Gov. Malloy signs budget – but isn’t happy about it

Gov. Dannel Malloy on Tuesday signed into law the bipartisan budget deal passed last week by the General Assembly ”“ but didn”™t seem happy about it in a letter he wrote to legislators.

The budget, which will take effect on July 1, falls short of what he had hoped, Malloy wrote.

“This new budget adjustment spends $197.2 million more than the original budget for Fiscal Year 2019,” he wrote. “It restores and expands various health and human service programs, outpacing benefits provided to levels well above those in our neighboring states and resulting in some of the most generous benefits in the nation. Critically, it does so without making the accompanying difficult decisions to reduce spending in other areas of the budget in order to afford these benefits.”

The governor criticized what he saw as the budget”™s failure to address potential deficits in the future.

“We now face out-year deficits of $1.96 billion in Fiscal Year 2020, growing nearly $600 million per year thereafter, and we leave the budget reserve fund at $1.16 billion by the end of Fiscal Year 2019,” Malloy wrote. “This is significantly below what is needed to meet the challenges of the next recession, which, by many measures, is overdue.”

Malloy”™s own proposed budget would have resulted in out-year deficits of $1.35 billion in 2020, and would have increased by approximately $150 million over the next two fiscal years.