As Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast Monday evening, sending wind gusts as strong as 76 mph into Connecticut and knocking out power across swaths of the state, Gov. Dannel Malloy signed four executive orders aimed at easing recovery efforts.
“Our first priority during this storm is public safety, but we also want to ensure efficient restoration efforts,” Malloy said in a statement.
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Three of the new executive orders offer extensions for several Thursday tax deadlines, while the fourth allows out-of-state workers to help respond to outages across the state, which currently top 320,000 and are expected to climb.
Under Executive Order 23, employers required to file unemployment tax documents and payments now have until Nov. 15, instead of Nov. 1, to do so.
Businesses in the state will also have until the 15th to file personal property tax declarations, thanks to Executive Order 24.
Executive Order 25 extends the deadline to file a variety of property tax exemption applications. The complete list of tax exemption applications affected by the order are listed in Section 12-81 of the General Statutes.
The four new orders come a day after Malloy extended the in-person voter registration deadline to Nov. 1 at 8 p.m., giving Connecticut residents two extra days to sign up to vote.
It also comes as Hurricane Sandy made its long-anticipated landfall, battering the Jersey Shore with torrents of rain and 85 mph winds. The effects of the large system stretched north through Connecticut where Malloy ordered road closures for all state highways and city officials in East Haven enacted a 7 p.m. curfew for residents of evacuation zones.
As of 6 p.m. Connecticut Light & Power was reporting 229,000 outages and United Illuminated was reporting another 45,000.
“Let’s be clear, it’s going to take awhile to get back to normal,” Malloy said. “But we are prepared to use all that we learned during the 2011 storms and the July statewide emergency drill to deal with the storm and address its aftermath.”
