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HARTFORD, CT – A bipartisan panel representing both houses of the Connecticut General Assembly shared their insights and ideas on how to make the state more conducive to business at the Economic Summit and Outlook on Wednesday morning.
Moderated by Chris Davis, vice president of public policy for the CBIA, the panel, titled “Reimagining Connecticut: 2024 General Assembly Session,” the two senators and two state representatives spoke about the needs of their constituencies, and how the concerns they’ve heard reflect issues statewide.
Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Avon, addressed the need for reform across Connecticut’s occupational licensing regime, a topic that she has worked on with Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich. She acknowledged that licensing itself, which can cost more than $100, along with other fees small businesses have to pay, can impose a burden on entrepreneurs.
“Something else that I’m thinking about came out of a constituent conversation,” she said. “I have a constituent who is a sole proprietor, and he’s talking about the fact that every year, he’s got to file a business report, and it’s $80 a year. And for someone who is a sole proprietor or photographer, that becomes somewhat onerous, because it’s like, why am I doing this year after year? So we’re thinking about, in addition to occupational licensing.We’re talking about, well, we still need those business reports to be filed, but do they need to be filed every year?”
Kavros DeGraw described seeing the small business owner’s perspective through her husband, who has owned a small business in Connecticut for over 30 years. She said that she’s seen the challenges of running a small business firsthand, and the largest challenge now remains filling the 73,000 jobs which remain open in the state.
“So I think that as we’re thinking about how can we cut licensing costs, how can we figure out maybe other ways to trim here and there so that you’re seeing some savings, we have to also be thinking about how are we going to support [business owners] in getting the employees in need,” she said.
Rep. Tammy Nuccio, R-Tolland, discussed the state of Connecticut’s technical high schools and apprenticeship program, saying that there is major room for improvement.
“We keep telling young people you gotta go to college, you gotta get a degree, you gotta do this,” she said. “And in the meantime, what we’ve absolutely done is massacred the trades. My husband is a service manager at a small HVAC company. They can only take one apprentice on in any given period. [My nephew] graduated with his HVAC certificate, but he can’t get a job now because of apprentice problems.”
Nuccio also talked about how licensing requirements for educators have made it difficult to fill vacancies at tech schools. She shared that at the tech school her nephew attended, he was without an HVAC teacher for 18 months. The class watched Disney movies instead of learning about their field of study.
“We made it harder to get teachers into the tech schools. We turned our tech schools into something that they were never meant to be. My husband, who has been in the field for 30 years, could not go and teach at a tech school because he doesn’t have a teacher’s degree. Let me tell you, that man can fix just about anything that happens in your house. He can do anything with these metal engine air conditioner. He could teach these kids.”
Nuccio said that the state needs to get back to focusing on a variety of jobs. She suggested looking at expanding the amount of seats in the tech schools, and reevaluating the qualifications of veteran tradespeople who can become teachers. d the seats?
Shortly before the end of the discussion, Sens. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, and Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, exchanged ideas about how to bring down the state’s soaring energy costs.
“Energy costs are the thing that I think all of us hear the most about from our constituents,” he said. “I have gotten hundreds if not thousands of emails from constituents saying, how the heck am I supposed to pay an energy bill of this size, even with a decent income? It’s hurting low and middle income workers, and it makes it very, very difficult to create new jobs and to invest in our state.”
Fazio offered some solutions which he admitted wouldn’t make Connecticut’s rates the cheapest in the nation, but that he said would get costs under control in the long run, and even push the state’s energy costs down to near the national average, from being the third highest in the nation.
His first suggestion was to significantly cut, if not eliminate, public benefits charges from electric bills. He described the charges as mostly discretionary government programs that the legislature passed. He said the programs should have to go through the regular appropriations process of public debate and vote. That would lead to a process where Fazio thinks they’ll be cut down for efficiency overall, but they would no longer be funded by an automatic hidden fee or electric bill.
Fazio also said the state should have an all-of-the-above clean energy strategy, where all forms of clean energy compete on a relatively equal playing field against one another and allow the best rise to the top, rather than allowing all these silent programs and bureaucracies in order to pick winners and losers in the energy industry.
“We need strong regulation. We need fair regulation to protect consumers. It should be predictable as well. There is a lot we can do, I think, to bend the long-term cost curve down,” he said.
Sen. Olsten agreed that energy policy needs to change, but put more emphasis on the expansion of nuclear power as a potential solution for the state at large, and as a boon for Eastern CT.
I think that we have to recognize that in eastern Connecticut, we have Dominion Millstone,” she said. “Part of that public benefit was to stabilize Millstone. And we must stabilize Millstone. We need to make sure that we are increasing our usage of nuclear.”
Olsten pointed out that any plan to increase reliance on natural gas may lead to a fight with New York, which has generally opposed natural gas pipelines crossing its borders.
“They refuse to work with us on those issues,” she said. “So we have to work within the confines of what we have here in Connecticut. That’s why I put forth a bill that was ultimately passed to allow small nuclear reactor development on nuclear sites, which is directly in eastern Connecticut, another place where people go to their job and work on a day-to-day basis, not from home.”
She said the state can’t afford for Millstone to follow the trend of nuclear power plants closing around the country, as 50% of the state’s energy generation comes from Millstone. She acknowledged though that it would take time to make significant changes, as the federal permitting process of nuclear power is about 15 years.
Olsten said improving the regulatory process for nuclear energy is what motivated her to sit on the Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee in Eastern Connecticut, along with colleagues, representatives from Dominion Millstone and representatives from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
“I know that we need those jobs,” she said. “I know we need the power generation that it creates and I know we need to expand nuclear in Eastern Connecticut, and we have the people that will work there tomorrow.”
Jamil Ragland writes and lives in Hartford. You can read more of his writing at www.nutmeggerdaily.com.
The views, opinions, positions, or strategies expressed by the author are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or positions of CTNewsJunkie.com or any of the author’s other employers.
