You may have recently received mail highlighting our legislative accomplishments from the 2025 session. I am following up to showcase the work we've done to strengthen child care and special education, pass a responsible state budget, tackle rising energy costs, and deliver results for our community.
Our budget creates a $300 million trust fund that will help increase the availability and affordability of child care. By 2027, families earning up to $100,000 will be able to receive free child care, while families earning more will pay no more than 7% of their income toward that service. The budget also establishes a refundable $250 Earned-Income Tax Credit check for working families.
| I was proud to help lead the successful effort to secure an additional $142 million in state funds for the new Westhill High School and Roxbury Elementary School projects — meaning we obtained a total of $434.8 million of state funding to support the construction of the state-of-the-art schools our students and educators deserve. |
|
|
| The state budget also devotes historic funding to special education, easing the burden on municipalities such as Stamford. We will receive $37.5 million in total state funding and $22.6 million in education funding in Fiscal Year 2026. |
|
| In addition to supporting education, we’ve made significant progress in expanding affordable access to health care. We strengthened privacy protections in Connecticut’s first-in-the-nation reproductive healthcare shield law and increased Medicaid funding to help providers bolster reproductive care infrastructure. We also took on the insurance industry by toughening our mental health parity law to ensure fair coverage, and we tackled the high cost of prescription drugs by eliminating middleman markups, requiring that manufacturer rebates go directly to consumers, and advancing efforts to import lower-cost medications from Canada. |
|
| We’ve also been focused on fighting for working families by delivering targeted tax relief and pushing for reforms to lower energy costs and make utility regulation more accountable. To protect consumers, we expanded our price-gouging laws and capped broadband internet prices for low-income households at $40 per month. And to safeguard privacy, we prohibited large social media companies from targeting ads at minors or selling sensitive personal data without consent. |
|
