CT House Passes Earmark Reform Bill 141-0

The Connecticut House of Representatives voted 141-0 Thursday to pass a bill imposing new transparency requirements on the state’s legislative earmark process, a system that has allowed lawmakers to steer millions of dollars annually to nonprofits and other groups with almost no public scrutiny.

A unanimous vote in Hartford is rare. That it happened here tells you how much pressure has accumulated around earmarks since federal investigators began examining how state money moves through friendly organizations.

Gov. Ned Lamont proposed the bill. Under the new rules, lawmakers would have to specifically name every organization receiving earmark funding and explain what the money is for. Both requirements sound obvious. Neither is currently on the books.

What changes, exactly

Any entity planning to pass state money to a third party, a subgrant, would need prior sign-off from state officials before doing so. The Office of Policy and Management would be required to produce an annual report cataloging every dollar that lawmakers directed state agencies to distribute to nonprofits and other groups. That report doesn’t exist today.

The reform push didn’t emerge from routine good-government housekeeping. Lamont put the package together against the backdrop of a federal criminal investigation into state Sen. Doug McCrory, a Hartford Democrat who pushed for at least $11 million in legislative earmarks over multiple years for the Blue Hills Civic Association, a Hartford nonprofit. A forensic audit commissioned by the state Department of Economic and Community Development found that McCrory controlled a substantial share of the money flowing to the association, using that control to subgrant millions to other nonprofits and businesses. Some of those recipients are now targets in the same federal probe.

Connecticut is already one of the higher-tax states in the country. When residents learn that a chunk of what they send to Hartford ends up in a network of loosely monitored nonprofits tied to a senator under federal investigation, it’s not a good look.

What the bill still doesn’t do

The legislation leaves out some reforms that watchdog groups and certain legislators have pushed hard for.

Lawmakers still won’t have to attach their names to individual earmarks. No straightforward public record will show which legislator requested which funding. That’s a real problem. If a member of the General Assembly can quietly direct money to a favored organization without any public trail connecting them to the decision, the core accountability gap isn’t closed.

The new rules also won’t cover money routed through the Connecticut Judicial Branch, where earmarks historically tied to the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus have been distributed. That carve-out matters. It means a portion of the earmark universe sits entirely outside the new framework, and the 2026 reforms can’t touch it.

Rep. Lucy Dathan, the Democratic chairwoman of the Government Oversight Committee, was direct about both the progress and the limits. “I think any transparency that we can provide is critical, but we do need to make sure it is a comprehensive framework for addressing these legislative earmarks,” Dathan said.

She wasn’t alone in seeing this as a beginning rather than a finish line. “People want to know where their tax dollars are spent, and I feel this is a great start.”

That word, start, is doing a lot of work in this debate. The 141-0 tally reflects genuine consensus that something had to change after the McCrory investigation put earmarks on the front page. But a bill that doesn’t require legislators to publicly claim their own earmarks, and that excludes the Judicial Branch channel entirely, still leaves reporters, auditors, and ordinary residents without the full picture.

CT Mirror reported the vote results Thursday as the bill moved toward the Senate.

Watch whether the Senate adds the missing pieces before the measure heads to Lamont’s desk. Specifically, watch the name-attachment requirement. That’s the provision with the clearest potential to change behavior, and it’s the one that didn’t make it into Thursday’s version.