By James Lomuscio

As Westport’s Representative Town Meeting (RTM) Monday night approved a $76,251,688 municipal budget for next year, one town department took center stage — the Westport Transit District (WTD).

In April, the Board of Finance denied the restoration of $115,000 it had cut from the WTD’s proposed $355,000 budget in an attempt to phase out its underutilized shuttle service to the town’s two train stations.

But Monday night, the shuttle service, a perennial whipping boy of the finance board, caught another reprieve from the RTM.

The legislative body restored $115,000 by a vote of 32 to 0 with 1 abstention, far more than the supermajority the RTM needed to overturn the finance board.

By Keith M. Phaneuf

With less than a month left until adjournment, state lawmakers are no closer — at least on paper — to charting a new course for Connecticut’s overburdened, decaying transportation system.

Though somewhat dysfunctional by design, the legislature’s latest budget proposals — which don’t feature tolls — would leave the Special Transportation Fund nearly $11.5 million in deficit by 2021, according to a new, nonpartisan analysis.

And while Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont continues to rally support for electronic tolling on the state’s major highways, Republican minorities in the House and Senate are pressing equally hard for a non-toll alternative that relies exclusively on borrowing.

“I think everybody realizes there is a level of punting that’s going on,” House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, said today, referring to separate Democratic proposals for transportation spending and revenue adopted last week that are out of balance.

By Keith M. Phaneuf

UPDATE Gov. Ned Lamont and his fellow Democrats in the legislature appear to be headed for a showdown over taxing the rich to help solve Connecticut’s pension debt crisis.

One day after gutting a 2 percent surcharge on capital gains earnings by the wealthy, the legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee was expected to revive the surcharge.

The surcharge was the centerpiece of a new revenue plan that would scale back Lamont’s efforts to broaden the sales tax, but also slow his initiative to provide property tax relief to the middle class.

The committee’s plan also would:

By Keith M. Phaneuf, Mark Pazniokas, and Kathleen Megan

On spending and taxes, Democratic legislators took their lead today from the more moderate fiscal positions of Gov. Ned Lamont, less a surrender to the governor than a postponement of a debate still to come.

The legislature’s Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee gutted a bill to boost income taxes on Connecticut’s wealthiest, siding with Lamont over progressive lawmakers. The new measure makes no change in tax rates, mandating only a study of the capital gains income of the state’s top earners.

The action in finance came as Democrats on the Appropriations Committee were explaining why tens of millions of dollars in proposed spending increases were being scrapped.

The goal, sources said, was to bring spending proposals for each of the next two fiscal years in line with the total amounts the Democratic governor offered in February.

By Ana Radelat

Washington — “Blue” states like Connecticut that fought against the Trump tax plan’s cap on state and local tax deductions are now seeing a silver lining — people turned to municipal bonds to lower their tax burden, which in turn lowered borrowing rates for state governments.

The new tax law capped the amount of state and local taxes, known as SALT, that taxpayers could deduct from their federal income tax at $10,000 this year. That drew howls of protests from “blue,” or Democratic-leaning, states whose taxpayers would more likely be hurt by the cap on deductions.

Connecticut joined a number of other states, including New York, California and New Jersey, to sue to block that change because their states have high costs of living, high incomes and high state and property taxes that, before the change, provided their residents with a valuable tax break.

But, having lost that tax break, there’s been a rush by taxpayers this year to replace it with municipal bonds which act as a tax shelter for income and can lower a person’s federal tax burden, and in some cases, their state and local tax burdens, too.