Gov. Ned Lamont predicted Wednesday he would reach new wage agreements — including raises — with all state employee unions, saying his administration is delivering its latest offers this week.

But it appears the 35 bargaining units currently working under expired contracts are expecting raises similar in size to those the governor and General Assembly granted state police troopers in mid-May. That agreement authorized a 2.5% cost-of-living hike plus a step adjustment for all but the most senior workers. A step adds roughly 2 percentage points to the value of the raise.

It remained unclear Thursday whether matching pay raises would happen.

“There shouldn’t be any confusion” among workers about the administration’s desire to award raises, Lamont said Wednesday following a Medicaid-related press conference. “They know we have well over $100 million earmarked in this budget. They know that we’ve said, ‘You’re going to get a raise.’”

The fiscally moderate governor did not disclose compensation specifics but added “we’ve got a couple of raise possibilities that they’re considering right now — not just a lump sum but an … ongoing.”

Lamont, a Democrat weighing whether to seek a third term next year, has been at odds with a key part of his political base for the first half of this summer.

The union representing 1,300 probation officers, information technology analysts, assistant clerks, counselors and other Judicial Branch support staff announced July 2 it would seek arbitration.

Six days later, two more bargaining units, representing judicial marshals and their immediate supervisors, also declared an impasse.

In all three instances, labor officials charged, the administration was offering $2,000 one-time payments in lieu of ongoing raises.

But Lamont’s office insisted there had been a misunderstanding and that the governor always planned to offer raises to all bargaining units.

Still, a fourth bargaining unit, representing correction officers, announced Wednesday evening that it had broken off talks as well.

During an April 25 appearance at a labor conference in Mystic, the governor pledged raises for all state workers and urged them to remember his track record. 

He echoed those comments again Wednesday morning.

“We’re sitting down and negotiating in good faith,” he said. “They’ve had a raise every year from me for the last six and they’re going to get a raise in years seven and eight. Compare that to before we got here.”

Since 2021, as Connecticut has enjoyed unprecedented surpluses driven by aggressive and increasingly controversial budget caps, most unionized workers have received effective annual raises of 4.5%.

Minority Republicans in the General Assembly have criticized Lamont for being too generous with state employees, arguing the compensation bumps exceed those offered by most private-sector employers.

But labor advocates say it’s more complicated than that.

Unions granted wage and benefit concessions in 2015 and 2011 to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and benefit givebacks in 2009 to Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

Bargaining units also granted Malloy permission in 2017 to restructure mandated contributions to the state employees’ pension fund. This helped legislators to avert what otherwise would have been a fourth major tax hike in nine years.

Malloy and the legislature reduced Executive Branch agency staffing by roughly 10% between 2011 and 2018, and many of those posts have remained unfilled since Lamont took office in 2019.

Many legislators argue most state agencies face staffing crises, and some administration officials have said it’s difficult to recruit professionals into state service.

Contract negotiations typically address work conditions and other issues besides compensation, and this year’s talks were expected to include one particularly sticky point: working from home.

The governor and many legislators have expressed increasing concerns over remote-work rules, set up shortly after COVID struck Connecticut in spring 2020, and their effects on productivity. Unions have been reluctant to alter those work-from-home rules.

A spokeswoman for the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, Drew Stoner, declined to discuss specifics of negotiations Thursday.

But “if the governor had matched the offer of the state police of 2.5% plus step, the units we have headed to arbitration wouldn’t be there,” she said.

Rep. Josh Elliott, a liberal Democrat from Hamden who launched his own bid for governor earlier this month, said Wednesday that Lamont’s struggles to settle contracts are odd, given the massive budget surplus Connecticut enjoyed in the fiscal year that closed June 30 and the healthy cushions projected for next two.

“We have billions of dollars in surplus money, and with promises coming from the governor that our bargaining units would get raises, there really should be no issue,” Elliott said. “We should be protecting our state workforce and negotiating with them in good faith.”

In its last forecast, issued June 20, Lamont’s budget staff projected Connecticut had closed last fiscal year with almost $2.2 billion unspent, which would be the second-largest surplus in state history and equal to about 10% of the General Fund. Preliminary estimates from the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis anticipate more than $1 billion in black ink both this fiscal year and next.