CT’s fiscal guardrails do great unintended harm

Much has been published within the last year about the fiscal guardrails that the Connecticut General Assembly voted into existence during the 2017 legislative session and renewed in 2023 , and to which Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration has repeatedly expressed not only its commitment but also its unwillingness to consider modifications.

Both the fiscal guardrails and the roadside barriers whose terminology they share are intended to offer protection, but both also can and do cause serious unintended harm. Unlike the latter, whose design, placement, and installation have undergone continuous review and reengineering over the years, Connecticut’s fiscal guardrails have never been carefully calibrated — either at their inception in 2017, or upon their renewal in 2023.

Civil engineers continue to learn a great deal — through controlled crash tests, thoughtful analyses of motorway tragedies, and in response to changes over time in the height and weight of vehicles on the road — about how to manufacture roadside guardrails (their materials and dimensions — chiefly, their height), and how and where to install them (so that vehicles are neither impaled nor deflected into traffic by guardrails when they come into contact with them).

The Lamont administration and all members of the General Assembly (not just the leadership of that body’s two chambers) should be not only willing, but eager, to subject the fiscal guardrails to similarly rigorous, ongoing analysis. Indeed, they ought to have done that before having renewed them last year.

Although I do not question the prudence of having fiscal guardrails, and while I do not impugn lawmakers’ motives for having enacted them, I cannot understand (let alone endorse) their having continued them as-is, when the impacts of their imprecision — and the imprecision itself — had already become all too apparent.

I do not at all appreciate the Lamont administration’s having dismissed out of hand the recently released results of a poll, commissioned by the CT Nonprofit Alliance , showing that 63% of responding Connecticut voters favored spending some of the state’s budget surpluses on “funding health and human services, education, and other priorities” and that 68% of respondents supported “increasing nonprofit funding even if it requires adjustments to the state’s fiscal guardrails.”

Connecticut’s elected leaders — both incumbents of long-standing and those who will be elected in November to their first terms — must not squander the opportunity that they have in the coming months to reengineer the spending cap, revenue cap, and volatility adjustment to render those guardrails far more flexible than they currently are, so that the state government can appropriately fund its public PreK-12 schools, its institutions of public higher education, and its social service programs; upgrade its aging infrastructures; and fairly compensate the many nonprofit organizations upon which it relies to meet the needs of its residents.

As they currently exist, Connecticut’s fiscal guardrails do as much unintended harm to the state’s most vulnerable people and the agencies and organizations that serve them, as earlier, cruder iterations of roadside guardrails did to the motorists who had the misfortune of colliding with them. It is long past time that our state’s elected officials carefully study the impacts of the fiscal guardrails, and recalibrate them so that they may continue to ensure the state’s long-term fiscal health — but without causing needless harm to the children, families, and seniors whose well-being is its sacred obligation.

Christopher Trombly is Interim Dean, College of Education, Southern Connecticut State University.

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