Muni leaders make last-minute funding plea as state revenues drop

HARTFORD, Conn. – Town executives sought Wednesday morning to discourage lawmakers from looking at municipal aid as they work to craft a budget based on lower-than-expected tax revenues.

“The last thing that should be done — something that actually should not be done — is to continue to further weaken our cities by any additional cuts to municipal aid,” Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra said at a Connecticut Conference of Municipalities press conference.

Segarra, a Democrat, called the budget proposed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in February “very conservative.” He said it contained essentially flat funding for towns, who have adopted their own budgets based on those funding levels.

But revenue estimates have dropped by “hundreds of millions” of dollars, according to Malloy’s Budget Secretary Benjamin Barnes. The exact reduction in revenue will not be known until consensus estimates are released later Wednesday. But policymaker will spend the remaining week of the legislative session negotiating a budget based on new fiscal realities.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.