CT Towns Demand 50% Share of Casino Slot Revenue

Connecticut’s 169 cities and towns have spent more than two decades watching their share of casino revenue shrink, and municipal leaders took that grievance directly to state lawmakers Wednesday morning in Hartford.

New London Mayor Michael Passero, who chairs the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, didn’t mince words. “It was a great injustice,” Passero said at a press conference at the Capitol. He argued that revenue originally intended for towns started getting diverted in 2002 when the state faced its own budget crunch, and that the diversion never stopped even as Connecticut’s fiscal picture improved dramatically.

The math backs him up. This budget cycle, the state will distribute just $52.5 million in casino revenues to municipalities. That’s roughly 14% of the $365 million in video slot receipts Connecticut expects to collect from its two tribal casino partners this fiscal year. Municipal advocates want Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly to move to a 50-50 split, which they say would begin getting towns back to where they stood when legalized gaming was new.

How Connecticut’s Casino Deal Was Built

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1992. That’s when the Mashantucket Pequot tribe opened Foxwoods on sovereign land near the Ledyard and North Stonington border in New London County. The casino opened with table games only. Video slots came a year later after then-Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. worked out a compact settling the state’s legal objections to those machines. The tribe’s end of the deal: hand over 25% of all video slot receipts to Connecticut. When the Mohegan tribe opened Mohegan Sun in 1996, it signed onto the same arrangement.

Weicker, who was no fan of casinos, sold the deal on a specific premise. Gaming would drive up demand for social services, public safety, and housing support, all of which are delivered at the local level. Towns bore the costs, so towns should get the bulk of the revenue. That wasn’t a vague promise. When lawmakers built the budget for fiscal year 1993-94, they anticipated $113 million coming in from Foxwoods and committed 78% of that total to communities. The direct municipal share: $88.1 million. By 2002, that framework had started to collapse as the state began redirecting dollars it had once pledged to cities and towns.

Today, municipalities receive $52.5 million from a much larger revenue pool than existed in 1993. That’s the core of Passero’s argument. It’s not just that the dollar amount is lower than it should be. The share of the pie has shrunk while the pie itself got bigger.

The Surplus Argument

What makes the timing of this push notable is Connecticut’s current financial position. The state’s General Fund budget runs to $27.2 billion. The projected shortfall for the current cycle is $6 million, which amounts to about 1/40th of one percent of total spending. That’s not a crisis; it’s a rounding error. The state also maintains a budget reserve fund that has grown substantially, which municipal advocates are using to undercut any claim that the state can’t afford to restore what towns lost.

Passero’s argument is straightforward: if Connecticut can’t find a way to honor the original commitment to municipalities when it’s running a $6 million gap on a $27 billion budget, it won’t do it when times get harder either. The political moment is now or it’s nowhere.

The push, covered this week by CT Mirror, comes as Lamont and the General Assembly are deep into negotiations over the fiscal year 2026 budget, with a June 30 deadline to get a spending plan in place. Municipal leaders are betting that pressure applied now, during the budget’s final weeks, carries more weight than advocacy submitted months earlier.

Whether the General Assembly bites is another question. Connecticut’s 94 municipalities that receive casino aid represent a broad enough constituency to matter politically, but the legislature has absorbed similar arguments before without acting. What’s different now, Passero and his allies contend, is that the state’s fiscal health has removed the most common excuse for inaction.