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Afternoon retreat
Jun 25, 2025
Riley Klein
Cornwall’s 10th annual Books and Blooms garden tours were in full swing Saturday with four private gardens open to the public. One of the four was the Trapp garden on River Road. It overlooks the Housatonic River in West Cornwall with multi-leveled terraces creating secluded coves that invoke a Tuscan charm atop the rocky, Cornwall landscape. Guests were greeted by tranquil scenes as they wandered along leafy, veiled paths that connected each level.
Riley Klein
The House of Representatives in session on February 24, 2025, at the state Capitol in Hartford.
Credit: Shahrzad Rasekh / CT Mirror
Over six dozen Connecticut laws, including the state’s next budget and bond package, will wholly or partially take effect on July 1.
Here’s a look at some of the dozens of laws that will be implemented next month.
New biennial budget
Now with Gov. Ned Lamont’s signature, Connecticut’s next biennial state budget will take effect at the beginning of the state’s next fiscal year, which is July 1.
The budget prioritizes children, would boost funds for nonprofit social service agencies two years from now, and would increase taxes on corporations. It also dramatically scales back a pledged boost to health care providers who treat the poor and relies on accounting maneuvers to comply with the state’s constitutional spending cap.
$9.7B bond package
A $9.7B bond package to finance school construction, transportation upgrades and other capital projects for the next two fiscal years will take effect on July 1.
The borrowing plan would expand non-education aid for cities and towns, increase affordable housing and combat homelessness, bolster security at places of worship and support construction and renovation of child care facilities.
It recommends new capital investments in higher education — including $5 million to advance the planned renovation of Gampel Pavilion at the University of Connecticut — and a new $60 million program to help K-12 school districts fund small-scale renovation projects.
Education requirements in public schools
Beginning in the 2025-26 school year, Connecticut public schools will be required to add two units to their social studies curriculum: Asian American and Pacific Islander history and civics and media literacy.
The AAPI studies provision, part of a bill that lawmakers passed in 2022, requires schools to teach the history of Asian American and Pacific Islanders in the state, region and country, including the contributions of AAPI individuals and communities to the United States’ arts, sciences, government, economy and civil rights advancements.
A separate law that passed in 2023 requires the civics and media literacy lessons. Civics is defined in the bill as “the study of the rights and obligations of citizens” and media literacy will cover the role of all forms of media in society and how to use, evaluate and analyze the media that a person consumes or creates.
Absentee ballot drop box recordings
As of July 1, municipalities are required to have implemented video recording technology, complete with date and time evidence, at each of their absentee ballot drop boxes. They will be required to start recording the boxes on the first day absentee ballots are issued for an election or primary and continue recording until the town clerk retrieves the last ballots.
The law also requires that the recordings be made available to the public as soon as possible — and no later than five days after the town clerk’s last ballot retrieval — and that they keep the recordings for at least a year.
Legislators approved that requirement in the wake of an absentee ballot abuse scandal in Bridgeport, where a court ordered a re-do of the city’s 2023 Democratic primary after a video surfaced of Democratic Town Committee vice chairwoman Wanda Geter-Pataky appearing to place multiple absentee ballots into a Bridgeport absentee ballot drop box.
Five people, including Geter-Pataky and three Bridgeport council members, have been charged with election-related crimes as part of a sprawling investigation into that primary.
Limits on library e-book contracts
This year, lawmakers gave full passage to a bill designed to address the high costs libraries incur when buying electronic and audiobooks by banning them from entering into contracts with e-book publishers that contain terms that some lawmakers call restrictive.
E-book contracts for libraries often come with terms that mean the library has to re-purchase the book after it’s been borrowed 26 times or every couple of years, whichever comes first. The law prohibits libraries from contracting with publishers that place simultaneous restrictions on the loan period of an e-book and the number of times people can borrow it.
Though the law takes effect on July 1, it will only be implemented if one or more states with a total or combined population of 7 million enact similar laws, and mandates that the state librarian check quarterly whether any other states have passed a similar law.
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Senate Republicans are currently considering this domestic policy (tax) bill recently approved by the House of Representatives with just a single vote margin. This suggests that the bill will undergo much scrutiny and perhaps some significant changes before being finalized and coordinated with the House version for a final vote. Here is where it’s at so far.
The legislation would slash taxes, providing by far the biggest saving to the wealthy;a current estimate is that more than forty percent of the personal income tax reduction will go to the top one percent of incomes. This tax cut is estimated to cost the government more than $4 trillion over ten years, a staggering amount that is being offset by cuts to various other programs for less affluent taxpayers.
The bill would also steer more money to the military and immigration enforcement while cutting health care, nutrition, education and clean energy programs to cover part of the cost of tax cuts. In addition there are several other measures that President Trump campaigned on such as “no tax” on tips and overtime pay and an increase to the standard deduction for Americans 65 years or older. These are all uncertain to pass because of conservative objections.
Businesses would receive several tax cuts including valuable deductions for research and spending.
The bill would also hike taxes on universities with a tax on the investment income that their endowments earn which would rise substantially, from 1.4 per cent to as high as 21 percent.
The cap on state and local tax deductions in the House bill has been raised from $10,000. to $40,000.
In a complex array of revisions, the regulations regarding Medicaid, the insurance program primarily for the poor and disabled population has been revised to reduce the cost to the Federal government by shifting much of the costs to states.The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that pushing these costs to the states will likely cause 16 million people to lose their healthcare and endanger rural hospitals. The Senate is currently investigating other possible health care cuts in Medicare, Obamacare and several other programs.
Like President Trump himself, the House bill is unfriendly to the environment. The bill would quickly end most of the big tax credits for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.Many of those incentives were expected to last a decade.Tax credits for low emissions electricity sources like wind would be available in full only to power plants in service before the end of 2028.
Although Republican members of Congress have, at President Trump’s insistence, been trying to cancel most of the environmental provisions from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act as well, as it happens more than three quarters of the environmental projects being funded are in the districts of Republican representatives and are not easy for those lawmakers to vote against.
It’s too early to know what effect the fallout between Trump and Elon Musk might have on the final budget.Trump’s insistence on cancelling subsidies for electric vehicles (including Teslas) will hurt both Musk and the environment and may weaken Trump’s hold over Republican senators and members of Congress, allowing some of the few who are unhappy with the current bill to vote against it.But who knows?
A number of conservative Republican senators have threatened not to support the ‘“big beautiful bill” unless enough additional cuts are made so as to not increase the overall national debt but at this point there is little left that might be cut without triggering massive objections over most all of the possible sacrifices. And fewpossible cuts offer enough to get even close to a balanced budget.
Despite the pleas of many Democrats thus far, not a single Republican except for Senator Josh Hawley has said publicly that he was against enormous tax cuts for the very rich.
But this giveaway together with major cuts to programs like Medicaid for ordinary citizens, if enacted, will worsen the ever widening income gap between rich and poor.
According to Evan Osnos in his new book, “The Haves and Have Yaghts,” un 1978, “the top .01 percent of Americans owned about 7 percent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns 18 percent.”
Is this what our country needs?
Architect and landscape designer Mac Gordon lives in Lakeville.
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