Welcome to The Connecticut Mirror’s budget tracker. This tool is designed to help show how the state budget process unfolds for the 2016-2017 fiscal year.
Last updated May 17, 2016.
Jump straight to the budget tracker or read on to understand how the process works…
The budget-writing process
Connecticut budgets two years at a time. That means that the budget legislators passed in 2015 provides a spending plan for both this and next fiscal year. But legislators almost always make adjustments to the second year of the two-year budget before it takes effect, which is what they’ll be doing during this year’s session.
Big adjustments are likely to be necessary this time around because nonpartisan analysts have projected that, as currently written, the budget scheduled to take effect July 1 includes a deficit of more than $900 million. That means that legislators will have to find savings (read: spending cuts) or additional sources of income (read: taxes and fees) to balance it.
So how does it come together?
The budget process generally involves three major steps (in some years, four), and this year’s has involved more iterations than usual.
First, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy proposed a budget or, in this case, adjustments to the second year of the two-year budget. He did that Feb. 3.
Next, legislators held hearings about the budget and came up with their own proposals. The Democrat-led Appropriations Committee issued a spending plan April 6, but faced immediate criticism because the plan was approximately $340 million short of closing the projected deficit, which had grown since Malloy proposed his budget.
Democrats presented a proposal to address that gap on April 28.
Meanwhile, the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee issued a plan for generating the money to pay for that spending.
Republican legislators proposed their own budget on April 25.
And, in an unusual move, Malloy released his own revised proposal April 12. Then, following the Democrats’ revised proposal and a standoff in negotiations, Malloy issued a third budget plan on May 2.
Malloy and Democrats in the legislature reached a tentative budget deal on May 3, with just over 24 hours to go before the session’s deadline. The Senate passed the final budget during a May 12 special session, and the House passed it the following day.
How to use this tool
This tool will show the major spending cuts, spending increases and revenue changes (that is, taxes and fees) in each proposal.
Items that were changed in Malloy’s second or third proposals or the Democrats’ second proposal are marked with an asterisk next to the number that indicates the size of the cut or add.
On the spending side, cuts are listed in red. Items in green indicate that the proposal would not change the level of funding an item would get. Items in yellow mean that there was a proposed cut but it was less than in one or more other proposals, while items in blue indicate a proposed cut that was deeper than in one or more other proposals.
There’s a separate tab, “adds,” for areas in which spending would increase under one or more proposals. Green represents a proposed spending increase. Yellow indicates a spending increase that’s lower than that included in one or more other proposals, while red indicates no change and blue indicates that a given proposal calls for cutting funding for that item.
On the taxes and fees side, items in red indicate a tax or fee increase. Items in green indicate that a proposal does not call for making any changes. Items in yellow indicate a tax or fee increase but at a lower level than in another proposal, while items in blue indicate a proposed tax or fee hike that was larger than in other proposals. Purple indicates a proposed cut in a tax or fee.
You can use the search field to find items that cover a particular topic, program or town, and click on specific lines to read more.
Circles that are white are items we’re still working to confirm.
A technical note: To the extent possible, we compared the proposed spending for the 2016-2017 fiscal year to the amount included in the two-year budget that passed in June 2015. In some cases – those in which the cut hit an item that wasn’t a full line item in the budget – we instead used the cut figure included in the proposal.