HARTFORD — The state finished the 2010-11 fiscal year in June with a
$236.9 million surplus, state Comptroller Kevin Lembo
reported Thursday.
The surplus would have been more than $1 billion and was driven by
higher-than-expected tax collections. But lawmakers put $14.5 million of the
surplus toward retiree health care and used $915.8 million to pay off borrowing
they’d approved to balance the budget.
That borrowing was to be paid back through surcharges on electricity bills. The
unpopular surcharges drew an unsuccessful lawsuit from one Republican state
senator, who called them a “sneaky tax.”
Lembo wrote in a letter to Gov. Dannel
P. Malloy that without one-time funds such as carrying over surplus from a
previous year and federal stimulus money, the state would have finished nearly
$1 billion in the red. He also warned about the effect of federal cutbacks.
“Those temporary lifelines that saved us in fiscal year 2011 have
disappeared this year,” he wrote. “Instead of the significant federal stimulus
money that Connecticut received this past
fiscal year, Connecticut
could face cuts in federal assistance.”
In the budget year that ended June 30, tax revenue grew by $1.5 billion, or
10.6 percent. The personal income tax, the largest tax, grew more than $660
million.
Lembo attributed the higher tax collection to more
jobs, saying payrolls grew by 15,200 workers from July 2010 to June 2011. Most
of that growth was in the first half of the year, he said.