Lt. Gov. Wyman Says With New Budget, The State Will Be Open For Business

Patch sat down with Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, of Tolland, after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy delivered the first budget address of his administration on Wednesday, Feb. 16.  His budget, which has a “bottom line” total of $17.94 billion for the 2011-12 fiscal year, fills an estimated $3.2 billion deficit in the coming year.  It also contains numerous spending cuts, tax increases and a consolidation of numerous government agencies.

Wyman echoed the governor’s call for “shared sacrifices,” after stepping into an administration inheriting a $3.5 billion deficit.

She said there was no more rainy day fund. “We don’t have the one-shot deals that were done previously. We started out with a major hole, and now how do we fill that hole?”

Wyman said part of the solution was to streamline state government. “You’re going to see in the future more downsizing of state government, more streamlining—making sure that services are delivered faster and better,” she said. 

According to Wyman, a top priority for the administration is also to ensure that it is providing more jobs. "Our first focus was: What in this budget can we do to make sure that we are providing more jobs in the state, bringing more businesses  into this state?" she said.

She said when creating the proposed budget, they looked at how to reorganize state government. They next looked to the unions, to make concessions. “It was only after doing all that that we finally realized that the only way to get this state back on track again is to basically raise some taxes,” said Wyman. She acknowledged that nobody wants to increase taxes, but there was no other way for the state to move ahead.

In her 16 years as a state comptroller, Wyman said she “struggled and pushed for years…to go under an accounting system, which is not sexy to anybody, but it’s the true, open, transparency in accounting.” She said that this was asked of municipalities and business but very few states in the nation do this.

Reporting under what is called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, Connecticut will no longer be “monkeying around with revenues and expenditures anymore,” Wyman said. “We’re going to be honest to the people of this state.”

Wyman recognized that there were many holes for the administration to fill. One of those, she said, was created when the last administration took $270 million from federal funds to put into the Education Cost Sharing grant, the state’s largest means of support to local schools. “It’s the biggest education grant, the biggest grant given to cities and towns,” she said.

The governor's budget calls for the restoration of those funds over each of the next two years to compensate for the anticipated loss of funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is set to expire at the end of June.

The town of Tolland stands to lose an estimated $1.5 million in grant revenue if the funds are not restored, according to the state Department of Education’s Bureau of Grants Management. Without filling that 14 percent gap, residents might very well see “an increase in larger class sizes, potentially reduced quality [of education] and likely an increase in property taxes,” State Rep. Bryan Hurlburt, D-Tolland, said.

Malloy said the restoration would bring the state’s ECS funding to 2009 levels. "The governor had always said that you can’t just keep cutting the cities and towns, you just hurt the people and the property tax. We told people we would flat fund it, and we did it," said Wyman. "So they know exactly what they’re going to get when they’re doing their own budgets."  

Wyman said the administration had to find $270 million to put in the budget to provide flat funding for ECS. Some of the money used to restore funding might come from other sources like the increased sales tax, she said.

Wyman also said that choosing to no longer go through a managed health care organization for Medicaid, instead administering it through the state, would provide substantial savings.

“We can save in the first year and first half of next year $35 million,” she said. "The following year it would be $75 million.”

Within the next two years, the hope is that the administration can say of the state, “We are now open for business.”

With a promising job market, Wyman envisioned more graduates choosing to stay in Connecticut and new businesses being attracted to the state.

“People of the state are tired of hearing about how bad this state is,” she said. “But I’ve gotta tell you that this governor really is out there to push, to bring businesses in, to get jobs going again in the state.”

She said the bond package, discussed in Malloy’s address, which would provide more money for roads and bridges that are in desperate need, would also create approximately 1,000 jobs for the state.

“So that’s what we’re geared for, and that’s why everybody is going to have a little bit of shared sacrifices,” she said.