Guilford sends its municipal budget to voters in April, but the State of Connecticut doesn’t finalize its budget until June, meaning Guilford goes to the polls for approval on its budget without firm state aid revenue numbers. It makes for a high-stakes guessing game for town officials every year and state legislators recently dropped by the Board of Education (BOE) to try to share some information.

State Representative Sean Scanlon (D-98) and State Representative Vincent Candelora (R-86) attended the BOE meeting on March 11. Governor Ned Lamont proposed his first budget on Feb. 20 and while his budget will likely be changed by the legislature, the initial numbers for Guilford included significant proposed cuts to Guilford’s state aid, particularly in the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) education grant. This year, Guilford received slightly more than $2 million in the ECS grant, but the governor’s proposal would drop Guilford’s allocation down to $1,568,902 next year and then $983,156 the following year.

Scanlon said having the governor propose a large cut can be unsettling for town officials, but reminded people that this is not a new tactic.

“The last couple of years I have come here we have seen the same story play out, which is the governor’s budget comes out; it shows that our community is facing a loss; and then we go to work to try to restore as much of that money as possible,” he said. “I am very proud of the fact that we have been successful in that over the last couple of years, but this is a new governor and it’s a new administration. Our teamwork dynamic has not changed, but other dynamics in the building have.”

Both Scanlon and Candelora said they would work to keep town officials informed and try to protect as much ECS money as possible. As the town budget stands now, the Board of Finance (BOF) recently decided to assume some loss of revenue, but not all. The BOF looked at the $500,000 difference between last year’s ECS allocation and the proposed amount for this year and assumed half would be lost, putting the town’s ECS assumption at $1.8 million.

However the ECS game is a familiar frustration, so the conversation between the state legislators and BOE members quickly turned to some larger proposals before the legislature this session.

Regionalization

Three bills have come up this session that involve the regionalization of schools across the state. The proposals vary in terms of approach and scope. Scanlon said the bills have sparked a lot of conversation, but he doesn’t think any are likely to pass.

“I think each of the three bills is a forced mandate and I think the approach they should be taking is to incentivize towns to decide that they want to regionalize,” he said.

Candelora agreed and said if legislators pass anything involving regionalization this year, it would only be language that would lead to a taskforce-type approach to further study the issue.

BOE Chair Bill Bloss said the state used to have regionalization under a county system. He said he can’t see the state going back to that model and that he has been frustrated by the quality of the debate.

“We already do share a lot of services with Madison and Branford and Old Saybrook and Clinton and a number of other places,” he said. “We do it where it makes sense and we don’t do it because we are forced to do it…It has to be in the best interest of the kids in this district if we are going to do it and I am more than a little afraid that some of these proposals are not taking that into account. I haven’t heard a lot about quality of educational services in the debate.”

Teacher Pensions

While regionalization issues are a concern, a more immediate proposal from the governor has also sparked worry among town officials. Guilford would be asked to pick up $166,052 of the teacher pension in the first year of the Lamont budget and $342,913 in the second year. Previously, then-governor Dannel Malloy had tried to push some of the teacher pension contribution onto towns without success, but this Lamont proposal has yet to receive as swift a rebuttal from the legislature.

Bloss said the legislature has done a poor job of explaining how the state took over the teacher pensions and how the unfunded liability spiraled out of control.

“On a really slow day I actually read the legislative debates from 1917 when the committee members were considering this,” he said. “Teachers unions in the state begged to be left out of this. They had their own local pension plans. The teachers in New Haven voted 650 to 50 to not go into the state plan and [said] ‘Don’t make us join the state plan’ and ‘We are doing fine, just leave us alone.’ But the state insisted and made it a state program.”

At the time, Bloss said the proposal made some sense as the state was trying to keep teachers in the profession as more wartime jobs were opening up. However, how the pensions are actually negotiated is a problem. The General Assembly, by law, is essentially the sole negotiator of the pensions, meaning towns have no say.

“The teacher retirement system, as long as the General Assembly is doing it, we are not at the table,” he said. “It’s frustrating to hear the General Assembly say you towns need to pay for something that you don’t have any voice in negotiating at all. It is also frustrating that in our non-teacher pensions are over 85 percent funded, according to the actuaries, so pretty good. Your teachers are what, 50-something percent?”

Bloss said the whole issue is “exceedingly frustrating” and he wants to see some accountability before the state tries to just shove the costs onto towns.

“There has also been no explanation about how this happened,” he said. “Some human beings made the decision not to fund these pensions. Who are they and what we they thinking? If we did that, then we would have some accountability to the voters and the voters would be able to say, ‘OK, you didn’t do your job.’ We have not heard any of that.”

Candelora said how the state ended up in the position it’s in now regarding the pensions is surprising.

“I mean, many people in the legislature didn’t know that the state was authorized to underfund the pension plans without approval of the legislature,” he said. “So a lot of times the legislature thought it was being funded and it wasn’t by agreement of previous administrations, so it’s been a long, terrible history and I agree that if there is going to be a shift, there has to be much greater dialogue.”

BOE member Ted Sands said the alarming part of the teacher pension proposals is that while the numbers by town are not devastating right now, that doesn’t mean the state might not look to just keep pushing more and more onto towns as the years go by.

“The most terrifying thing would be the camel’s nose under the tent,” he said. “I don’t care if it is $10,000 we contribute the first year to the teacher pensions, because I know three or four years down the road, that is going to be $3- or $5- or $10 million. It’s going to wipe out our budget… It’s taxation without representation, which led to an unpleasant disagreement several hundred years ago.”

Bloss said he is not sure we are at that point yet, but Candelora joked, “Well we do have a sugar tax proposal, so I think we are pretty close”.

Legislators promised to keep the BOE and the public apprised of progress up in Hartford as debates continue this session.