Cathy Osten

Sen. Osten Listens to Ledyard’s Concerns About Proposed
State Budget

State Senator Cathy Osten (D-Sprague) took her budget-listening tour to Ledyard Town Hall Tuesday night, where nearly a dozen local residents turned out to express some of their concerns with Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s proposed biennial state budget and what they would like to see local legislators like Sen. Osten do differently.

Sen. Osten—who is Co-Chair of the legislature’s budget-writing Appropriations Committee—listened for two hours as nearly a dozen residents shared their thoughts on a variety of budget-related matters

“I got a lot of good information last night in Ledyard that I can take back to the committee and share with them where people in my district are on some of our spending priorities,” Sen. Osten said. “Obviously I cannot promise that every concern will be addressed, but the public input does significantly shape our final product, which will be different from the governor’s proposed budget, no doubt about it.”

Ledyard citizens spoke on a number of budget-related issues, including:

• The importance of state financial aid to towns and how that largess can affect local property tax rates
• Binding arbitration laws and how towns negotiate union contracts
• Whether towns should have to pay for funding some of their own teacher retirement costs
• State-supplied ECS (educational cost sharing) funds
• So-called ‘lockboxes’ not just for transportation-related revenues and expenses, but also for casino slot revenues that are supposed to be used for education expenses
• Gov. Malloy’s proposed gun permit fee increase, which Sen. Osten opposes
• Electronic highways tolls and—if instituted—how those could effects gas taxes
• What the possible legalization of marijuana could mean for Connecticut
• The issue of local police issuing traffic tickets and whether they receive enough local revenue from those fines
• A breakdown on the revenue collected from local traffic tickets, where that revenue goes, and how this compares to other states
• The possibility of instituting mandatory drug-testing of all state employees
• Casino revenue sharing for host towns

Sen. Osten reminds her constituents that her next budget listening session will be Friday, April 28 at 8 a.m. at TJ’s Café in Sprague; she is also in the process of scheduling a budget listening session in Montville.