Some lawmakers’ attempts to pass two bills spurred by a child sex abuse scandal at a town-run camp in Bethany came to an end at midnight on Wednesday when the legislative session came to a close.

Senate Bill 6, which would have required camps operated by towns and cities across Connecticut to be regulated by the state, had received support in the Senate, but efforts to move that forward came to an unceremonious end when the House failed to take it up on the last day of the session. House Bill 6952, which would have required a more limited set of safety measures for those camps, was never voted on by either chamber.

“It’s very unfortunate, disappointing,” Sen. Jorge Cabrera, D-Bethany, told The Connecticut Mirror on the Senate floor Wednesday night. “I hope that we’ll get the chance to try again next year.”

Cabrera said he thinks that confusion over S.B. 6 and its impact stood in its way. In addition to other unrelated provisions on food assistance, disconnected youth and the Early Start program, that bill would have required municipal camps to be licensed by the Office of Early Childhood in the same way that private camps are.

Municipalities overwhelmingly voiced opposition to the legislation, citing concerns about the financial impact of complying with regulations like ratios of bathrooms to the number of campers. They said that such changes could close camps and shut low-income families out of an inexpensive child care option in the summer months. Advocates argued that these concerns were overblown and that it was possible to get to a middle ground that would have assured the safety of campers with only modest increases in cost.

The bill gained traction after a scathing report was released on May 15 that detailed the findings of an internal investigation into how the town of Bethany and its first selectwoman, Paula Cofrancesco, handled allegations of sexual abuse by an employee who worked with children at the local school and in the town-run summer camp.

After Cofrancesco learned of those allegations, the report found that she deceived Bethany residents and failed to protect local children from an alleged abuser — then resisted efforts to make those programs safer. More than a year later, no arrest had been made despite findings by experts at the Yale Child Advocacy Center and the state Department of Children and Families that the allegations were credible, and in that time an additional victim alleges she was abused.

The report also found that Bethany’s Parks and Recreation Department was poorly run. According to the report, the department “had no filing or record-keeping system, written safety policies, or documented training protocols for its staff.” 

According to an interview in the report with Cofrancesco’s assistant, no background checks were conducted until 2024.

Cofrancesco was among the voices of opposition back in 2023 when the legislature took up a similar bill that attempted to create oversight for town camps. At the time, she argued that municipal camps already received enough oversight, including from elected leaders like herself.

Sen. Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, who is co-chair of the Committee on Children, had championed the bill’s passage on the Senate floor. She said that licensing municipal camps is an equity issue, because many low-income families rely on town camps and should be able to count on them to be checked for safety, on par with the way the state regulates private camps.

Maher said she believes there is a pathway forward to come to an agreement in the future and had hoped to carve out a middle ground that would have satisfied the concerns of municipalities. She had hoped to develop a task force to bring stakeholders to the table to discuss the best path forward.

“The most important thing to me is that municipal camps are taking care of our children, that our children are safe, that parents know that their child is safe in the summer,” she said. “Most parents drop their kids off and have no idea that they are not licensed and there’s no oversight except through the municipality. So, we want to make sure that there’s first aid training, that there’s mandated reporter training, that they have staffing ratios that make sense that keep kids safe.”

H.B. 6952 was an attempt to carve out a more modest set of regulations based on safety concerns. That bill would have required prospective employees age 18 and older to submit to comprehensive background checks, which many municipal camps say that they already do but which is not required by the state. It would also have required at least one staff member over the age of 18 for every 12 children, mandatory reporter training for leadership, and that such programs, because they are exempt from camp licensing, would not be allowed to call themselves “camps.”

Many municipal Parks and Recreation departments took issue with the bills. In written testimony, Stephanie Crane, the recreation director for Bolton, said the S.B. 6 “could result in reduced program registrations, the loss of high school employees, and potentially force the closure of many recreational programs due to staffing shortages.”

Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, also spoke out in opposition to the bill on the Senate floor.

“I think it’s a great thing that you want to feel better, but I can tell you that you are not going to protect children with a piece of legislation that will not stop someone from putting hands on children,” Osten said on the Senate floor. “The only thing that stops people from putting hands on children is to put them in jail, to incarcerate those people, to make sure they stay there a really long time. And when they get out to follow them and make sure they get the treatment they can. And our bills today don’t address that issue.” 

Rep. Mary Welander, D-Orange, said she hoped to come to the table next year, and was encouraged by testimony submitted by municipal camps.

“The good news is that through the public hearing we did learn that the overwhelming majority, if not the entirety of municipal camps are already doing the vast majority of what was being asked for,” she said.

Welander said that while background checks would not have prevented the Bethany case, since that counselor did not yet have a record at the time of the alleged abuse, the internal investigation did raise concerns and questions about what else could be done to prevent a similar case in the future.

“It’s not just about background checks, it’s also about best practices,” she said, emphasizing that there should be measures in place to ensure that concerning behavior is addressed, “and that the people that work with the children are taught to recognize the signs that something might be going on that is unacceptable.”

But for Acting Child Advocate Christina Ghio, background checks are still the major focus.

“From our perspective the core of the issue is that background checking, so I hope there is a way to make sure that, at a minimum, we can get background checks for all of those settings even if we can’t get full licensure.”