If lawmakers on either side of the aisle are not exactly happy with the budget talks surrounding Gov. Lamont's proposal, or maybe the Appropriations Committee's version, where do things go from here?
NBC Connecticut's Mike Hydeck spoke with Maria Horn, a Democrat from Salisbury and chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee.
Mike Hydeck: So the governor submitted a balanced budget with the first tax break since the 1990s. Billions in surplus, though. That means some are still calling for bigger investments in education. What do you think is the likelihood of that happening?
Maria Horn: I think that's a really good framing of this, because what's happening here is, you know, we've passed our appropriations and revenue package. I am framing my job as co-chair of Finance Committee, part of our job is to structure, to make sure that our tax system is as fair as possible. And it builds in incentives for growth. But it is also the job of the Finance Committee to finance the government. And that means a lot of hard choices are being made in the Appropriations Committee. And one of those is education, for example, and my very good colleague, Jeff Currey, was just on with you discussing the critical nature of that bill that he has been working so hard on, 5003, to sort of fulfill the promise of the ECS system. And that's a big priority for my district for a whole lot of reasons. And if we're going to take that seriously and actually try to correct some of those inequities, we have to look hard at how we're going to do that. And that sometimes requires being a little creative.
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Mike Hydeck: Speaking of creative, you lead me right to my next question. Republican leader Senator Kevin Kelly said that he supported the governor's budget when it came to having no gimmicks. Now, let's try to explain what he's talking about when he says gimmicks. What's a gimmick?
Maria Horn: Yes. So I guess one person's gimmick is another person's creative financial structure. And having worked in finance in my life, I can say that I've been part of creating those in the past. The one in front of us right now is to try to figure out how to, you know, I am a strong supporter of the fiscal guardrails that we just put in place. I was a prime advocate for them, very proud to stand on the floor of the House and put those forward and pass those again, because they do put rules in place for the process that we're playing. But those rules, you know, you got to look hard at the rules and follow the rules. But then sometimes that means making creative use of the rules. And what this would do here is allow us to give a little bit more room. There are very strong limits on the spending and the Appropriations Committee and a time when we have some significant need. And, you know, we're coming off a time when we no longer have the federal resources that we had available to us in the last year. And we have real opportunity to correct some real problems, for example, in our education system, which is the way we create opportunity in Connecticut.
Mike Hydeck: So let me interrupt you for a second. I want to explain something because if people read this in the newspaper, I want them to understand it, or if we hear and talk about it now. One of the ways that it's been done here in the past in Connecticut is with something called the revenue intercept. Revenue intercept means the money that's subject to those guardrails is what's in the budget, what the Appropriations is going to do. They would move this money to the side and fund something before it gets into the budget process. Am I explaining that properly?
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Maria Horn: That's correct. What it does is essentially, in most simple terms, it is a revenue intercept, which means we take certain revenue, and we remove it from the revenue stream before it hits the budget. And in this case, the revenue that we're removing, to be really clear, is the sort of, by definition, unpredictable amount of our revenue. It's not really what goes into the volatility cap, which funds our rainy day fund, but it is the part of the budget, we do the best we can to predict what our budget is going to be. But recently, we've had budget surpluses because we've done better than we predicted. It's that chunk of money that we are trying to capture and apply for really critically important functions.
Mike Hydeck: So among the critically important functions, that leads me to my next question. This week, we saw more grants given to the childcare crisis, which we know is a long standing thing here in Connecticut. $1.7 million was given to the Meriden-New Britain-Berlin YMCA. There are other big investments in childcare for the next two years, but does something more permanent need to be on the table?
Maria Horn: Absolutely. I mean, I think we need real structural aid here. We took the governor up on his, in a small way, the human capital tax credit which encourages corporations to invest in childcare. We in the Finance Committee expanded that so that in the hope that those investments would be in community childcare, so that if a company decides to move its campus, the childcare remains and continues to serve those in the community. But that is a small drop in the bucket for what we need to do to provide adequate infrastructure and funding for childcare in Connecticut.
Mike Hydeck: Well, and when you're going to pay, you know, 10, 12, 13, $16,000 for full-time childcare, and you don't even pay the people providing that care a livable wage, it's a difficult matrix to try to figure out. I mean, does the state need a line item?
Maria Horn: I think we need all oars rowing in the same direction. Because first of all, this is a child's first educational experience and every piece of data will suggest to you that is the most important part of a child's life, is to get those first few years right. It's about the workforce. It's about letting parents get back into the workforce as quickly as possible. It's about fairness. It's about treating people and compensating them for the critically important work they do. So we have to be creative again.
