Connecticut’s Speaker of the House said he intends to call a vote on a state budget for Sept. 14.
However, Rep. Joe Aresimowicz, in his first term in charge of the House, could not guarantee what a budget would look like by that time or even whether it would pass.
The priority, he said, is passing a budget before Governor Dannel Malloy’s executive order on spending cuts to city and town education takes effect.
“If October first happens without all of us taking some sort of step to avert it, we all share the blame,” Aresimowicz said following a meeting of his caucus at the State Capitol.
He would not commit that he had garnered enough votes to pass a spending plan next week.
Senate Democrats said they are in close alignment with House Democrats on what a budget may look like, but President Pro Tem Martin Looney said there are still changes they want to see.
Overall, Looney said the pressure is mounting to get any spending plan approved to avoid the dire consequences of spending cuts.
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“It’s essential to get to a budget and I think people need to be able to compromise on their pet projects, or their ideological checklists, or whatever, to give priority to the need to get a priority in place,” he said.
On the Republican side in the Senate, Republican Leader Len Fasano maintains that he wants to see a bipartisan solution, so long as it closely resembles Republican spending plans that made steep changes to collective bargaining and reaped savings as a result.
He said he wants to see Democrats support his plan, but would not commit that any Republicans would support a Democrat-sponsored budget.
“I want to know if any Democrat is going to turn around and vote for our budget. If it’s a bad budget we’re not going to vote for it, pure and simple,” Fasano said.
