Dog Racing Now Officially Illegal in Connecticut

Dog racing was officially prohibited in Connecticut as of this week due to a new law, which repealed largely unused statutes that had previously authorized the operation of dog racetracks in the state.

Although it has been nearly two decades since the closure of the last operational dog racetrack in Connecticut, state lawmakers saw fit during the 2024 legislative session to officially ban the sport, which is considered to be a form of animal cruelty.

Legislators in the state Senate approved the change on a nearly unanimous vote in April, with only Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, voting to keep dog racing legal.

This week, Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff told reporters that the new law codified current practice.

“If you talk to folks around the state, they say that we shouldn’t have that,” Duff said. “We love our pets, we love our dogs. We don’t want them racing — it’s kind of cruel and inhuman and so we banned it.”

The change brings Connecticut in line with at least 42 other states, according to the Humane Society, which offered testimony in support of banning dog racing when the bill was before the legislature’s General Law Committee.

“Dog racing is associated with significant animal cruelty,” Humane Society Connecticut State Director Annie Hornish said. “Greyhounds suffer extreme confinement and drugging; injuries and premature deaths are common.”

While Connecticut had long ago moved away from the sport, Duff said the policy was worth making official in an effort to protect dogs.

Posted By Hugh McQuaid

Connecticut Minimum Wage Set to Increase in January

Connecticut’s minimum wage will increase to $16.35 an hour on Jan. 1 – a 4.2% wage hike from the current $15.69 an hour, and the sixth consecutive hourly wage increase thanks to a law that Democrats passed in 2019, Gov. Ned Lamont’s office announced last week.

That 2019 law – House Bill 5004 – passed despite unanimous Republican opposition. The bill increased Connecticut’s minimum hourly wage from $10.10 an hour to $11 on Oct. 1, 2019; $12 on Sept. 1, 2020; $13 on Aug. 1, 2021; $14 on July 1, 2022; and $15 on June 1, 2023.

Beginning Jan. 1, 2024, the law indexed all future minimum wage changes to the federal employment cost index.

State Senator Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, who is Senate chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, told Hearst CT media that the increase will be a real benefit for working people in Connecticut.

“There’s considerable pressure to make ends meet,” Kushner told Hearst. “Workers know they have hope.”

According to the Current Population Survey as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 60% of minimum wage earners in Connecticut are women. A person working full-time and making the minimum wage will earn $34,008 in 2025. In 2020, 50% of Connecticut residents filed income tax returns claiming an adjusted gross income of $21,000 or less, while another 18% filed returns claiming they made between $21,000 and $60,000.

In a press release announcing the pay boost, Lamont said the state’s law ensured that the wages of low-income workers grew alongside the economy.

“This is a fair, modest adjustment for workers who will invest their earnings right back into our economy and support local businesses in their communities,” Lamont said.

Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz and Labor Commissioner Danté Bartolomeo agreed.

“The minimum wage was established to provide a fair, livable baseline of income for those who work,” Bysiewicz said. “But, for too long, while the nation’s economy grew, the income of minimum wage workers stayed flat, making already existing pay disparities even worse, especially for the already economically disadvantaged. This is a policy that benefits everyone and provides more financial security to families, especially women and people of color.”

“Minimum wage increases help ensure that no Connecticut worker gets left behind,” Bartolomeo said. “The majority of minimum wage earners are women, and many have families. Giving them this increase is good policy that supports Connecticut workers and the local economy.”

Posted By Lawrence Cook

Judiciary Committee Backs Mullins as Next Chief Justice in Nearly Unanimous Vote

The legislature’s Judiciary Committee voted overwhelmingly to allow Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Raheem L. Mullins to begin serving as chief justice following a Monday public hearing in the Legislative Office Building.

The committee approved Gov. Ned Lamont’s nomination of Mullins in a nearly unanimous vote, which will permit him to fill, on an interim basis, a vacancy left by the recent retirement of Chief Justice Richard Robinson. His nomination will need to be approved by the legislature after January, when lawmakers will convene for the 2025 session.

Throughout Monday’s hearing, legislators questioned the justice about his judicial background and philosophy while Mullins described his goal of fostering a more technologically advanced Judicial Branch.

“My vision for the Judicial Branch is this: to leverage technology so that we can enhance access, efficiency and transparency with the ultimate goal being to better serve our citizens,” Mullins told the committee.

Mullins has served as an associate justice on the state’s high court since he was nominated by then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. At the time, Mullins was the youngest justice to serve on the state’s Supreme Court. Prior to that nomination, he served on both the Connecticut Appellate Court and Superior Court.

Mullins represents the second Black man to serve as chief justice of Connecticut’s Supreme Court, following his immediate predecessor, Robinson.

During Monday’s hearing, Sen. Gary Winfield, a New Haven Democrat who co-chairs the committee, said it was important for policymakers to recognize the impact of the state’s past, including its historical tolerance of slavery.

“While some may feel that we’ve done a good job in this state, we had humans in bondage and when we released them from bondage, we did it gradually,” Winfield said. “So, the system we have here thought it was appropriate to do that.”

Mullins said he felt it was important to remember both the opportunities he had received and the people who came before him.

“From the first time I was appointed to the Superior Court, I saw many people in the New Haven GA that looked just like me and could have been me when I was 17 — I could have gone a very different path and didn’t, and that always makes an impression on me, on how I treat people and how I approach the opportunities that I do have because I could have been that kid that went a different direction,” Mullins said.

State Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, was the only lawmaker on the judiciary panel to vote in opposition to Mullins following Monday’s hearing.

Posted By Hugh McQuaid

Senate Democrats Mark Anniversary of Public Safety Reforms, Passed Over GOP Opposition

Senate Democrats marked this week’s one year anniversary of key Connecticut gun safety policies during a Monday press conference, where they recalled an overnight filibuster of the public safety reforms led by the Senate Republican Caucus.

During the news briefing in the Legislative Office Building, Democratic leaders including Senate President Martin Looney and Majority Leaders Bob Duff highlighted the Oct. 1 anniversary of the effective date of two critical provisions of 2023’s An Act Concerning Gun Violence.

The law included a prohibition on the open carry of firearms in public and new restrictions on bulk gun purchases, effectively reducing gun trafficking. These policies have been protecting Connecticut families for one year, despite prolonged efforts by Senate Republicans, who engaged in an extreme, multi-hour filibuster in an attempt to kill the bill, the Democratic leaders said.

“It was something we had to do over Republican objections,” Looney said. “Many times they try to present themselves as moderates on a variety of issues when they go home to their districts. But often we find it to be very different here at the Capitol.”

Throughout their overnight obstruction efforts, Republicans made 14 separate attempts to water down the gun safety bill. Every single Senate Republican voted in favor of each of these attempts to weaken Connecticut’s public safety laws.

Among Republican efforts to walk back the state’s firearm policies was an amendment that would have undermined Ethan’s Law, a safe storage policy named for Ethan Song, a Connecticut teenager who was killed as a result of an unsecured weapon.

The policy, enacted in 2019, has served as a model that Congressional Democrats have sought to replicate on the federal level.

“As recently as this past month, Hearst Connecticut Media ran a story suggesting that maybe Ethan’s Law — if Congressional Republicans hadn’t prevented it from becoming law — Ethan’s Law could have prevented a mass shooting in Georgia, where a 14-year-old with unsupervised access to a gun killed four people at a school,” Duff said. “So while there’s this national dialogue going on about whether our law can save lives across the country, Senate Republicans are voting to undermine it here. All of them.”

Senate Democrats passed An Act Concerning Gun Violence, HB 6667, at 4:19 a.m. on June 3, 2023 over widespread Republican opposition. Its provisions involving openly displaying a firearm in public and limiting handgun purchases to three per month for most residents took effect several months later on Oct. 1, 2023.

Reasonable limits on bulk purchases have helped to curtail gun trafficking in states where they have been enacted and have helped law enforcement hold offenders accountable.

For instance, on Sept. 3, attorneys general in Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit against three gun dealers for selling 34 pistols to a straw purchaser over a seven-month period despite a Maryland law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.

At least nine of those weapons were later recovered at crime scenes in the Washington D.C. or Maryland area, according to the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. This is not uncommon. Handguns sold in bulk are as much as 64% more likely to be used in a crime than a gun purchased on its own, according to the Giffords Law Center, which estimated that between 20% and 25% of handguns found at crime scenes were originally part of multi-gun sales.

Meanwhile, Connecticut’s prohibition on the open carry of firearms in public addressed tense situations that have resulted from the state’s previous policies on the matter, which allowed open carry but did not allow law enforcement to compel a person openly carrying a gun to produce a permit.

In 2017, the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association submitted testimony to the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, arguing that a “small number of pistol permit holders have purposely engaged in open-carry behavior and used the current statute language to create situations in which an officer cannot request a permit. These situations are unnerving to the public and have the potential to escalate into confrontations.”

Prosecutors have also lauded Connecticut’s new open carry policy, which legislative Republicans sought to undermine. Last year, Connecticut’s Office of the Chief State’s Attorney submitted testimony supporting the provision to prohibit the knowing open carry of guns in public.

Among Senate Republicans’ 14 attempts to undermine the public safety bill, were amendments to weaken Connecticut’s safe storage laws and create loopholes in the state’s background check requirements.

Posted by Hugh McQuaid