Some news media coverage of Connecticut state employee compensation misinforms the public. Periodic news articles titillate readers with the pay of the state’s highest earners. Yet, six high-paid UCONN athletic coaches and 33 high-paid UCONN Health doctors are not the reason that the overall state payroll has exploded under Governor Lamont.
The problem is that Lamont is giving away the farm. He has awarded the unionized workforce six consecutive annual wage increases that have driven up pay by a stunning 33%. And he is poised to award a seventh. Instead, he should freeze wages.
A recent news article is typical, saying about state pay “The top 50 earners on the 2025 state payroll received nearly $58.5 million in overall compensation, including $55.4 million in wages and salaries.” Yet, $55 million represents less than 1% of Connecticut’s overall payroll of over $6.0 billion. The article focuses on minutia and misses the real story.
Not only is the article a swing and a miss, but it includes with serious errors. It states that “The payroll increased by more than $220 million in the seven years since Governor Ned Lamont took office to top $6 billion in 2025.”
WRONG!
The very next sentence cites the payroll number just before Lamont “… the overall payroll grew 4.8% from $4.6 billion…” The dollar increase under Lamont is $1.4 billion, not $220 million! The percentage increase from $4.6 billion to over $6.0 billion is about 33%, not 4.8%.
The problem, of course, is the missing phrase “an annual average of about” which should precede the 4.8% figure and the $220 million figure.
These may be only careless errors, but they are consequential. Focusing on the top 50 wage earners is simply unserious.
The real story is that Lamont’s six wage increases have propelled Connecticut state workers’ wages to the second highest of state employees in the 50 states… and that ranking dates back to 2023. Today, Connecticut state pay may well be the highest in the nation.
Lamont bills himself as a fiscal moderate. He’s not. The best way to understand his fiscal profligacy is to compare him to his predecessor, Democrat Dannel Malloy. Over Malloy’s eight years in office, Malloy imposed unpaid furlough days and, later, three annual wage freezes (albeit partially offset by a one-time bonus). He eliminated overtime spiking for post-2017 hires, and he reformulated pensions for post-2017 hires who have a hybrid of a defined benefit and a defined contribution plan, with employees absorbing much of the investment risk.
What has Lamont done? Nothing!
Actually, on top of the six annual pay raises, he has paid out “pensionable bonuses.” All-in, he has delivered a pay increase that is probably closer to 40%.
While he was right to award “frontline” employees hardship pay for service during COVID, he granted other employees the right to work remote for four days out of the week, a right that persists today as a totally unnecessary perk.
Under Lamont, overtime pay has surged, driven by overtime spiking, with about 28,000 state employees retaining the right to spike, which they systematically abuse. In 2025, one agency accounted for $127 million of overtime and another $64 million out of total overtime pay of $400 million. Employees in these two agencies have been retiring with beginning pensions one-third higher than their last salary. They will receive about twice as much in their first 20 years of retirement as they earned during 20 years on the job (these employees can retire after only 20 years of service – and most do).
Lamont claims to have made “progress on pensions.” He hasn’t. When wages go up, so do pensions, which are based upon wages. When employees OT spike, the pension cost to the state explodes. That’s not just theoretically true. Under Lamont, the gross pension liability has increased almost 30% or $10 billion from $34 billion to $44 billion, according to the latest Valuation Report of the Actuary.
To call all this Lamont’s gravy train is understatement. Any sensible governor, much less a “fiscal moderate,” would impose a wage freeze. A freeze is the least that should be done. A freeze would simply prevent further deterioration of the state’s already dire fiscal / financial condition, which is disproportionately impacted by overall pay and benefits that are running almost $11 billion in a $28 billion budget. Reforming pensions – and health care benefits which we have not even mentioned – is ultimately necessary.
There’s another fallacy that the Connecticut news media perpetuates that runs something like this: it has taken the state years to get into this mess, so it will take years to get out. The symmetry of that formulation gives it seeming plausibility.
Yet, the actual truth about financial crises is this: one minute, everything is hunky-dory, the next nanosecond, everything has fallen apart. Remember 1929, 1987, 2008 and COVID. And remember New York City’s near bankruptcy in 1975.
Red Jahncke is a nationally recognized columnist, who writes about politics and policy. His columns appear in numerous national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today, The Hill, Issues & Insights and National Review as well as many Connecticut newspapers.