The survey released by the CT Community Nonprofit Alliance also found slightly more than half of voters favor these investments, even if it requires adjusting the state budget caps that have forced unprecedented surpluses since their enactment nine years ago.

“I understand the need to save for the future,” Gian-Carl Casa, president and CEO of the alliance, said this week. “But it doesn’t help somebody hungry to get food.”

The poll, conducted online last month by the Connecticut-based STATS Group, surveyed 602 voters and has a 4% margin of error.

State government uses hundreds of community-based nonprofits to deliver the bulk of publicly sponsored social services to people with disabilities or mental illness, patients struggling with addiction, children with various needs and people reentering society following incarceration.

The alliance, which represents most of those agencies, has argued in recent years for a major adjustment in state compensation, insisting payments have lagged inflation for more than a decade, costing the industry more than $300 million annually.

Agencies praised the General Assembly and Gov. Ned Lamont last May for boosting funding by roughly $60 million for the fiscal year that began July 1. But they also fear new and impending cuts in federal programs will create a climate of need and demand for aid that swamps all services.

For example, nearly 63,000 residents have lost federal nutrition benefits since Congress and President Donald Trump tightened eligibility last July — roughly double state officials’ projections, New Haven-based Connecticut Voices for Children reported last month.

An estimated 110,000 low-income adults who receive health insurance through the Medicaid-funded HUSKY D program are at risk of losing coverage this January due to new federal work rules. And hundreds of lawfully present immigrants are expected to lose Medicare eligibility — regardless of work status — at the same time.

State officials project the maximum federally funded heating and energy assistance benefits this winter will be down 33% from prepandemic levels for Connecticut residents in need.

The survey found 86% of voters want the state, which has run up unprecedented surpluses averaging more than $1.8 billion or about 8% of the General Fund since 2017, to spend Connecticut dollars to ease this pain.

The state has been using those surpluses chiefly to build reserves and reduce the state’s hefty pension debt, which still exceeds $30 billion.

But critics say Connecticut could shift hundreds of millions of dollars toward social services and still wipe out pension debt by a significant margin each year, especially now that the emergency reserve — commonly known as the rainy day fund — holds nearly $4.5 billion or 18% of annual operating costs, the maximum allowed by law.

The survey found 54% of voters favor adjusting the state’s budget caps to redirect more funds to top social services.

And 56% of those surveyed said they would be more likely to support a gubernatorial candidate who wants to adjust those caps to send more funds to community-based nonprofits.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a fiscally moderate Democrat, largely opposed all efforts to modify budget caps during six of his eight years in office, frustrating many liberals in his party.

But the governor compromised and supported several efforts to work around the caps in recent years, including dedicating $712 million outside of the formal budget system to expand affordable childcare. He also declared fiscal emergencies — the first step in legally exceeding the cap — to allow legislators to order more than $280 million in additional municipal aid this spring.

He also helped legislators create a special $550 million fund, also outside of the formal budget, to begin to mitigate cuts to federal programs. Since last November, Lamont has used this fund to help low- to moderate-income households purchase health insurance, bolster food pantries, provide $300 grocery store gift cards to 25,000 residents removed from SNAP, and to assist legally present immigrants who have been stripped of temporary protected status by President Trump’s administration.

But all of that assistance has been one-time in nature, and many legislators are pressing for Connecticut to establish ongoing state-funded assistance programs for many of these groups.

The governor has not ruled out providing ongoing assistance in some cases but has cautioned legislators that state government cannot afford to backfill all federal cuts.

“Gov. Lamont shares concerns about federal cuts that affect critical services for our residents,” Chris Collibee, the governor’s budget spokesman, said Wednesday. “The Lamont administration continues working with nonprofit providers and legislative leaders to protect essential services while maintaining the fiscal stability that allows us to be there for residents when they need us most.”

Republican gubernatorial nominee Ryan Fazio does not support modifying the caps. But Fazio, a state senator from Greenwich, also says Lamont and legislators have not done enough to cut wasteful spending, which then could have been redirected toward social services.

Fazio and others have criticized Lamont and Democratic legislators for awarding most unionized state employees annual raises around 4.5% since 2022, compensation Republicans say tops most private sector pay hikes.

The GOP also says Democrats have allowed public colleges and universities to spend far too much on administrative costs and also could save on Medicaid by denying benefits to undocumented immigrant adults and children.

Sen. Cathy Osten of Sprague, who co-chairs the Appropriations Committee, is one of several Democrats who predicts the 2027 session will feature an extensive debate on expanding Connecticut’s role in protecting vulnerable residents.

Osten has called for a state-funded benefit to assist those who’ve lost federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits but still cannot work due to mental illness or disability.

As inflation rises and the average price of regular gasoline tops $4.40 per gallon in Connecticut, according to the AAA, “it’s becoming dire for people. Their incomes are not going up anywhere near the level the need. And it’s eating into the middle class,” she said.

Rep. Tammy Nuccio of Tolland, ranking House Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said the GOP is ready to find more money to assist Connecticut’s most vulnerable.

But for that to happen, she added, majority Democrats in the General Assembly must be ready to hear ideas on cutting wasteful spending.

That effort “has to be fully bipartisan, and not just bipartisan in name,” she said.

Keith M. Phaneuf is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2026 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).

Lamont unveiled a new television ad this week that criticizes Fazio for failing to support state funding to help patients facing cutbacks from President Donald Trump’s administration. When Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed the enhanced subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to expire, the premiums for many residents sharply increased.

Lamont said that essentially raised healthcare costs for patients by $800 per month, and he criticized Fazio for not voting to cover the gap.

Lamont’s 30-second commercial highlights a longtime nurse named Eileen from Bridgeport, who talks about the impact of costs on her patients. As the campaigns heat up, the ad was broadcast three times in a 40-minute period Tuesday on the news at noon and the “CT Buzz” talk show on WTNH Channel 8.

At the same time, Fazio has been running an ad called “Superman” that was broadcast four times Tuesday on the same two programs where Lamont’s commercials were running. The “Superman” ad was filmed as supporters say that the bespectacled Fazio looks like Clark Kent from the famed television and comic book series.

The battle of the commercials is expected to continue during the campaign’s final 50 days as Fazio has $18 million in campaign funds after qualifying for public financing as the Republican nominee. Lamont has turned down public financing, but he spent $25.7 million in his reelection race in 2022 and is currently spending millions more.

In the Lamont ad, the focus features Lamont, Fazio, and Trump.

“I’ve been a nurse for over 40 years. I’ve seen it all,” Eileen says as the ad opens. “When Trump cut Obamacare, it was devastating. But then, our governor stepped in. Ned Lamont helped thousands of families pay for their premiums.”

The situation became a major issue at the state Capitol, where Democrats scrambled to create a new Federal Cuts Relief Fund to cover not only healthcare but other cuts by the federal Republican administration.

A narrator states, “But Ryan Fazio, he voted to support Trump’s cuts and to raise our healthcare costs $800 a month.”

The nurse then returns to the screen, and says, “We just can’t take a chance with Fazio. Just imagine if he were governor.”

Fazio pushes back

Fazio, though, told The Courant in an interview that Lamont has made little progress on healthcare.

“The governor has been in charge of the state for eight years, and his own insurance department has approved rate increases of 17% and 11% in the last two years in individual health insurance premiums,” Fazio said. “This man will not take responsibility for his own record of unaffordability in this state. I do have a plan that will increase choice in health insurance and increase competition in the healthcare space and reduce costs.”

Fazio added, “The governor has refused to support it. So real reform that is bipartisan has been left on the shelf amidst rising healthcare costs because of the governor’s unwillingness and failure of leadership, and that’s what matters to Connecticut residents – results. … He has done a horrible job on affordability as it pertains to healthcare, among other things. That is not my conjecture. Those are the facts. The Kaiser Foundation saying that Connecticut’s health insurance premiums are 40% more than the national average is a fact. He has failed to deliver affordability.”

Fazio said he will release his own healthcare plan “in the not-too-distant future.”

But Lamont said Fazio has not provided a viable healthcare plan.

“If you talk about affordability, you’ve got to talk about healthcare,” Lamont said when asked by The Courant. “Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill would have jacked up healthcare premiums on the exchange.  He had no plan to deal with that. We came forward, and we said we’re not going to let that happen. New York lost 400,000 people on the exchange. We haven’t let that happen. I want more people insured.”

Connecticut was among the few states helping to cover the loss of federal health insurance subsidies by earmarking millions of dollars to soften the blow for more than 150,000 Connecticut residents. Previously, the subsidies had made health care more affordable with enhanced federal credits since 2021.

Unlike more than 20 million Americans across the country who saw government subsidies for health insurance cut off this year on New Year’s Day, Connecticut residents received relief with state-subsidized health insurance.

“We put in place the Trump Relief Fund,” Lamont said. “We had strong, bipartisan support in the House and Senate, I believe, on that just to take care of folks who would be impacted by a big increase in healthcare costs. He didn’t support that.”

With less than two months left before Election Day, Lamont is retaining his double-digit lead in the latest poll as the candidates sparred over the survey’s accuracy. Lamont leads Fazio by 14 percentage points in the latest survey for Sacred Heart University, WFSB-Channel 3 and CT Insider, continuing a trend showing him ahead of Fazio in the polls. The survey of 1,000 registered voters was taken from Sept. 1 to 8 and released Monday.

But Fazio immediately questioned the results, saying that eight days of polling was stretched out too long as the survey by Great Blue Research of Glastonbury should simply measure a snapshot in time. In addition, the poll measured registered voters instead of those likely to vote in November.

Fazio told The Courant that the race is much closer than the public polling has shown, with the latest poll having Lamont at 48% and Fazio at 34%.

“We know that this is a single-digit race currently,” Fazio said in an interview. “In a race that is a 14-point race, why would the incumbent of eight years, who has more resources than me, be launching his campaign with two negative ads rather than positive ads? It all maps out that it’s a single-digit race with him below 50%. Everyone within both campaigns knows that it’s a single-digit race, and that both of our polling shows it. I’ll just leave that there.”

The State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition, which represents nearly all major employee unions in state government, notified rank-and-file members of the tentative understanding Thursday morning.

It’s one of the largest issues that legislators and Connecticut’s governor will face in 2027.

But because no formal contract amendment has been negotiated to date and none is likely to be done until after the November elections, Lamont’s pledge is conditional on winning reelection this fall. He faces a challenge from Republican Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, who already has said he believes state employee benefits are too costly for taxpayers and need to be reformed.

“From opposite sides of the bargaining table, it is already clear the parties [union leaders and the Lamont administration] share an understanding of how important these benefits are to maintaining a strong, experienced public workforce,” SEBAC leaders wrote to rank-and-file union members.

The current contract, which guarantees state employees access to a pension and retirement healthcare once service requirements have been reached, expires June 30.

But unions leaders wrote “the parties have reached an agreement that no changes in pension or healthcare will occur before June 30, 2028, unless mutually agreed upon by both the state and SEBAC, adding more certainty for members. That should give plenty of time for employees to have all the information they need to make the best decisions about their future.”

The coalition limited its public comments about the announcement to the statement sent to its members.

Lamont’s budget director, Office of Policy and Management Secretary Josh Wojcik, wrote in an email to state agency heads that extending current benefits at least for one more year also would help ensure departments are properly staffed.

The state experienced a major surge in retirements in the first six months of 2022 as veteran workers scrambled to leave service before new limits on pensions took effect.

“This additional time will allow us to better evaluate and manage staffing needs across state agencies, properly plan for the implementation of any future changes and give employees the time and information they need to make informed decisions about retirement,” Wojcik wrote.

Fazio accused Lamont of playing politics at taxpayers’ expense.

“The governor is buying votes with your tax dollars,” Fazio said, adding that, if elected, “I’ll negotiate fairly to ensure we can attract and retain public-sector talent and protect taxpayers with sustainable agreements.”

But unions likely would seek arbitration and battle any effort to weaken retirement benefits.

Workers helped to close big state budget deficits by accepting concessions in 2009, 2011 and 2017, weakening their pensions and healthcare coverage and freezing wages.

Labor leaders say those sacrifices, coupled with deep staffing cuts in the 2010s, left agencies in social services, healthcare, public safety and other key fields unable to retain many workers. It also has triggered significant mandatory overtime.

State agencies set an overtime record in 2023, spending $305.4 million, and have pushed well past that since. According to the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis, overtime spending in the 2025-26 fiscal year, which wrapped last June 30, approached $338 million, up almost 7% over the prior year.

More than 95% of that spending came from just five departments: Correction, Mental Health and Addiction Services, Emergency Services and Public Protection, Developmental Services, and Children and Families.

Still, Republicans say Lamont has done too little to control staffing costs.

Most unionized employees have enjoyed annual raises of about 4.5%, which include cost-of-living adjustments and step increases, since 2022.

House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, noted that governors traditionally don’t make such public pledges when overall negotiations are far from resolved, especially during a gubernatorial campaign.

“This circumvention of the traditional process to me is quite disturbing and suggests to me the governor is abusing his position for campaign purposes,” Candelora said. “It reeks of politics.”

Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, called Lamont’s understanding with unions “yet another glaring example of his lack of leadership on so many issues and the reason our state continues to remain one of the most unaffordable in the nation.”

Connecticut has been grappling with high state employee benefit costs for decades.

Most of that problem stems from poor savings habits by governors and legislators who served prior to 2011. According to a 2015 study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the state failed to properly save for more than seven decades. This deprived the state treasurer of huge assets that otherwise could have been invested to generate billions of dollars in revenue.

Connecticut legislators enacted aggressive budget caps in 2017 that forced unprecedented surpluses. In the last seven years, Lamont and legislators have poured $11 billion in surplus into the pension funds.

But the state still carries more than $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, one of the largest burdens, per capita, in the nation, and isn’t expected to finish paying that off until well into the 2040s.

Keith M. Phaneuf is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2026 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).

Lamont leads Republican challenger Ryan Fazio by 14 percentage points in the latest survey for Sacred Heart University, WFSB-Channel 3 and CT Insider, continuing a trend showing him ahead of Fazio in the polls. The survey of 1,000 registered voters was taken from Sept. 1 to 8 and released Monday.

But Fazio immediately questioned the results, saying that eight days of polling was stretched out too long as the survey by Great Blue Research of Glastonbury should simply measure a snapshot in time. In addition, the poll measured registered voters instead of those likely to vote in November.

Fazio told The Courant that the race is much closer than the public polling has shown, with the latest poll having Lamont at 48% and Fazio at 34%.

“We know that this is a single-digit race currently,” Fazio said in an interview. “In a race that is a 14-point race, why would the incumbent of eight years, who has more resources than me, be launching his campaign with two negative ads rather than positive ads? It all maps out that it’s a single-digit race with him below 50%. Everyone within both campaigns knows that it’s a single-digit race, and that both of our polling shows it. I’ll just leave that there.”

Chris Lane, a pollster who analyzed the survey for Fazio, said the “poll’s combination of a registered-voter universe, lack of a turnout model, overrepresentation of younger and urban voters, underrepresentation of college graduates, extended field period, and undisclosed sample source make the topline results more reflective of the panel Great Blue assembled than of the electorate expected to vote in November.”

He added that the poll “should therefore not be interpreted as a definitive measurement of the current state of Connecticut’s gubernatorial race.”

Political candidates often argue about poll results, and they traditionally say the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day, which this year is Tuesday, Nov. 3.

Lamont said the poll results were similar to others.

“Look, I think it showed no real movement, as far as I can see,” Lamont told reporters at the state Capitol in Hartford. “I don’t spend much time on polls. … Look, they spent 6 or 7 million bucks hitting me pretty good in the primary and the general election. I feel like people know me pretty well. … I don’t govern by polls. I don’t give a damn.”

Lamont was referring to criticism of his record by primary opponent Josh Elliott of Hamden and then by Fazio more recently leading up to the general election. Fazio has qualified for $18 million in public financing, which helps him compete against Lamont, a wealthy Greenwich Democrat who has spent more than $60 million of his own money on four previous campaigns in 2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022.

One of the issues in recent campaigns has been age, which was a huge factor in the 2024 race between President Joe Biden and Republican Donald J. Trump. Biden eventually dropped out of the race after stumbling verbally in a televised debate that was seen by millions of people, and many Democrats said Biden should have gotten out of the race sooner.

This year, the 72-year-old Lamont is exactly double the age of the 36-year-old Fazio.

“Look, I want everybody’s support,” Lamont said as he laughed. “I did paid family and medical leave and early childhood education and the best K through 12 because I care about our young families. You know something? So do seniors. They care about young families.”

When asked by The Courant, Lamont said that neither he nor Fazio would make the final decision.

“That’s up to the voters,” Lamont said. “It’s good to have somebody with senior executive experience who has managed things, managed people, managed organizations, managed through a budget. We have got almost a $30 billion budget with 45,000 employees. I’ve done this before in my previous life, and I’ve done this now for eight years. You never know what’s going to hit you. First, it was COVID. Then, it’s Trump. Now, it’s storm water and intense flooding. You’ve got to have a little bit of breadth of experience to be able to deal with things like that. I think it serves me well.”

Polling concerns

Regarding the Sacred Heart poll, Lamont was ahead by 14 percentage points with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Fazio’s pollster says the survey over-represents voters in the cities, where Lamont is counting on a strong turnout among Democrats.

“Urban voters comprise 25% of the Great Blue sample compared with the approximately 13% share Cygnal expects Connecticut’s cities to produce in November,” Lane said. “Cygnal argues that this nearly two-to-one difference is particularly consequential.”

But Gary Rose, a longtime political science professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, said he saw no problems with the methodology or the polls results because it was “remarkably similar” to results by the University of New Hampshire on the Lamont-Fazio race in late August.

“The methodology is very strong,” Rose told The Courant in an interview. “There’s 1,000 people in the sample. … They’re remarkably similar in terms of Lamont ahead of Fazio by a wide margin.”

Regarding the concern that eight days of polling is too long, Rose said, “I don’t see why that’s a problem at all. … I don’t get it.”

The memo by Lane for the Fazio campaign notes that he is a senior partner for Cygnal, which is described as “an award-winning international polling, public opinion, and predictive analytics firm that pioneered multi-mode polling, text-to-web collection and emotive analysis.” The memo continues that “Cygnal is ranked as the most accurate firm, and clients rely on Cygnal’s ability to create intelligence for action.”

Rose, who has written multiple books on politics, said, “I never heard of them.”

Amid the back-and-forth over the polling, Fazio said, “The only poll that matters is on Election Day. Polling has had major errors this year, whether it’s in Wisconsin or Michigan or other places. We’ll see.”

On the morning after Trump urged voters to pretend he is on the ballot in November, Lamont and other Democrats were happy to take his advice, while Fazio did his best to ignore a president hard to ignore and make the case that Lamont is a “laissez-faire” governor tolerant of corruption and malfeasance in Hartford.

“When you are in office, you should take responsibility for what occurs on your watch,” Fazio said at a press conference with Republican legislative leaders and other candidates outside the state Capitol.

He ticked off items he deems disqualifying to Lamont earning a third term: A $250,000 no-bid contract to a former education commissioner; a credit card scandal that toppled a university chancellor; a former administration official convicted of soliciting bribes from school construction contractors and accused of conspiring to cancel an audit into Medicaid fraud; and a federal investigation into legislative earmarks.

Trump, hoping to salvage midterms, makes dubious pledge to give every US adult $5,000 if GOP wins

“After eight years in office, the governor has had enough time to clean up Connecticut state government, but instead the scandals and corruption has only metastasized,” Fazio said. Recycling a line used by GOP nominee Bob Stefanowski four years ago, Fazio said taxpayers are paying a “corruption tax.”

Less than a mile away on Pratt Street, a brick-lined pedestrian way in downtown Hartford, Democrats reveled at their good fortune in the insistence of an unpopular Republican president staging an unusual midterm convention that abets the Democrats’ goal of defining the midterms as a referendum on Trump.

Luke Bronin, the former Hartford mayor and winner of a Democratic congressional primary that all but assures his election to Congress, set the tone at the Democratic event, embracing Trump’s call from a stage in Dallas to treat Republicans on the ballot this year as stand-ins for him.

“We don’t have to pretend he’s on the ballot,” Bronin said. “He is on the ballot because the truth is that there is not a single Republican who is willing to stand up to Donald Trump, even as Trump’s reckless war drives up costs, as his crazy tariffs drive up costs, as he tries to interfere in our elections through the postal service and in every other way he can, as he takes corruption to levels we have never seen in this country before.”

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who has reason to expect that his 102-49 Democratic majority is safe or even likely to grow, was next.

“If you don’t like what you see in Washington, if you don’t like the corruption, if you don’t like the blind loyalty to one person, the team behind me is your team,” Ritter said, standing with Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Comptroller Sean Scanlon, Treasurer Erick Russell and Attorney General William Tong.

Lamont challenged the credibility of Fazio or any other Republican to question his ethics, given their tolerance of a president whose net worth has grown by more than $2 billion since returning to the White House, while his attorney general signed off on a deal ending the IRS examination of his taxes.

“You’ve got a president who’s added well over a billion dollars to his income on gross malfeasance and corruption. I didn’t hear a word from any of the Republicans, I didn’t hear one word from Ryan Fazio,” Lamont said. “You know what I heard was crickets.”

Fazio, a state senator from Greenwich who had refused to identify his choice for president in 2016, 2020 and 2024 as he ran for reelection to the Senate in a district where Trump was unpopular, initially declined to comment on the president’s offer of a $5,000 payout to adults if the GOP wins this year.

“I’m not going to comment on every single federal issue that comes about,” he said.

Fazio, who disclosed his votes for Trump once he announced his candidacy for governor, relented when pressed to express an opinion on the promised bonus.

“I think it is a very bad idea,” Fazio said. “I support broad-based middle-class tax relief. I always have. I think that is the path to prosperity, straightforward equality under law, pro-growth, pro-opportunity, pro-affordability. I think what was talked about last night — I only read a short account of it, so I don’t know exactly what it is or any context — it sounds like a very bad idea.”

The confluence of Trump’s speech, Fazio’s press conference and a Democratic rally in which the governor and his ticket hewed to a message of Connecticut’s fiscal stability under Lamont and U.S. economic instability on the president’s watch illustrated the challenge to Republicans in blue states.

Fazio, who is 36 and the youngest gubernatorial nominee in Connecticut since 1990, has significant resources after qualifying for $18 million in public campaign financing, but he is competing for voters’ attention in a time of national and international volatility in a blue state where an incumbent governor has not been defeated at the polls in 72 years.

He suggested he would amplify his message about Lamont as a less-than-engaged governor in advertising, without saying to what degree.

“We’re going to primarily run this campaign to present a vision to the public of change in Connecticut, and that’s not just one talking point, one 30-second ad. It’s about the full body of what’s being proposed,” Fazio said. “Yes, many people are busy in their daily lives. They’re not going to see every little thing we put out. But we want to give the public as much as we can give in order to paint a picture of what new leadership can look like, and transparency and accountability and affordability in the state can look like.”

Fazio is trying to draw voters’ attention to back the inappropriate p-card spending by the former chancellor of Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, who was removed but retained a well-paying faculty job. And the ongoing FBI examination of how Sen. Doug McCrory, D-Hartford, funneled legislative earmarks to Hartford nonprofits. McCrory lost a primary last month.

They also called out Lamont for awarding a $250,000 no-bid contract to Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s former education commissioner who also served as President Joe Biden’s education secretary. Cardona’s firm was hired by the state to do research and make recommendations for an education workforce commission he also leads as chair.

Lamont expressed no regret for hiring Cardona.

“You say, ‘Oh my gosh, you’ve got a guy who used to be secretary of education leading our [Career] Pathways Commission.’ You’re damn right, because he knows what he’s doing,” Lamont said. “He was commissioner of education for us. He was secretary of education for the president. He knows best practices going on around the country. If you want to give every kid the very best opportunity and pathways, make sure they know what they can do educationally and know what they can do work-wise, he’s the best person for the job.”

Fazio, who has served in the state Senate since 2021, unveiled a plan at the press conference to “crack down” on alleged corruption and misspending in the state government if he is elected in November.

Fazio’s plan includes proposals that would add additional transparency to the legislative earmark process that was utilized by McCrory to direct money to organizations in his district. It also called for strengthening the state’s Freedom of Information Act and implementing new rules policing no-bid contracts, like the one that was awarded to Cardona in July.

Bob Stefanowski, the Republican who competed with Lamont in 2018 and 2022, failed to make the issue resonate when he, too, called on Lamont to end the “corruption tax” on Connecticut taxpayers. A difference this cycle is that at least one of the federal corruption cases that Republicans have cited in recent years has now resulted in criminal convictions.

Lamont’s former deputy budget director Konstantinos Diamantis was found guilty last year of soliciting bribes from a pair of construction contractors that he oversaw as the head of Connecticut’s school construction office. Diamantis is set to be sentenced for those crimes next week.

Fazio and the other Republican leaders at the press conference said that policing and preventing such corruption needs to be a top priority in the next administration.

“Time and again, we are seeing these scandals popping up in the state of Connecticut,” House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said. “We are on a merry-go-round cycle of corruption.”

Lamont proposed and helped to pass several reforms to the state budgeting process to increase reporting and oversight around legislative earmarks. The governor also fired Diamantis in 2021, prior to his arrest.

Matt Corey, the Republican running for lieutenant governor with Fazio, said Lamont is “reactive” to corruption in the state instead of being “proactive.” And in the case of Cardona’s consulting contract, they noted that the governor personally approved the contract that will provide $250,000 to the former U.S. Education Secretary.

On Pratt Street, the Democrats indicated a willingness to compare their record and stewardship of government with the Republican brand established by Trump. Tong, the Democratic attorney general, said Trump is more than a convenient talking point for Democrats: He is a source of material harm in Connecticut that Fazio ignores.

“He has a tolerance for the harms, the dangers that this president visits upon Connecticut,” Tong said. “This discussion about Trump is not about Washington. It’s about Connecticut. It’s about the damage he’s doing in Connecticut.”

The state’s chief fiscal watchdog, who is involved with two analyses of how Connecticut funds local schools and other municipal services, estimated special education services will cost $96 million more than their available resources.

“The way that we fund education generally, and specifically special education, is very broken,” Scanlon, a Guilford Democrat, said during his monthly media briefing on state fiscal and economic issues. “I think you’ve seen report after report showing that year after year — and yet nothing changes.”

The special education funding crisis is happening even after Gov. Ned Lamont and the Democratic-controlled General Assembly used emergency procedures last spring to exceed the state’s chief budget cap to send an extra $183 million to local schools and another $100 million in general aid to cities and towns.

But Lamont, a fiscally moderate Democrat, wouldn’t consent to legislators’ requests to make that an ongoing exception.

In other words, lawmakers were allowed to exceed the cap once. But if they want to maintain those payments 12 months from now, they will have to cut spending elsewhere or seek gubernatorial permission for another exception.

But Scanlon and other education advocates say the special education crisis facing local schools won’t be solved in one year.

Nearly one in five Connecticut students, 19.1%, was identified as having a learning disability in the 2025-26 academic year, Scanlon reported, citing data from the state Department of Education. It was less than 15% just eight years ago.

Those numbers are rising, partly because some local educators have gotten better at identifying students in need, said Fran Rabinowitz, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents.

But the biggest driver of those numbers, she added, is a dearth of intervention services that could identify and address students’ learning challenges early — averting the need for special instruction entirely.

“We don’t have a robust system of intervention in many of our districts,” Rabinowitz said.

Lisa Hammersley, executive director of the School and State Finance Project, said “districts are at a breaking point” trying to cover special education costs.

Federal law mandates districts provide special services that some children need. State government will send $221 million to districts through its chief special education grant this fiscal year, leaving cities and towns to grapple with billions of dollars in additional expenses.

Scanlon has spent the past year working with a bipartisan panel of 14 mayors and first selectmen to examine Connecticut’s heavy reliance on municipal property taxes to fund many public services, not just education. He also has been assisting a 100-member citizens’ assembly tasked this summer by the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities with undergoing a similar review.

The comptroller said Tuesday the state can do little to help communities solve a special education crisis until it reviews state budget caps, labeled “fiscal guardrails” by supporters, that have forced unprecedented surpluses since 2017.

Lawmakers created one “guardrail” that has removed huge chunks of income and business tax receipts from the budget — without first studying how much would likely be removed or the ramifications for programs.

In the two decades prior, the average state budget closed with a surplus equal to one-tenth of 1% of the General Fund. In the nine years under the “guardrails,” the average surplus is nearly 9%.

The bulk of those captured funds have been used to pay down Connecticut’s considerable pension debt, which still exceeds $30 billion, and to build a record-setting $4.5 billion rainy day fund.

After initially resisting most efforts to modify these caps, Lamont has compromised with Democratic legislators over the past two years to divert more dollars for education, healthcare, social services and municipal aid, though many lawmakers argue the system still is heavily skewed in favor of saving and paying down pension debt.

Lamont’s budget spokesman, Chris Collibee, noted the governor formed his own working group this year to study education issues, including special education costs. That panel, which includes many education advocates, is expected to issue recommendations when the 2027 General Assembly convenes in early January.

“As students’ needs evolve, the state’s approach to funding education must keep pace,” Collibee said.  “This review is an opportunity to ensure that state investments reach students where they are needed most and that every child, in every community, has access to a high-quality public education.”

Lamont’s GOP opponent, Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, says the governor has compromised far too much and needs to adhere strictly to the existing caps.

But Scanlon says Connecticut’s perspective has changed greatly, and the state can invest more in special education and other vital programs and still shrink pension debt.

The 2010s were marked by two of the largest state tax hikes in Connecticut history, a string of budget deficits and a sluggish economy.

Connecticut has chopped more than $11 billion off its pension debt since then and cut state income taxes in 2023.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic in the early 2020s dramatically increased demands for social services while placing strains on hospitals and other healthcare providers, problems that still exist today. And unprecedented cutbacks in human service programs are threatening thousands of Connecticut residents.

Connecticut has run up significant deficits in its Medicaid program in each of the past three fiscal years as demand has grown, and the Lamont administration reported $25 million in Medicaid cost overruns in July alone — the first month of the new fiscal year.

“We are in a significantly different situation, and yet the ‘guardrails’ are the same, Scanlon said. “I believe that [budget caps] need to be adapted to meet moment that we’re in.”

Keith M. Phaneuf is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2026 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).

At the Rehobeth Church of God, where most worshipers have familial ties to Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies, gray-haired Bishop Jonathan Ramsey preached in a thunderous voice about prayer and possibilities — but also the futility of denying that whatever comes will be by God’s plan.

“You are not in control,” Ramsey said. “God is in control.”

Rehobeth worships in the passionate tradition of Pentecostals. Congregants surrender to the Holy Spirit, responding to a preacher in murmurs, shouts or hands waving high. Fazio, a Catholic engaged to an Episcopalian, worshipped less demonstrably. His was not among the voices shouting, “Amen.”

Fazio is 36, a state senator, a former commodities trader and Connecticut’s youngest gubernatorial nominee since 33-year-old Congressman John G. Rowland ran and lost in 1990, the year Fazio was born. Rowland succeeded on a second try in 1994 and would win three terms, the record Lamont is trying to match.

Called to speak from Rehobeth’s half-round altar in an amphitheater-style sanctuary that can seat 900, Fazio sought common ground with references to the apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians about Christ and the candidate Ryan’s message to the Nutmeggers about property tax reform and cheaper electricity.

“Paul wrote to the Galatians we are all one in Christ Jesus, we are all created in the love of God,” Fazio said. “We should always remember that.”

And also that taxes are too high, electricity too expensive.

“It feels like the property taxes are like a second mortgage, and the electric bills are like rent,” Fazio said. “And I think we could do more to make the state affordable to ensure that we have opportunity, education and hope for everybody. So I’m so appreciative of you allowing me to be here today, and I’m looking forward to worshiping with you this morning as well.”

The road ahead is steep and not clearly mapped for Fazio. Rowland’s victory was 32 years ago, coming in an open race after the adoption of an income tax under a third-party governor, Lowell P. Weicker Jr.

Whether God’s plan or not, it’s been 72 years since anyone has unseated a Connecticut governor.

Fazio is a millennial carrying cautious hopes of a Grand Old Party staggered by four successive cycles of losses in Connecticut and fears of a fifth, all in the decade since President Donald Trump has redefined the party in his image with hostility to free trade, undocumented immigrants and any notion of addressing climate change.

Fazio is a believer in free-market competition shaping public policy. He favors school choice and is a fan of charter schools like the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, where he tutored middle-school kids for several years after college. He is dubious about single-payer health care. Or that offshore wind ever will be a good deal for electric ratepayers. And he worries about Major League Baseball.

He is tall with thick dark hair — good candidate hair, as more than one colleague has lightly observed. He was a high school athlete but gives off the vibe of a kid who always did his homework. He wears roundish, dark-framed glasses and enjoys writing long policy assessments for conservative journals and punchier ones for the New York Post. He can be playful on social media, but admirers acknowledge he is blessed with more earnestness than charisma.

In other words, not unlike a certain other fellow from Greenwich.

As summer winds down, Fazio is fine-tuning the tenor and tone of a campaign that must simultaneously raise his own profile and destroy Lamont’s brand as a fiscal disciplinarian who has used an extraordinary run of budget surpluses to pay down debt and deliver the first significant cut to the income tax since its passage.

Fazio argues that the 72-year-old Democrat, whose moderate fiscal policies inspired a primary challenge from a liberal seeking freer spending and higher taxes on the wealthy, made a significant and largely overlooked shift to the left on budgetary issues in the past two years.

“That will be part of the campaign and the debate,” Fazio said. “But honestly, if the governor had stuck to his guns on fiscal and economic issues and was running for a third term — if the governor was the same governor he was in 2021 or 2022 — I might not have run for governor.”

It is true that Lamont has legally exceeded the state’s spending cap to bolster spending for Medicaid and municipal grants in the past two years, and he has shifted nearly $1.3 billion off budget, mostly to expand affordable child care and shield human services from federal cuts. Those are things Lamont is happy to talk about.

It also is true that Lamont has done that while keeping a $4.5 billion budget reserve equal to 18% of the general fund, the maximum allowed under law. And he used another $2.9 billion in surplus funds to shrink a massive unfunded pension liability, which is about 16% less than previous years.

Rehobeth was the second of two churches Fazio visited on the same Sunday morning in Bloomfield, one of two suburbs on Hartford’s northern border that are the heart of a Black middle class and its religious life. The other is Windsor. Median household incomes in the two communities are more than double Hartford’s; home ownership rates, roughly triple. Both churches were founded in Hartford.

The first stop was First Cathedral, a rare New England megachurch with a membership of 11,000, a sanctuary that seats 3,000 and a network-quality livestream. It was First Baptist when established in 1968, taking over a vacant synagogue across from Hartford’s sprawling Keeney Park. Led by a minister from Memphis, Leroy Bailey Jr., the Baptists bought 40 acres in Bloomfield in 1998, and the new Cathedral opened there in 1999.

Fazio is aware that Black churches are not fertile fields for the harvesting of Republican votes come autumn, that there are only 11 Sundays before voters go to the polls and that modern campaigns tend to be targeted narrowly, not broadly.

“I’m a believer that to be a good public servant, you have to aim to represent all people, and you have to make a case to all voters, whether they’re more likely to vote for you or not,” Fazio said. “I think it’s been a little bit lost in modern politics, and I think that in Connecticut it could be fruitful to talk to people and go places that other Republican candidates have been less likely to go.”

Dr. Michael David Bailey, the senior pastor at First Cathedral, welcomed Fazio, his running mate, Matt Corey, and a small entourage of local Republicans to his private study. Fazio’s local liaison and guide was Dr. Sweets Wilson, a faith-based therapist of West Indies descent and chair of the Republican town committee of Hartford.

Bailey, the son of the Cathedral’s first minister, is a burly Red Sox fan married to a woman from outside Boston. He teased a Fazio campaign staffer, Andrew Tammaro, for wearing a midnight blue windbreaker with a Yankees logo. The candidate, wearing a charcoal gray suit and sitting on a blood-red leather couch, didn’t volunteer that his baseball loyalties also lay in the Bronx.

Fazio shared little of himself at either church.

His childhood in Greenwich is not part of a campaign narrative, though a constituent named Amy Orser is prominently featured. She is from New Canaan, one of the three communities Fazio has represented in the Senate since winning a special election five years ago. They met by chance on holiday in Nantucket.

Fazio proposed a year ago, and they are to be married 11 days after the election at their shared parish now that Orser has converted to Catholicism, St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich.

In his first general election ad, Fazio and Orser stand by the two-bedroom starter home he bought four years ago in the Greenwich neighborhood of Riverside. Orser glances upwards towards her fiancée as he says, “I’m Ryan Fazio. I was born here, went to public school here, and now we’re starting a family here. Because I love Connecticut.”

“It’s my home,” Fazio reiterated to the congregants at First Cathedral. “And I just hope that I can serve it and give back what I felt it gave to me as a young boy growing up here.”

Fazio is the oldest of three brothers born in four years to Michael A. Fazio and Madeline Gadaleta Fazio, who both worked in finance. On an alumni page of the private K-8 school his mother attended in Philadelphia, she described her first born as the 10 pound, 3 ounce baby who “stole my heart.”

Home for the Fazios was a five-bedroom, 5,500-square foot Georgian Colonial with a pool on two acres off Lake Avenue, the iconic road lined by estates and well-tended homes. His parents split when Fazio was a teen, the divorce finalized shortly after he turned 16. The father’s career took him to Chicago and London.

Fazio has an 18-year-old sister from his father’s second marriage. She was an unpaid intern on Fazio’s campaign over the summer. His father and stepmother live in Austin, Texas.

It is a 12-minute drive from Fazio’s childhood neighborhood to the one where Lamont and his wife, Annie, bought their 8,500-square foot house in 1992 and raised two daughters and a son. Between is Applejack Farm, where Weicker was living when elected governor in 1990.

The Fazios belonged to Burning Tree Country Club — the family-friendly one in Greenwich, not the one in Maryland famous for its Washington, D.C., elite members and infamous for excluding women.

Fazio grew to 6-foot-2 and played varsity baseball at Greenwich High School for the Cardinals as a left-handed pitcher and first baseman, wearing number 11. One of the umpires at his games was Fred Camillo, the former state lawmaker and current first selectman of Greenwich.

Fazio called Camillo after the 2018 election. Camillo was reelected to the House, but Republicans suffered unexpectedly broad losses, including a Greenwich-centered Senate seat held by the GOP for the better part of a century. Camillo said Fazio talked to him about ideas and issues, not ambitions.

“It was refreshing, because you knew he was young and smart and interested in public policy, not just in running to be something,” Camillo said.

Fazio graduated in 2012 with a degree in economics from Northwestern University, started a career as a trader and began writing for two conservative outlets, the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and The Federalist, an online journal founded in 2013 by, among others, John McCain’s son-in-law.

From the perspective of a free-market commodities trader, Fazio had warned in the City Journal that Trump’s first-term flirtations with tariffs could be trouble at the polls for Republicans in the 2018 midterms, though his focus was the impact on corn, wheat, soy beans and sorghum prices in farm states. In The Federalist, Fazio chided Trump for equating a strong stock market with broader economic success and panned a 2018 budget deal for ballooning the debt.

The critiques notwithstanding, Fazio disclosed after beginning his run for governor that he voted for Trump each time he ran.

Not all his essays were political. Two of the dozen he wrote over three years for The Federalist were about baseball. He decried Major League Baseball’s embrace of the pitch clock and its single-elimination wild card game, the latter under the headline, “MLB’s Wild Card Games Celebrate Randomness And Mediocrity.”

His first Federalist piece argued why the United Kingdom should make good on its exit from the European Union. It showed a flash of puckish humor, opening with a jab at the trappings of the political left, not just its beliefs.

“The United Kingdom’s plebiscite to leave the European Union has the ‘cosmopolitan’ Left in hysterics,” Fazio wrote. “It is as if their tribe is experiencing a true existential crisis, like a ban on microbreweries or ‘Hamilton’ failing to win a Tony award.”

It was published July 15, 2016, three weeks after the narrow Brexit vote, four months after Fazio’s 26th birthday and 13 months after a reality TV star descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower and announced a presidential candidacy anchored in hostility to free trade and migrants from Mexico.

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump said. “And some, I assume, are good people.”

With none of Trump’s venom, Fazio wrote approvingly that Brexit was about sovereignty and border control: “Most (in)famously, member states must accept nearly unlimited migration of EU citizens. That means all member states implicitly adopt the external immigration policy of the most lenient EU nation, because once a state nationalizes an immigrant, all grant him free rein.”

Like every Connecticut Republican lawmaker, Fazio opposed efforts to regulate ICE agents by placing courts off limits and banning the wearing of masks. An early ad, when he anticipated a difficult primary, stressed his support for deporting criminals. He had no opinion last week on agents arresting parents at a school bus stop in Danbury.

“I think we want orderliness and safety and rule of law,” Fazio said. “I don’t know exactly what happened, so I’ll wait until I hear the facts to truly understand what it did and comment accordingly.”

Another essay attacked the notion of a single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach to healthcare. It was titled, No, You Don’t Have A ‘Right’ To ‘Free’ Health Care, And Neither Does Anyone Else. It described healthcare as “a product that must be created out of thin air by the mind and muscle of doctors, nurses, scientists, businesspeople, and other providers. It is not manna from Heaven.”

He concluded if people have a right to free healthcare, they effectively have a claim on the labor of others.

“It was a little argumentative,” Fazio said. “What I was trying to show is that just because you write something into law or write something on paper or intend for something to be, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be.”

He insists that the essays were not a preparation for a candidacy.

“I’ve always enjoyed the kind of competition and clash of ideas, and what motivates political debates,” Fazio said. “By writing and by thinking about those difficult issues, I kind of learn more about the political process, and, you know, also sometimes change my mind in the process.”

For the record, he now is OK with the pitch clock.

Camillo, disheartened by GOP losses and waning influence in Hartford, declared for first selectman in 2019. Fazio coordinated campaign volunteers. Fazio also was on the ballot for the first time as candidate for the Representative Town Meeting. Camillo and Fazio won.

Fazio was the choice to attempt regaining the Senate seat Greenwich Republicans lost in 2018. He fell just short in 2020 but won a similarly close special election in August 2021 after the Democratic incumbent, who had previously announced she was gay and divorcing her husband, resigned.

Joining the Senate ended his job as a commodities trader, a pursuit requiring minute-by-minute attention to the markets. He became an investment adviser employed by Capital Services, an affiliate of the company his father founded and chairs, MARCorp Financial.

Focusing on the campaign, Fazio now has no employment outside the Senate, where he has amassed a conservative voting record that both he and the Democratic Party are happy to publicize.

He claims credit for $100 million in savings to electric ratepayers, pointing to his push in a bipartisan energy bill for reductions in the public benefits charge, an assortment of state and federal mandates. “Give a little credit to Ryan Fazio,” Lamont told reporters after the bill’s passage. “He is somebody we were able to work with.”

The Democratic Party was more interested in making sure his endorsement by CCDL, a group opposed to gun control, did not go unnoticed.

In Bloomfield, Fazio entered Rehobeth in a steady rain and emerged from the services to find the clouds gone and the sun shining, a blessing on the church’s parking-lot party celebrating the nations represented by its parishioners. They include a few outliers — Canada, Poland and Ukraine — among the island nations of the Caribbean.

Fazio mingled with curious children, one who amused him by seeking his autograph near the steel-drum band and across from the Island Breezes vendor selling ox tail, jerk chicken, curry goat and fried red snapper from a truck.

Fazio fell into deep conversation with Kirlew Alexander, who wore a black T-shirt with Jamaica’s flag underneath a black suit jacket, when a woman on stilts suddenly loomed behind them.

Alexander was dubious about Fazio’s plan to limit property-tax exemptions on some nonprofits, mainly universities and hospitals. Intently explaining his plans for property-tax reform to Alexander, the candidate was oblivious to the smiling performer, who swirled green gossamer wings as she danced behind him.

On his way to his black SUV, a Lincoln Navigator leased by his campaign, Fazio called for the ball from a gaggle of boys shooting hoops. He had been a recreation league player back in the day. He missed two before peeling off his suit coat, and missed two more before finding the range on his fifth try.

The boys whooped, and Fazio smiled.

The apparition on stilts reappeared, this time noticed by Fazio. She called down, asking for a photo. He responded with two thumbs up. He reached up to hold hands with the stilt-walker and pose. There was a wide grin on the face of the millennial generation’s wonkish and earnest new hope of the Connecticut Republican Party.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves toured the downtown businesses in Danbury on Monday and found it eerily quiet because immigrants fear that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency will return to make more arrests.

“It’s quieter today, but I don’t think the worst is over because you just don’t know when they’re going to be back,” Alves said.

Following their walking tour, they said the economic impact is obvious; Danbury restaurants and sidewalks were missing the normal hustle and bustle of residents traditionally shopping and going about their daily business.

“Main Street isn’t what it used to be,” Alves said. “We don’t see folks going to the stores. We still see parents scared to send their kids to school. We still see parents scared to go to work.”

Blumenthal recently returned from his 11th trip to war-torn Ukraine, and he was so concerned that he called Alves from overseas.

“We’re both sons of immigrants,” Blumenthal said outside Danbury city hall. “What I saw [on the tour] I didn’t recognize as America: people fearing for their basic safety from agents of their own government. That’s not America.”

Recalling his phone call to Alves, Blumenthal said, “I asked him what is going on. I am in a country that is at war, trying to preserve its rights and liberties against the murderous onslaught of Putin in Russia. And in the United States of America we see this blatant infringement on civil rights and liberties. The administration promised it was going to go after the worst of the worst, that is, people with serious criminal records. That’s not what’s happening.”

Out of nearly 100 people arrested in Danbury, Bridgeport and Stamford in recent days, officials estimate that only about six or seven might have criminal records.

Some students, Alves says, are afraid of going to school as shown by attendance that is down by about 700 in a Danbury public school system of about 12,000 students.

With strong support from President Donald J. Trump, ICE has been able to arrest immigrants across the country with little pushback from the Republican-controlled Congress.

As the ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Blumenthal has held forums on the activities of ICE. He is planning another public forum in Danbury on Thursday so that residents can speak on the issues. The exact location will be announced in the coming days.

“ICE is going after hardworking people with families and children and jobs who are living their lives in Danbury, a community built by immigrants,” Blumenthal said. “That’s not what the administration promised. Seizing people after they put their kids on school buses, dragging them from cars and throwing them to the ground, kicking them while they’re there, using masks without full identification is what we have seen in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles.”

ICE officials have not responded to emailed requests for comment, and the agency has declined to provide details of the arrests and detentions.

But in a televised interview on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union with host Dana Bash, top administration official Tom Homan said ICE agents have been doing their jobs.

“We’re out there to look for illegal aliens with final orders of removal, those who overstay, those who are criminals, and we’re out there looking for them and arresting them,” Homan said. “ICE has no intention of terrorizing children. That is just a political statement, you know, to enrage the American people.”

When Bash asked about Connecticut, Homan said, “Did somebody arrest somebody at a bus stop? I’m not aware of that. … I’m not aware of that incident at all.”

When asked if he will investigate the reports about arrests at a bus stop in Connecticut, Homan responded, “I’ll make an inquiry to the Department of Homeland Security. Yes.”

Threats to lawmakers

In a related matter, threats have been made to both Alves and state Rep. Farley Santos, two Danbury Democrats who were undocumented immigrants as children and later obtained citizenship. Santos responded on Facebook after a written comment that he should receive “a lead sleeping pill.”

“Our political discourse should be better than this,” Santos wrote. “But our discourse, particularly on social media, has become dangerously polarized. Here is a comment on one of my posts saying that someone should ‘take this…out with a lead sleeping pill.’ In other words, calling for me to be shot and killed because of something I believe, support, or oppose. There have been so many truly disgusting comments this week and recently.”

Santos added, “We are all entitled to our opinions. In fact, that freedom to disagree, debate, organize, vote, and speak our minds is part of what makes the American experiment so sacred. But disagreement should never become a call for violence. Social media has given some people a courage behind a keyboard that they would likely never have face to face. We joke about “keyboard warriors,” but comments like this cannot simply be dismissed as internet nonsense. We have witnessed far too much political violence in this country to pretend words like these don’t matter. Whether this person intended it as a joke or not, for the sake of my family, I will be reporting it to the appropriate authorities.”

He concluded, “Disagree with me. Challenge me. Vote against me. Tell me when you think I’m wrong. That is democracy. Wishing someone dead is not.”

State Rep. Ken Gucker, a fellow Danbury Democrat, responded, “I am very familiar with these statements as I experienced them as well. What is disturbing is those in our community who endorse such statements with either their silence or adding more content.”

In a similar way, Alves has been threatened to the point that he needs a security detail of Danbury police officers. A 54-year-old man was arrested earlier this year and charged on a Class A misdemeanor count with second-degree threatening. Alves wrote that the case involved 41 registered guns, six unregistered guns, more than 1,000 high-capacity magazines, and Nazi memorabilia.

“When someone uses language like illegals while wishing for my death, that is not incidental,” Alves wrote. “It reflects the same hateful rhetoric that has fueled threats against me before.”

In addition, he wrote on Facebook that “criticism is democracy. Death wishes are not. “We can disagree on policy. We can debate ideas. That’s part of public service. But wishing for someone’s death crosses every line. Comments like these are exactly why security is necessary and why I will continue to take it seriously. I have a responsibility to serve the people of Danbury, and I have a responsibility to return home safely to my family each night. There is no place for this kind of hatred in our or any community.”

Outside of Danbury, state lawmakers are highly concerned about the arrests and detentions.

Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven, majority leader Bob Duff of Norwalk and other Democrats all raised issues with ICE.

“Democracy and the protection of human and Constitutional rights are priorities for Connecticut Democrats,” they said. “While adherence to our new ICE law isn’t perfect, we are seeing fewer ICE face masks during arrests. People generally aren’t being arrested in sensitive areas as described in Senate Bill 397. Bystanders are generally being allowed to record these arrests without being assaulted and arrested.”

“Unfortunately, there have been some violations of our new law, and we hope that a quick resolution of the Trump Justice Department’s challenge to the bill that we Democrats passed will allow Connecticut to move forward with firm guidance to local police departments and the chief state’s attorney’s office on how to arrest federal ICE agents who violate our state laws. … More than 95% of the people ICE arrests in America have no violent criminal convictions.”

The contract, which was first reported by The Connecticut Mirror last week, will pay Cardona’s business up to $250,000 to consult for the state’s new Career Pathways Commission, which Cardona was also appointed to lead as chairman.

That deal has drawn criticism from Connecticut Republicans who have cast it as a political patronage job for Cardona, who served as Lamont’s education commissioner from 2019 to 2021 and as President Joe Biden’s Education Secretary from 2021 to 2025.

During a press conference on Monday, Lamont was pushed by reporters to explain how the contract with Cardona Solutions LLC came to be and whether the contract was contingent on Cardona serving as chairman for the new workforce commission.

Lamont, a Democrat who is seeking reelection for a third term, said the decision to make Cardona the chairman of the new commission went “hand-in-hand” with the plan to award Cardona’s company the government contract.

“Look, I was very aware that Miguel Cardona was going to be chairman. I really wanted him to be chairman. I thought he was best person for it. Then I think the workforce team worked out what they did with Cardona partners,” Lamont said, misidentifying the LLC named Cardona Solutions.

Lamont said his administration chose to have the $250,000 contract reviewed by the Office of State Ethics in case news reporters or other people were to raise questions about the arrangement.

Sen. Ryan Fazio, who is seeking to unseat Lamont in November and become the state’s first Republican governor in more than a decade, issued a statement on Monday calling the contract an “insider deal.”

“Connecticut families are paying higher taxes and bills than ever thanks to Gov. Lamont’s unaffordable policies, while his politically connected friends continue to get rewarded,” Fazio said.

Speaking to reporters, Lamont argued it was “appropriate” for the state to award the contract to Cardona’s company, even though state officials did not provide other companies with an opportunity to submit a bid for that work.

Kelli-Marie Vallieres, the leader of the state Office of Workforce Strategy, told CT Mirror last week that her team did not have time to solicit bids from other consulting companies because the governor had instructed the new career pathway commission to produce a workforce development plan by the end of this year.

Lamont said the state entered the contract with Cardona because of the amount of work that plan would take to produce. And he suggested that it was Cardona, himself, who suggested his company be hired to assist the state.

“I do think that Miguel said, ‘I’d like to come on and do this. It’s going to require a heck of a lot of other research, administrative work. I think our Cardona partners would be the best place to go.'” Lamont said.

“And we tended to agree,” Lamont added. “Make it seamless. Make it consolidated.”

Andrew Brown is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2026 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).

But while the contract guaranteeing pensions and other benefits to thousands of present and retired state employees expires June 30, the question of its renewal has sparked few statements so far among candidates for governor, other statewide offices or for the General Assembly.

For some, the pension and health insurance benefits that state government offers retirees are too lucrative. Others say the benefits have been watered down considerably, leaving understaffed state agencies unable to retain talent and forced to mandate excessive overtime.

Gov. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich Democrat seeking a third term this November, has not called for any major changes to the benefits plan and told the Connecticut Mirror he expects to resolve the issue amicably with unions next spring.

But unions have charged the fiscally moderate governor with leaving major agencies understaffed and diverting too many dollars from core programs to reduce debt. They’ve also received raises topping 4% annually since 2021.

Lamont said his budget policy “also means [workers] have a pension they can count upon … They weren’t sure about that eight years ago.”

Since 2020, the governor has deposited $11 billion in surpluses — generated through aggressive budget caps — to reduce unfunded pension liabilities. Connecticut amassed enormous pension debt through seven decades of poor savings habits prior to 2011.

Three concessions deals reshaped worker benefits

Connecticut first began offering pensions to state workers in 1939, and lawmakers added retirement healthcare in 1978.

But by the late 2000s, those programs were missing billions of dollars in principal and investment earnings forfeited by prior generations that failed to save for the benefits they established and promised.

Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the 2009 legislature got unions to accept a one-year wage freeze and to require new workers and existing staff with less than five years of experience to contribute to their retirement healthcare.

Just two years later, facing the largest budget deficit in state history, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy got unions to freeze pay for two years, force all workers to contribute toward retirement healthcare and create a reduced pension benefit for new hires.

A third concessions package, under Malloy in 2017, included a three-year freeze and more healthcare restrictions. And the pension benefit, set just six years earlier, was reduced again and converted to a hybrid that also included a 401(k)-style savings program.

Unions also gave Connecticut extra time to solve the pension debt left by prior generations. Catch-up payments that were supported to be completed by the mid-2030s were stretched into the early 2050s.

Despite the huge financial stakes, elected officials have had few chances to vote on these benefits in recent history. Gov. John G. Rowland and the 1997 legislature set pensions and retirement healthcare for 20 years in an unprecedented contract with unions. Malloy added five years to the deal in 2011 and again in 2017 in exchange for the concessions packages he negotiated.

Still, some say major and necessary adjustments to these benefits already have been made.

“I think the reforms from the Malloy administration made significant changes to pensions and healthcare, which have produced considerable savings,” House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said Thursday. “Our pension liabilities are decreasing every year, and if we continue to meet our actuarial commitments, we should be over 80% fully funded within 15 years.”

But labor leaders say the sacrifices workers made to close numerous state deficits in the 2010s left agencies in social services, healthcare, public safety and other key fields unable to retain top workers.

“The private sector actively recruits state workers with higher paying positions, especially once they are fully trained and experienced,” the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition wrote in a statement this week, adding the hybrid pension/401(k) system “provides little incentive to stay.”

Department of Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto has said that his agency has struggled to keep engineers and other key professionals from leaving for lucrative private-sector jobs.

Union leaders say other departments are losing staff because shortages — created as the overall workforce shrank 10% between 2011 and 2018 — trigger too much mandatory overtime and oppressive work conditions.

State agencies set an overtime record in 2023, spending $305.4 million, and have pushed well past that since. According to the legislature’s nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis, overtime spending in the 2025-26 fiscal year, which wrapped last June 30, approached $338 million, up almost 7% over the prior year.

More than 95% of that spending came from just five departments: Correction, Mental Health and Addiction Services, Emergency Services and Public Protection, Developmental Services, and Children and Families.

“Many of our staff dedicate their careers to serving those most at risk, most in need, most vulnerable, and sometimes even most dangerous,” the coalition wrote in its statement. “Doing so understaffed with mandated double or even triple shifts makes a bad situation much worse for them and the people they care for.”

Lamont also recently validated unions’ concerns and said this must be considered when a contract is negotiated next year.

“In some categories, we need more people,” he added.

Comptroller Sean Scanlon said there is some good news on that front. Early indications from his office indicate that state employees are not projected to retire in large numbers during the first half of next year, before the old contract expires.

An unprecedented 4,834 state employees retired in 2022 — more than double the normal amount — as veteran staffers left in droves before some delayed pension restrictions left over from the 2017 concessions package took effect.

With debt still high, does CT need to reduce pensions again?

But Republican gubernatorial candidate Ryan Fazio, a state senator from Greenwich, says Connecticut’s taxpayers also suffered during the 2010s.

Connecticut imposed three large tax hikes — all included income tax increases — in 2009, 2011 and 2015. The state also closed sales tax exceptions and boosted business taxes in 2019.

And the state still owes more than $30 billion in unfunded liabilities for pensions for state employees and for municipal teachers, one of the largest burdens, per capita, among any state. And another $16 billion is due to the retiree healthcare program.

Given that debt and Connecticut’s high cost of living, “there needs to be reforms or changes made to make the long-term state of the state more sustainable” for taxpayers, Fazio said earlier this month.

“If Sen. Fazio is concerned about affordability for taxpayers, he should be making sure the ultra-rich pay their fair share in taxes to provide relief to middle and working-class families,” SEBAC responded.

But both Fazio and House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, say unionized workers have fared better than the public in recent budgets.

Most state employees have received annual raises of about 4.5% — a 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment and a step hike that adds about 2 more percentage points — since the 2021-22 fiscal year.

Generous raises that exceed most in the private sector and significant overtime pay also will drive up the value of pensions, Republicans said.

“The majority party’s approach to labor is simple,” Candelora said. “It’s more about just keeping the unions happy so Democrats get reelected. I would have a broader conversation.”

Unions seeking to preserve pension benefits should scale back remote work policies, particularly in child welfare and social worker positions that often require face-to-face interaction with residents, he said.

“I have a growing number of people calling me not able to get people on the phone” at state human service agencies, Candelora added.

Keith M. Phaneuf is a reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. Copyright 2026 @ CT Mirror (ctmirror.org).