The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Malloy critical of 2019 budget, but signs it anyway
The governor signed a bipartisan budget Tuesday passed by the General Assembly, but he chastised lawmakers for spending too much and not doing enough to reduce future state deficits.
The budget adjustments that will take effect July 1 put the state on track to spend more than it can afford, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy wrote in a letter to legislators.
“This new budget adjustment spends $197.2 million more than the original budget for Fiscal Year 2019,” he wrote. “It restores and expands various health and human service programs, outpacing benefits provided to levels well above those in our neighboring states and resulting in some of the most generous benefits in the nation. Critically, it does so without making the accompanying difficult decisions to reduce spending in other areas of the budget in order to afford these benefits.”
Although lawmakers tackled cuts scheduled to hit in July with millions of dollars in one-time revenue, they did little to address future deficits when they passed the budget last week, Malloy said.
As for nearly $800 million in deficits this fiscal year and next, lawmakers tapped the state’s emergency reserves to paper them over instead of deploying the deficit mitigation plan Malloy laid out in December 2017, the governor lamented.
“We now face out-year deficits of $1.96 billion in Fiscal Year 2020, growing nearly $600 million per year thereafter, and we leave the budget reserve fund at $1.16 billion by the end of Fiscal Year 2019,” Malloy wrote. “This is significantly below what is needed to meet the challenges of the next recession, which, by many measures, is overdue.”
Malloy’s own budget adjustment proposal left $1.35 billion in deficits in 2020, growing by about $150 million over the next two fiscal years.