By reopening the budget guardrails to include surplus funding for municipal tax reduction grants, Connecticut for the first time in its recent history would be equipped to tackle both of its major fiscal liabilities of unfunded pension debt and under-funding of municipal property tax reduction grants.

The bond lock was an improper end run around the constitutional amendment process.

In this article, we examine the legislative history of the budget cap system to demonstrate how it was transformed from a flexible mechanism mainly designed to refill the Rainy Day Fund into new interlocking restrictive caps.

Rebalancing the priorities between debt retirement and property tax reduction is one of the main reasons we urge the General Assembly to readjust the allocation of “excess surplus” before the 2023 guardrail reenactment becomes irrevocable.

We were stunned that the General Assembly readopted perhaps the most far-reaching fiscal legislation in Connecticut history — locking in the basic parameters of future state budgets for the next 10 years– by using an “emergency certified” procedure.