Connecticut has a law requiring the state to estimate the local cost of mandates before lawmakers pass them. It has another law requiring the state to keep track of those mandates after they pass.
What it does not have is a general requirement that Hartford help towns cover the costs of the mandates it imposes.
A review of Connecticut’s annual state mandate reports, prepared by the Connecticut Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR),from 2020 through 2025 found at least 104 public and special act entries containing one or more provisions that appear to leave local governments responsible for some of the costs or resources needed to comply.
The 104 entries should not be read as 104 individual unfunded mandates. Some acts contain multiple requirements; some receive partial state funding, and others primarily consume staff time rather than generating an easily identifiable expense. The review may also not capture every mandate.
The reports show how those costs accumulate — from multimillion-dollar expenses to smaller requirements absorbed through existing staff and resources.
From Millions to Man-Hours
The costs can be substantial. In 2022, lawmakers lowered Connecticut’s lead-poisoning thresholds, and the legislature’s Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA) estimated the change could cost local health departments up to $5.5 million in fiscal year 2023 and another $20 million in fiscal year 2024 through increased operating and abatement costs.
Other mandates are much smaller.
In 2025, lawmakers required certain municipalities with a state college campus housing at least 1,000 students to provide an on-campus early-voting location. Registrars must designate an area for curbside voting at every polling place. Municipalities already required to translate election materials must use professional translators.
The same year, towns went from paying five cents per dog license tag to covering the full cost.
Individually, many of these requirements may seem minor. Together, they consume money, staff time and other local resources.
Education shows up repeatedly in the review. At least 28 of the 104 act entries involved school districts, boards of education, school employees or school facilities.
In 2021, boards of education were required to adopt or revise policies involving gifted and talented students, advanced courses, curriculum, and FAFSA completion.
Two years later, another mandate added school-climate coordinators, annual surveys, more frequent air-quality testing and additional training. OFA did identify a cost to local school districts for those requirements.
Staff Time Is Not Free
Not every mandate requires a town to write a new check. Sometimes the cost is the time existing employees must spend carrying out a new state requirement.
That is where ACIR and OFA do not always agree.
OFA sometimes concludes that a new requirement has no additional municipal cost because existing employees can handle the work. ACIR takes a broader view: if employees are spending time complying with a new state requirement, that is time and resources the municipality can no longer use elsewhere.
A mandate does not become free simply because the cost appears on a timesheet instead of an invoice.
That distinction matters in the state’s own mandate reports. Of the 104 act entries in the review, 58 involved a local burden for which OFA did not assign an additional dollar cost. In other words, more than half of the entries reviewed involved costs or resources that could be easy to overlook if the analysis focuses only on new spending.
ACIR has warned that individually small mandates can have a significant cumulative effect and that school districts can end up with employees whose time is largely consumed by handling them.
Another 40 of the 104 entries had a local cost identified; five involved only partial state funding, and one had funding that could not be clearly determined from the records reviewed.
The Two-Thirds Test
Connecticut scrutinizes costly mandates. But scrutiny does not pay the bill.
Before a mandate passes, OFA is supposed to estimate its local fiscal impact. Most bills carrying a municipal mandate are then referred to the Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers consider whether the state should reimburse towns and by how much. The House and Senate can bypass that referral, but only with a two-thirds vote in each chamber.
But that two-thirds requirement applies to skipping the Appropriations referral — not to passing an unfunded mandate.
Even after the state identifies a mandate and estimates its local cost, lawmakers can still enact it without fully reimbursing towns. And as the mandate reports show, some local burdens never receive an incremental dollar estimate at all.
One proposed reform would apply the two-thirds threshold where it matters most: to the decision to impose an unfunded mandate itself.
In 2023, Rep. Mitch Bolinsky (R-Newtown) proposed requiring a two-thirds vote in both chambers to create or expand an unfunded mandate on municipalities or school districts. The bill never received a public hearing.
Bolinsky proposed essentially the same reform again in 2025. That bill did not receive a public hearing either.
The idea is straightforward: lawmakers could still impose an unfunded mandate, but doing so would require broader agreement when the state is asking towns or school districts to pick up the cost.
Other New England States Already Impose Stronger Limits.
Maine requires the state to cover 90 percent of the added local cost of a mandate. If it does not, the measure needs a two-thirds vote of the elected membership in both chambers.
In New Hampshire, the constitution generally requires new or expanded local responsibilities that demand additional spending to be funded by the state unless the local government agrees to pay.
Massachusetts handles state mandates differently. Under its rules, if the state passes a new requirement that costs local communities money, the state must pick up the tab or towns can simply say “no thanks.” If a community believes the state’s reimbursement falls short, it can seek an official review.
There is no shortage of ways to deal with the problem. The state can fund more of what it requires, give towns a meaningful way to push back, or make unfunded mandates harder to pass.
What Connecticut lacks is any real consequence when Hartford imposes a mandate but leaves towns with the bill. A two-thirds requirement would provide one.
