of step with the feds.”
“We need to enhance what we can do for the unmet needs, especially for our kids,” Duff said in an interview. “It’s a major issue that needs to be addressed without delay.”
Looney noted that task forces created by the mental health and behavioral health bills have upcoming deadlines for reports to the General Assembly to craft legislation in 2022, including access to treatment and expanded insurance coverage.
Regional cooperation
State Rep. Sean Scanlon, D-Guilford, co-chairman of the powerful tax-writing legislative Finance Committee, plans to expand opportunities for towns and cities to share services by allowing cities and towns to negotiate with unions across municipal borders.
“It’s an incentive program, so rather than the stick, we want to use a carrot,” said Scanlon in an interview.
That proposal gained some speed in 2021, winning approval in the state House of Representatives before dying on the Senate calendar.
“I think it makes a lot of sense and a lot more efficiencies can get done,” said DeLong, at the conference of municipalities, which issued a report supporting the idea back in 2018.
We can also expect to see more than one proposal for property tax reform, which give incentives for cities and towns to cooperate on services.
Looney wants to continue a theme of increasing municipal aid. While the longtime property tax credit was scaled back during recent budgets, before the pandemic when lawmakers were concerned about balancing the budget, Looney wants to provide more funding for special education and will push for a change in the state’s program of giving cities and payments for supporting tax-exempt properties including colleges and hospitals.
Looney will push for a new three-tiered system of such payments, giving poorer cities more relief.
Child tax credits
Scanlon said his biggest priority in the 2022 session is the child tax credit for working families that was opposed by Lamont in 2021. The plan was pushed into the background by the monthly federal payments to families with kids, under the pandemic relief, which is now ending.
Even if a version of Biden’s Build Back Better proposal passes, it almost definitely will nit include a permanent extension of the larger pandemic-era child tax credit.
Ritter, who named Scanlon to head the Finance Committee, said the robust budget surpluses leave him hopeful that child credits would pass in some form, picking up where Washington left off.
The challenge to legislative leaders will be to see how much can be accomplished before the end of the short session and the beginning of the electioncampaign season for the General Assembly and top-of-the-ticket candidates including Lamont.