AGENDA

State Spending

Goal: Make state government more efficient, effective, and affordable.

[PDF: Download CBIA’s 2013 Government Affairs Agenda]

Policymakers can inspire greater job-creating confidence among Connecticut employers by exercising greater fiscal discipline and addressing the state’s short- and long-term challenges. It’s critically important to truly reduce state spending, accurately budget and forecast for entitlement programs,  and make state government leaner and more effective.

Some streamlining efforts have been made but have not progressed far nor fast enough. Accelerating proven, practical reforms—proposed by the Connecticut Institute for the 21st Century and others—will enable lawmakers to control spending, avoid crippling tax increases, improve the delivery of services, and increase business confidence.

Budget responsibly

Create a new, two-year state budget that:

  • Reduces the size and cost of state government while improving its effectiveness
  • Balances without any new taxes or fee increases that would harm economic recovery and job creation
  • Adheres to the constitutional spending cap
  • Holds to the phased-in implementation of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)

Eliminate mandates and other statutory provisions and regulations that drive up the costs of municipal services.

Continue to encourage municipalities to work together to deliver public services more efficiently and reduce the need for property tax increases.

Streamline state government

By the end of 2016, implement reforms recommended by the Connecticut Institute for the 21st Century and best practices from other states to reduce spending and improve the quality and effectiveness of state programs and services:

  • Achieve a 75% community-based/25%  institutional-based rebalancing of long-term healthcare in order to save significant tax dollars and provide the kinds of services people want
  • Reduce by 50% the rate of recidivism among Connecticut’s prisoners through the expanded use of quality nonprofit,  character-based programs and best practices of other states
  • Require every major state program and agency to adopt performance-based systems (such as results-based accountability and zero-based budgeting) that measure and compel effectiveness as a prerequisite for continued funding
  • Adopt the use of lean and other efficiency strategies in every major aspect of state government
  • Negotiate to further modify state employee retiree healthcare and pension benefits and bring them in line with what state taxpayers can afford
  • Upgrade the state’s information technology system to create real-time sharing of information across agencies and better coordination of state services
  • Promote and expedite the expansion of shared municipal services