Budget: preserve local funding

State Rep. David Scribner (R-Brookfield, Bethel), an Assistant House Minority Leader, today joined with fellow House and Senate Republican leaders in unveiling a proposed 2009-2011 alternative state budget that would retain existing state funding for Brookfield and Bethel without raising taxes. The budget package presented by House and Senate Republicans would preserve vital state programs and services at 2007 levels, and greatly reduce government costs through cuts, agency mergers, retirements and salary and benefit concessions.

The proposal would also retain the $500 property tax credit for families earning as little as $46,000 that would be eliminated under the budget package approved by the Legislature’s Appropriations and Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committees, through largely party-line votes, on April 2. That plan contained $3.3 billion in tax increases, which would represent the largest tax hike in state history.

Republicans today pledged to work with Democrats and Gov. M. Jodi Rell to produce a two-year budget Connecticut can afford and not drive more businesses out of state through tax increases. Gov. Rell’s February budget proposal also had no tax increases, but state revenues have continued to deteriorate and the plan unveiled today accounts for the revenue drop projected by the non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA).

Additional highlights of the Republican alternative budget are:

• Early retirement to save more than $285 million;
• State worker concessions for salary, health care and pension benefits that save $662 million;
• Folding 23 agencies into six and implementing a hiring freeze to reduce overhead costs. Two more agencies would be merged into the General Fund;
• Overhauling the higher education bureaucracy that duplicates services and drives up tuition for families struggling to pay for college;
• Using the Rainy Day Fund for what it was intended – fiscal distress;
• Imposing $900 million in hard cuts;
• Engaging private companies that can perform duties such as state park maintenance

“This budget plan recognizes that we simply cannot hike taxes on families who are already struggling,” said Rep. Scribner, who serves on the Legislature’s tax-writing Finance Committee. “There is an affordable way to provide necessary services and state funds for towns. I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure this is the focus of the budget that is eventually passed into law.”