With cheers for child care, Lamont begins soft reelection campaign
Gov. Ned Lamont’s celebration Tuesday of a groundbreaking advance in early childhood education funding and his simultaneous struggle to calm concerns about a housing bill underscore the advantages and liabilities of incumbency as he edges towards a reelection campaign.
Lamont, 71, a Democrat who has scored high approval ratings since rebounding during COVID-19 from a difficult first year, shared his inclination to seek a third term on Thursday, the morning after the conclusion of the 2025 legislative session.
One immediate result is the heightened interest in how ably Lamont frames and exploits his legislative wins and how nimbly he can navigate, minimize or resolve controversies.
Both tasks were on display Tuesday.
Lamont, who was preparing to take an overnight flight to the Paris Air Show, twice updated reporters on his conversations with legislative leaders about his reservations over elements of House Bill 5002, the housing legislation passed by relatively narrow margins.
By day’s end, Lamont said he was inclined to sign the bill — assuming a deal is struck assuring that his misgivings would be addressed prior to it taking effect in October. Other sections would take effect next year.
“We’re desperately short of housing. That impacts affordability, impacts economic growth. This bill goes a long way to solving that,” Lamont said. “I think they went over the top in a couple of places.”
His misgivings included a section requiring communities to divide housing need among towns and assign each town a number of units to plan and zone for. He called that “a planning tool” but one that is being misread as a mandate.
Childhood education bill celebrated
A celebration of Senate Bill 1, a measure that will create a trust fund projected to raise salaries for child care workers, increase access and lower costs for parents, had all the ingredients of a campaign ad, save one.
The forecast of rain moved the event from a telegenic play area outside an early childhood education and care center to a third-floor function room in the state Capitol. But the vibe was happy to the point of giddy.
Beth Bye, who has run a well-regarded preschool, helped create the Office of Early Childhood as a state senator in 2013 and has run that office since Lamont took office in 2019, commanded the audience to rise for a sing a long as she once did for little children.
The room was packed with advocates, including day-care teachers and parents who readily complied. They sang “If You’re Happy And You Know It.”
And yes, someone eventually thrust an infant into the arms of the governor. The child wore a yellow shirt with the message, “Thank you governor.” Lamont proclaimed the press event to be “the happiest” of his tenure.
The new off-budget early childhood trust fund drew opposition from Republicans, who saw it as weakening the state’s fiscal guardrails by drawing some surplus funds away from paying down debt and the unfunded pension liability.
But Bye said it provides a structural solution to what the late Gwen Morgan, a national advocate and strategist on child care, termed the “trilemma” of simultaneously addressing quality, accessibility and affordability.
“Gwen Morgan made up this term in the 1980s to highlight the inherent tradeoff policy makers were constantly making, and same with providers, because when you can improve one goal, sometimes it would undermine the other,” Bye said.
Improving quality meant higher costs. Higher cost meant less accessibility. Controlling costs often meant lower wages, higher turnover and poorer quality.
The Lamont administration’s initiative has roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the governor said that he was dramatically reminded of how the absence of adequate child care can shut vital services and the economy.
“All of a sudden, I heard from nurses, ‘We cannot go to the hospital to take care of those folks most in need, unless we have a place where our kids can go, where they can be safe.’ And all of a sudden you realize how vital quality early childhood is for our economy,” Lamont said.
Kyla Siegmann, the executive director of the Trinity College Community Child Center, said the governor was hardly alone in that realization.
“Despite the critical role early educators play in shaping the future, we have operated in the shadows, underfunded, undervalued and often unseen,” she said. “Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, and in that time of crisis, a light was cast upon our work, not a spotlight, but a beacon.”
The trust fund will increase availability beginning next year but will bring more dramatic improvements in 2027 through 2032. Early childhood education programs will have access to state grants that will require adherence to a pay structure equal to public school teachers, Bye said.
Child care teachers earn on average about $36,000 annually, Bye said.
“This endowment will increase reimbursement rates by 88% for participating programs who will need to agree to paying teachers on par with public school teachers,” Bye said.
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