On the eve of the 2024 legislative session, Connecticut legislators and a statewide coalition of more than 60 community, faith and labor advocacy organizations are calling on Gov. Ned Lamont to reconsider his commitment to the state’s budgetary restraints and devote more funding and resources to working-class families.

The Connecticut For All coalition and several Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, a co-chair of the legislature’s Human Services Committee, and Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, a co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, sent the spirited message to Lamont during a press conference at the Legislative Office Building on Tuesday while announcing their agenda for the 2024 General Assembly, which begins on Wednesday.

“I’ll make it very simple: He has a responsibility to address the needs of working people, and we must hold him accountable to do it,” said Leslie Blatteau, an educator, a union member and president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, to a round of applause and affirmative shouts from others in the room.

The coalition is pushing for, among other things: an additional 5% tax on the wealthy; robust funding for institutions of higher education; an expansion of Medicaid to all immigrants 15 and older regardless of immigration status; the elimination of the subminimum wage for tipped workers; and the implementation of a universal “Just Cause” law to protect tenants from unjust eviction.

The agenda intends to make Lamont and ardent defenders of the state’s “fiscal guardrails” — mandatory savings systems and spending and borrowing caps — consider how a system intended to eliminate deficits and reduce debt has left working-class families without adequate services and programs to help them make ends meet.

However, “bipartisan fiscal guardrails are the reason why the state is no longer operating in a deficit, which our state had been doing for too many years,” Lamont’s office responded in a statement.

Still, some lawmakers and advocates believe the governor is judging the state’s fiscal health by the wrong metrics.

“Connecticut is not in good fiscal health when there are homeless children sleeping on the streets,” Gilchrest said at the press conference. “Connecticut is not in good fiscal health when there are families who cannot afford health care. And Connecticut is certainly not in good fiscal health when there are workers who have one, two, three jobs, and they still can’t afford to live in our state.”

Victoria Ceylan, a Danbury paraeducator, was one of the speakers on Tuesday, sharing a story about her son, AJ, who has cerebral palsy. She said she was told that he would never “walk, talk or amount to anything.”

With the help of paraeducators, who assist teachers and help provide individual attention to students, AJ recently accomplished what once seemed improbable: he graduated from UConn.

Paraeducators and higher education require investment, she added. And she said barely making $18 an hour as a paraeducator and her experienced coworkers barely making $20 per hour are not numbers reflective of a state with good fiscal health.

“Are you going to let a silly thing like fiscal guardrails prevent us from spending the billions we have in surplus on critical investments like paras and higher education?” Ceylan asked the governor, who was not at the event. “What kind of legacy does that leave?”

Amanda Watts, the vice president of a New Haven-based tenants union, also spoke on Tuesday, providing insight into residents’ battle for fair treatment from landlords. Watts lives in an apartment building composed of predominantly working-class Black families and elderly people.

The residents have had to live among rodents and with inadequate heating and fire hazards, Watts said. Their previous landlord sold the property to a “gentrifying landlord,” they said, and the space has become a construction site.

The landlord is focusing on renovating empty units and not improving the living conditions for residents who already reside there, Watts said. There’s a refusal to change the culture of the building, they said, and the company intends to raise the rent over the next couple of years.

“As we strive to help my neighbors recognize their rights … I’m confronted with their deep-seated fear of eviction that hinders many of them from joining or working with the union,” Watts said. “No one deserves to live in constant fear and stress of being displaced for retaliatory or gentrifying reasons, or for no reason at all.”

The fear of the residents is why “lawmakers must partner with their tenant constituents,” Watts added.

And the state doesn’t have to completely do away with the guardrails to help the people who need assistance, Winfield said.

“But we do need to do some things we have chosen not to do,” he said.