The Connecticut General Assembly begins the final day of its 2025 session Wednesday with an adopted budget and other priority bills safely on their way to the desk of Gov. Ned Lamont. But hundreds will die from inaction at the midnight adjournment.

“It’s an annual event at this stage,” said House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford.

A select few still have a chance for passage, most notably House Bill 5004, a largely aspirational measure that would strengthen the state’s existing carbon-reduction goals and create a new “Clean Economy Council” to develop strategies and policies to help meet those targets.

It passed the House and has been sitting on the Senate calendar since May 5. Senate President Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, said Tuesday night it will be one of the Senate’s first tasks on Wednesday.

Nearly 4,000 bills were filed this year. On Wednesday morning, there were nearly 80 Senate bills awaiting final action in the House and 63 House bills awaiting passage in the Senate. House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said most are effectively dead.

“I think most of us know that not every idea that we put out, not every bill that I put in, is going to become law, either,” said House Majority Leader Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford. “And this is just part of the natural process, that is this process of filtering through lots of ideas and only having enough time and or resources to pass so many.”

House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, said the legislative committees churned out too many bills.

“We say that every year: There’s too many bills that get out of committee,” Candelora said. “But I feel as if committees didn’t do their work. These bills are coming very late. A lot of them weren’t ready for prime time.”

Senate Bill 1, a priority bill for early childhood care, passed easily, as did House Bill 5001, an effort to improve special education services. An energy bill glided to final passage Tuesday night.

Other bills found new places to survive, and some are effectively dead.

State finances

Several smaller bills related to fiscal matters received final approval Tuesday when the Senate adopted the $55.8 billion two-year state budget.

Those smaller bills wrapped into the budget package would:

• Cap the reserve for the budget’s Special Transportation Fund at 18% of the STF.

Any reserves above that cap would be used to pay down bonded debt tied to highway, bridge, rail or other transportation projects.

• Create a business tax credit for farmers’ investments in machinery, other equipment and buildings. The credit would offset 20% of expenses in these categories.

• Establish a $500 state income tax credit for owners of a licensed family child care home.

• Require the Department of Economic and Community Development to submit a Sept. 1 progress report on an initiative launched last year to reduce concentrated poverty in Connecticut.

• Require the Department of Revenue Services to study ways to improve collection of delinquent taxes owed by state contractors. An earlier version of the bill would have allowed the state to deny driver’s license renewals to any delinquent taxpayer, not just to contractors.

• Require telecommunications companies to charge subscribers a five-cents-per-month fee to support a cancer relief account for Connecticut firefighters.

Other bills with fiscal elements were expected to die when the 2025 session closes Wednesday at midnight. These include:

• A plan to expand an existing property tax abatement program for police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians killed in the line of duty to including surviving domestic partners.

• A program to gradually phase out municipal property taxes on motor vehicles, beginning in 2028.

Insurance

The House on Monday gave full passage to a sweeping bill that seeks to boost insurance affordability and transparency, as well as address industry practices that critics say limit patients’ access to care.

Among its many provisions, the bill would allow the state insurance commissioner to limit rate increases for insurers that have a track record of hiking costs. Beginning Jan. 1, 2027, if an insurer’s rate increases exceed the state’s “cost growth benchmarks” for the previous two consecutive years where data is available, the commissioner can reduce the carrier’s proposed rate increase by up to two percentage points.

The insurance commissioner can also fine carriers that don’t comply with a state law requiring insurers to offer mental health coverage that’s as robust as coverage for medical services, known as “mental health parity.” The bill would allow the insurance commissioner to fine insurers up to $625,000 annually for noncompliance with the mental health parity law. It also would require the parity reports submitted by insurers, including the names of each company, to be made public.

The bill also contains measures directly responding to high-profile public scrutiny of the insurance industry over the past year on issues including prior authorization and proposed time limits on the use of anesthesia.

Housing

A bill that would have prevented municipalities from fining people for sleeping outside hasn’t moved forward since it gained Committee passage in March and is likely dead.

House Bill 7033 would prohibit municipalities from penalizing people for conducting “life sustaining activities,” such as sleeping, eating and storing personal belongings, in public spaces. There are exceptions if there is adequate indoor shelter offered that includes transportation to the shelter for the person and their belongings or if people are impeding traffic.

The proposal follows a summer Supreme Court decision that ruled in an Oregon case that towns can pass and enforce ordinances that prevent people from sleeping outside. 

Children’s issues

The Committee on Children debated a bill that would have allowed hospitals to install so-called “baby boxes” on an exterior wall, high-tech, temperature-controlled chambers with alarms where people could have left infants. But that bill died in committee.

Proponents said the boxes would have given people a judgement-free option to safely relinquish newborns, which could save lives. Opponents argued that the boxes, while well-intended, are not needed because Connecticut already has laws that allow mothers to anonymously relinquish babies with no consequences, and that the boxes could unleash many negative consequences.

They say that because the boxes are made by only one company in the U.S., Safe Haven Baby Boxes, and are unregulated, there could be unforeseen safety issues in the event of a blackout or technological problem. A baby was recently found dead in a baby box in a church in Italy, where a priest said he never received a notification linked to his cellphone, though that box was not made by Safe Haven Baby Boxes.

Safe Haven Baby Boxes are concentrated in the Midwest. Indiana, the home state of Safe Haven Baby Box CEO Monica Kelsey, an anti-abortion activist, has more than 100 of the boxes.

The Committee on Children also heard testimony on a bill that would have extended financial support for foster youth to attend college and other post-secondary education programs from age 23 to 28. That bill died in the Appropriations Committee.

At the start of the legislative session, Lamont championed the creation of a Universal Pre-K endowment. That bill, House Bill 6867, was since been abandoned for a plan in Senate Bill 1 that also encompasses infant and toddler care and is the result of negotiations between Lamont, House and Senate Democrats and advocates.

Environment

The last week of the legislative session has brought a bit of déjà vu for environmental activists, who once again find themselves waiting for the Senate to take up a climate bill numbered 5004.

Last year, that bill died in the Senate when the clock struck midnight. But this year, advocates are still hoping that lawmakers will find time to pass their legislation, which promises to set Connecticut on a path toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

“I’m like teetering between ‘Is it gonna fail again?’ and hoping that it’s gonna go,” said Samantha Dynowski, the state director for Sierra Club Connecticut. “Every five minutes I hear something different, and I don’t know what to think.”

The bill passed the House on a party-line 98-47 vote in May. The Senate chair of the Environment Committee, Sen. Rick Lopes, D-New Britain, said he expected to run the bill early on Wednesday.

Loosely tied to that bill is the fate of another measure dealing with the state’s growing population of black bears.

A controversial proposal to allow hunting of bears, Senate Bill 1523, was passed by the upper chamber on May 15. In the House, however, lawmakers plan to strip the hunting provisions of the bill and replace them with a requirement for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to come up with a bear management plan.

Should the House pass the amended bill, it would have to go back to the Senate for concurrence. The bill also includes language clarifying when farmers can shoot a bear that is causing damage to crops, a priority for Republicans representing rural districts.

With the session adjourning at midnight, both bills are prime candidates for the last-minute horse-trading that often takes place between the two chambers.

Criminal justice

Amid a public outcry from immigrant advocacy groups and faith organizations, lawmakers passed an expanded version of the Trust Act, Connecticut’s law outlining the circumstances under which local and state officials are allowed to work and communicate with the federal government’s efforts to detain unauthorized migrants. Individuals are now permitted to sue over alleged violations of the law. The bill also expands the situations in which officials can comply with federal immigration detainers — and not be subject to such litigation — to include 13 additional crimes.

Certain portions of the original bill were removed, including a section that would have prohibited companies who wish to contract with state agencies from working with federal immigration authorities.

A bill prohibiting the use of handcuffs in children passed through the Senate and the House, although significantly watered down. The bill would have originally raised the age at which a child could be arrested from age 10 to age 14, but this was eliminated before the bill reached the Senate. The adopted bill says a police officer cannot place handcuffs on a 14-year-old unless there is a risk to public safety or to the officer. An amendment to the bill says the officer is not held culpable if he or she handcuffs a child under 14 without knowing their age. 

A bill that would have expanded the eligibility of parole for people who committed crimes at a young age has not yet been called in the House of Representatives. The bill would make people who committed a crime while between the ages of 18 and 21 and were sentenced for that crime after Oct. 1, 2005, eligible for parole after serving a portion of their sentence. 

An act revising certain portions of Connecticut’s hate crimes statutes was temporarily passed in the House on Tuesday after a lengthy and technical debate over a proposed amendment that would add law enforcement officers as a protective class. The bill would move all the current statutes that pertain to hate crimes into one section, clarify conflicting language around intent and increase penalties for criminal acts that are found to have been motivated by bias against a protected group.

Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, said Tuesday that the purpose was to consolidate Connecticut’s hate crimes laws, which are “scattered,” “inconsistent” and “difficult for police officers and prosecutors to charge” into one place.

The House of Representatives has yet to call a bill passed by the Senate earlier this session that would penalize companies that manufacture and sell drugs or devices that can be used in capital punishment. Under the proposal, the Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection can refuse to issue a certificate of registration to a business that manufactures or sells items the business knows will be used to “execute a sentence of death.” The department can also suspend or revoke a registration that already exists. Republicans have argued that the bill violates the Interstate Commerce Clause, since the death penalty is legal in other states.

CT Mirror reporters Keith Phaneuf, Katy Golvala, Ginny Monk, Laura Tillman, John Moritz and Emilia Otte contributed to this story.