Thomas Breen file photo
Eco-friendly affordable housing on Dixwell: More, please.
With the Connecticut General Assembly’s legislative session in full swing, New Haven’s eight state lawmakers are pushing 184 different bills that touch on everything from growing housing near transit to digging deep on thermal energy to requiring movie theaters to disclose what time the films, and not just the trailers, actually start.
Those are just some of the proposed laws that New Haven’s delegation is backing in this year’s state General Assembly session, which is underway in Hartford, even as the threat of federal funding cuts looms.
One proposal would create a $50 million housing growth fund to finance affordable housing development, especially near transit.
Others would helps “green” the state with zero-emission school buses, investments in thermal energy, and a climate change “superfund” to make polluters pay for disaster mitigation.
Still another would commission a study on relocating the Whalley Avenue jail farther away from a residential area.
State legislative committee have begun holding hearings on a wide range of proposals.
Many of the bills introduced are still being drafted in full and only contain preliminary language. State legislative committees, meanwhile, have begun holding hearings and fielding public testimony and hashing through the testimony on what bills might eventually be passed and signed into law.
New Haven’s eight state lawmakers — State Sens. Martin Looney and Gary Winfield, and State Reps. Juan Candelaria, Pat Dillon, Roland Lemar, Al Paolillo, Jr., Toni Walker, and Steve Winter — arrived at the capitol for the new session on Jan. 8. Their work to pass these bills and the state’s biennial budget will continue until June 4.
Most of the city’s delegation holds powerful positions in the legislature. Looney returns for his eleventh year as president pro tem of the state Senate, while Winfield is still Senate chair of the Judiciary Committee. Walker retains her spot as House chair of Appropriations, while Lemar has moved on to chair General Law. Dillon and Candelaria continue to hold the roles of deputy majority leader and deputy speaker, respectively.
A review of the titles, descriptions and texts of the 184 bills introduced by New Haven’s state delegation so far shows a wide-ranging list of priorities, from allowing striking workers to claim unemployment benefits to funding local makerspaces like New Haven’s MakeHaven and outlawing bird hunting in Morris Cove.
And, of course, there’s the proposal by Looney — which has gone viral on social media — to require movie theaters to publish accurate schedules for the start times of movie trailers and for the movie itself, all in the name of “truth in advertising.” (As one X poster put it in this thread about Looney’s movie-theater bill, “connecticut knows what’s up.”)
Lawmakers, according to Looney, are operating in a uniquely uncertain environment, as they brace for what he described as a “tsunami of federal cuts” from the Trump administration.
“It casts a shadow over everything at this point, and one we can’t even really quantify,” Looney told the Independent. He said he is particularly concerned about cuts to federal education funding and Medicaid, which could lead to a “massive shortfall” for the program.
To view all of the bills introduced or co-sponsored by New Haven state lawmakers so far this session, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Housing Housing Housing
Tom Breen File Photo
Looney: Pushing bills, bills, bills amid funding uncertainty.
Two housing bills rank among the most backed by New Haven’s delegation — one about punishing housing code violators, the other about promoting the growth of affordable housing. Every delegation member besides Lemar is sponsoring both bills.
The first, H.B. 6530, stipulates that unpaid housing code violations would count as liens against the property. This comes as New Haven has beefed up its enforcement of code violations in recent months, collecting more than $27,000 in fines from landlords through the Livable City Initiative (LCI).
LCI Executive Director Liam Brennan told the Independent that the bill would streamline the process of enforcing code violations by allowing the department to go directly from receiving an assessment from a hearing officer to placing a lien on the property, without having to go through the “perfunctory” step of registering the judgment in state court.
“We have this huge issue of absentee ownership investments, housing as a commodity for people who are not caretaking for it, and so we have this growth of housing code violations,” Brennan said. “And it currently takes huge amounts of red tape to finalize a case [for the violations].”
Brennan said the legislation would bring the process for getting liens for housing code violations in line with blight violations, which already don’t include a stop in state court. He plans to testify in support of the bill at the state capitol on Wednesday.
The other bill garnering wide support from New Haven’s delegation is H.B. 6964, which would establish a “Housing Growth Fund” that would allocate $50 million a year in grants to municipalities to boost affordable housing, with a mandate to maximize development within walking distance of transit facilities.
A more expansive housing bill that included language for a housing growth fund passed out of the Housing Committee last session but did not receive a vote on the floor of either chamber.
This session, Looney named the bill as a priority, as the city grapples with both a shortage of affordable housing and rising rents. The Senate president pro tem also predicted the legislature would pass what he termed a “Work, Live, Ride” bill, to encourage denser development near train and bus stations.
Separate from the delegation’s collective housing fund bill, Winter has proposed his own bill, H.B. 6349. The bill would establish a revolving loan fund (where money is repaid to the fund and then loaned out again) to finance the construction of mixed-income affordable housing developments and managed by public housing authorities instead of private developers.
Winter named affordable housing developments in his district, including 340 Dixwell Ave. and Winchester Green as examples of successful affordable housing developments using state funds, but noted that they end up controlled by private developers, despite the public investment.
He cited the housing fund of Montgomery County, Maryland, as an example of locally funded mixed-income public housing — “definitely in the social housing category” — that his bill is trying to emulate.
“Given the need for affordable housing, and that we’re in the most housing-constrained market of any state in the United States, we ought to be looking at ways that we can support public housing authorities in developing more units,” Winter told the Independent.
One thing there is no shortage of is housing bills introduced by New Haven delegation members. Others include Looney’s S.B. 809, which would require landlords to provide more personal identification; Winter’s H.B. 6348, which expands just-cause eviction protections; and Candelaria’s H.B. 6490, which would limit the amount landlords could raise rent to five percent plus inflation, and give the Department of Housing authority to lower rent.
Winter's Climate
Laura Glesby File Photo
Winter with dog Toly at June canvassing event.
Among New Haven’s delegation, Winter stands out both as the only freshman in a seasoned delegation and for the volume of legislation he’s introduced, which dwarfs all other members besides Looney.
A clear focus for Winter is addressing the effects of pollution on both residents and the environment, an unsurprising priority for a man whose day job is being New Haven’s climate and sustainability chief.
“A fair amount of these issues that I’m trying to address also overlap with day-to-day issues for families in New Haven,” Winter said.
That’s why he’s proposing H.B. 5742, which funds grants for zero-emission school buses and is aimed at both reducing carbon emissions and the city’s rates of asthma, which are among the highest in the nation, and especially elevated in Winter’s Newhallville-based district.
That’s just one of a range of policies aimed at reducing emissions. Others include pilot thermal energy programs (an idea he borrowed from New York and Vermont), a more energy-efficient statewide building code, establishing a low-carbon procurement standard in state-building projects and increasing funding for lower-income households to make their homes more energy efficient.
Perhaps Winter’s most ambitious agenda item is H.B. 6280, which would establish a “climate change superfund” where major polluters in the state, mostly big companies, would pay to fund climate mitigation programs. He sees disasters like the floods in the Naugatuck Valley last August as a direct result of climate change caused by skyrocketing emissions.
Winter acknowledges passing this legislation will be difficult, and likened it to efforts to make tobacco companies pay for the public health effects of their products.
”Is it a difficult and longer conversation that extends past this session? Probably,” he said. “But I think it’s a really important conversation for us to be having as a state … and it’s a way to make polluters pay for pollution.”