Connecticut is having trouble recruiting first responders. Police and fire chiefs on Tuesday said a proposal by Gov. Ned Lamont to waive public college tuition and offer mortgage assistance for police and firefighters was a good “first step” to attract new recruits.

Lamont’s bill, H.B. 5046, would waive tuition to the state’s public colleges and universities for people who have worked as police officers for at least five years and for people who have served as paid or volunteer firefighters for at least five years. The bill also authorizes the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority to create a mortgage assistance program for police officers and firefighters.

At a press conference Tuesday, Lamont said the program could save people “tens of thousands of dollars” and would make it possible for more first responders to live in the communities where they work. 

Speaking alongside the governor, police chiefs and fire chiefs welcomed the new tools for attracting first responders to the profession. Applications for open positions have been declining, they said.

According to a 2025 study by the state comptroller, Connecticut has seen a 63% drop in the number of volunteer firefighters — the vast majority of firefighters in the state — since 2016-17. That translates to a 50% drop in firefighters overall, despite a 6.5% increase in career firefighters over the same period. 

Chief Vincent DeMaio of the Clinton Police Department said it can often take several rounds of hiring to find even one qualified candidate. Meanwhile, tenured officers “are leaving the profession at an unprecedented rate,” he said.

DeMaio added that about half of the people hired as police officers in the South-Central region of Connecticut over the last three years were transfers from other police departments, not new recruits. 

“Essentially, we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. This is unsustainable,” DeMaio said. 

North Haven Fire Chief Paul Januszewski echoed DeMaio, saying fewer people are interested in volunteering with fire departments. That’s a problem even for paying fire departments, he said, since volunteering creates a pipeline for career firefighters. 

“Now, even if you have a career department in your town, chances are your department is responding two, three, four towns away trying to maintain a response in other communities that rely on just volunteers,” Januszewski said. 

Sen. Herron Gaston, D-Bridgeport, co-chair of the legislature’s Public Safety and Security Committee, told the Connecticut Mirror that he supports the legislation. He said he thinks higher education would help police officers, who get asked to take on many roles — including, in some cases, that of social workers. He said he felt it was right for the state to step up and help, rather than making officers foot the bill for additional education. 

At the press conference, Rep. Pat Boyd, D-Pomfret, also a co-chair of the Public Safety and Security Committee, praised the governor’s proposal, noting that the committee had tried to pass laws around recruiting and retention for first responders for the last four years. 

“Appealing to one’s self-sense of duty is not enough. We need to also show them that this is a career [where] you can support your family, that contributing to your community is important and [there are] skills and pathways and things that you’ll learn in life that will never go away and will serve you in all different aspects,” Boyd said. 

Republican members of the Public Safety and Security Committee also said they supported the legislation, but they said more is needed to incentivize people to pursue careers in law enforcement. 

“It’s frustrating we’ve created an environment in Connecticut where no one wants to be a police officer,” said Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, who is a police officer.

Howard said he’s frustrated the governor feels the need to spend taxpayer money to recruit more police officers, but he understood why. Still, he said, the state needs to make broader changes to create a better climate for police officers — and those changes wouldn’t necessarily cost money.

Sen. Paul Cicarella, R-North Haven, said, “We’ve seen a shift where the general public disrespects law enforcement, and I think that has a big role in recruitment and retention.”

Both Howard and Cicarella have said restoring the ability for police officers to perform consent searches when vehicles are stopped for minor violations would go a long way. Under the Police Accountability Act, a wide-ranging policing bill passed in 2020, police officers can no longer search a vehicle stopped for a minor violation simply because they ask and receive the consent of the driver. They must have probable cause or receive unsolicited consent to search.

Cicarella also suggested revisiting when officers are allowed to engage in vehicular pursuit. A 2021 law passed in Connecticut restricts police officers to vehicular pursuits only when they have reasonable suspicion that someone has committed a violent felony. 

Howard also suggested allowing the government to appeal to a higher court for a judgement on qualified immunity while a case is pending in lower court — a process known as an interlocutory appeal. This process was eliminated in the Police Accountability Act passed in 2020.

Boyd, the committee co-chair, told CT Mirror that lawmakers continue to discuss the Police Accountability Act and other laws on policing, and that some things have been adjusted based on feedback from the police chiefs. But he disagreed with his colleagues’ assertion that declining interest in the profession was related to laws the legislature had passed.

“This is not about what laws surround police officers …it’s around, what are the skills and what are the things that get people to want to be public servants,” Boyd said. 

Police chiefs who spoke to CT Mirror said several factors contribute to declining interest in the profession.

Groton Police Chief L.J. Fusaro said the rise in jobs that offer the ability to work from home — something that isn’t possible for a police officer — along with the possibility to receive comparable benefits in the private sector might deter people from entering law enforcement.  

Fusaro said he believed some of the changes in Connecticut’s public safety laws over the last five years, although not necessarily bad, may have made people hesitant to enter law enforcement. Fusaro, who is also the President of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, said the group has been advocating to allow consent searches.

He also said that the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association and the state Police Officers Standards and Training Council were putting together “sensible policies” for the use of license plate readers, which he said were valuable tools for law enforcement. Recently, license plate readers have attracted concern from the Connecticut ACLU around data privacy, and an investigation by CT Insider found that, in some instances, out-of-state police agencies had searched data from Connecticut license plate readers to use for immigration enforcement. 

“We need to leverage the tools and technology that are available to us out there,” he said.

Still, Fusaro said he supported the Governor’s proposal.

“We want better-educated younger officers. We want those officers not because education in and of itself makes you better, but it certainly exposes you to more information,” Fusaro said. “Higher educational standards is something that we would support, but really what we want is people with good moral character that are ready to take on a challenging job, but also a very rewarding job.”

DeMaio told CT Mirror that he felt that negative publicity around the actions of law enforcement officers in other states may have deterred people from becoming police officers in Connecticut.

“I think we have highly professional people here in the state of Connecticut, but if you’re constantly looking at your screen, you’re not seeing that. You’re not really understanding that that’s a global issue being brought down to a local level when … most times it doesn’t really occur here in Connecticut,” said DeMaio. 

DeMaio said he believes any way the state legislature can show support for policing would help with recruiting and retention. He said he also hopes the legislature might eventually extend the tuition waiver to include the children of police officers and firefighters.

“There’s no magic bullet,” DeMaio said. “There’s no one fix to this problem. It’s taken a long time to get here, and it’s going to take a while to get back to where it needs to be. It can’t be changed overnight, and there’s no one piece of legislation or one action, I think, that’s going to fix everything. It’s going to take continued attention.”