In a break from routine, House and Senate Democrats on Monday announced they’ll prioritize education and housing this session, aiming to take big steps to encourage construction of more housing and reduce cost burdens of special education on towns.
While the House and Senate often have similar priorities, it’s not common for leaders to host a press conference to announce joint plans. Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, called it a “first-of-its kind” event.
“I think it just helps us get off the good momentum for the session and to highlight two issues that are of major importance to both majority caucuses at this point,” Looney said.
The press conference signaled Democrats’ interest in addressing two of the issues that have been thorns in the side of politicians. Education funding and housing are contentious political issues that have been difficult for legislators to solve.
While the priority bills lack many details at this point in the process, Monday’s press conference gave a glimpse into the broad strokes of what Democrats hope to accomplish this session.
Many lawmakers pointed out that there’s an intersection between housing and education issues. There are sharp geographical divides in outcomes for students in Connecticut, and where they live typically determines where they go to school.
Lawmakers intend to take an all-of-the-above approach to housing, and said they’ll consider changing zoning regulations, pushing cities to grow, making it easier to build more workforce housing and single-family housing, among other measures.
The state lacks tens of thousands of units of housing that are affordable and available to its lowest-income residents, and thousands more Connecticut residents are paying large chunks of their income to housing costs.
“We can’t swing too far to the left or too far to the right on this issue,” said House Majority Leader Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford. “If we do that, we end up failing, and we end up not making the kind of progress that we need to make.”
They also want to address ongoing concerns about how education is funded in Connecticut, including the cost of special education and continuing work on accountability measures for where money is going when it’s given to boards of education.
“If we’re going to build broad-based support for funding for our school system, we also have to have broad based public confidence that all the money that is spent there is well spent, well planned, well accounted for,” Looney said.
Many solutions to problems in the education system hinge on the outcome of the budget negotiations. Democrats intend to push against Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget constraints, they said Monday.
Lamont has defended the constraints, known as the “fiscal guardrails,” as a good way to ensure the state has a balanced budget and can pay down debt.
Senate Republicans in a written statement Monday said the guardrails help prevent tax hikes in Connecticut.
“Yes, the legislature must continue to focus on implementing best practices regarding improving Connecticut’s education and housing policies,” the statement read. “But we must not tweak or adjust our smart bipartisan fiscal guardrails which have served Connecticut taxpayers so well.”
The House Minority leader didn’t return a request for comment.
Connecticut Conference of Municipalities executive director Joe DeLong issued a statement of support for lawmakers seeking to address these policy areas, saying it “highlights a critical moment for our state.”
Housing
Rojas said ideas from past sessions are all on the table — including proposals to increase residential density near public transit, roll back environmental regulations that make it hard to build, and divide up housing need among towns and have each town plan and zone for a set number of units.
Housing Committee ranking member Rep. Tony Scott, R-Monroe, said in a statement Monday that the ideas on housing issues aren’t addressing the problem. He wants to cut down on utility costs, incentivize builders and add more money to homelessness services.
“They want to go back to concepts that failed in previous years such as Live, Work, Ride, and the next stages of fair share,” Scott said of the Democrats. “This is just more of the same — a one-size-fits-all mandate from the state regardless of local ability, need or wants. Local control of zoning maintains the character of our municipalities that draw people to our state and keeps them here.”
Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, said the lack of housing is holding back Connecticut’s economy. He pointed to job shortages and said workforce vacancies are nearing 100,000 in the state.
“If you talk to people out in the real world, outside this building, whether they’re senior citizens or just graduates of college, or anybody in between, housing for them is a very, very important issue, and we have to get this right,” Duff said. “We have to actually move forward on this issue.”
Looney repeated calls from Lamont’s state-of-the-state address last week for cities to increase their housing supply and grow their populations.
Housing Committee co-chair Sen. Martha Marx, D-New London, pointed to the need for better quality housing in many parts of the state and said in her work as a home health worker, she’s encountered many people who are struggling to pay housing costs.
Marx also said the state needs more single-family housing so that young people can buy homes and stay in the state. The comment marked a shift from rhetoric typically heard from leadership in past sessions.
Typically, the focus in the committee has been on increasing multifamily housing and improving landlord-tenant relationships. Marx said for her, it’s not an either-or question.
“I just don’t see why every single municipality in the state of Connecticut wouldn’t want a nice subdivision with a bunch of ranches and capes where really super nice little league coach people are going to live and really be a part of their environment,” she added. “So I want both, and we need both. We need to be bold, and we need to ask for both.”
Education
In 2023, Connecticut Democrats pledged to scrutinize school spending and reassess how the state’s major vehicle for school funding is calculated. In a major omnibus education bill that year, lawmakers passed reform that required the state’s Department of Education to submit an annual report for each school district that included financial information including where and how funding was spent.
Now special education has been coined a top priority as well, with educators and advocates saying special education costs take up a large share of many districts’ budgets and should instead be partly shifted to a responsibility of the state.
The funds for special education go toward everything from hiring specialized teachers, paraeducators and other support staff, to expenses associated with sending students with disabilities to non-district schools that can better meet their needs.
Advocates have pushed for special education to be added as a weight to the state’s “Education Cost Sharing” formula for districts that enroll higher numbers of students in special education programs. The proposed changes are similar to weighted funding that currently goes to districts with large populations of multilingual learners and students from low-income households.
A handful of mayors and superintendents from the state’s largest cities, including Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury and Stamford also gathered Monday to advocate for increases to their state funding and plead their case for the state to pick up some costs for the rising number of students in special education.
District leaders in Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven say between 20% and 30% of their budgets went toward special education expenditures in 2021-22, totaling between about $80 million up to $140 million. A majority of those expenditures were on tuition at private schools with programs designed for students with severe disabilities.
But Education Committee co-chair Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Hartford, said lawmakers will need to “do a deeper dive.”
“Yes, we have to look at special education. Yes, we have to look at the cost. Yes, we have to look at the burdens being placed on it, but we have to do a deeper dive,” McCrory said. “We have to look at the outcomes we’re getting for the children that are in these programs.”
Rep. Lezlye Zupkus, a ranking member on the Education Committee, called the Democrat’s priorities “encouraging … issues that should be worked on every session.”
“I hope that as our conversations on the Education Committee progress this session, that those talks don’t lead to legislation that punishes high-performing districts by reducing their funding, or add layers of regulations that undermine the good work they are doing,” she said.