It’s been a quiet period since Governor Rell unveiled her budget a few weeks ago, but last night Senate Democrats announced that there was too much missing and “they oppose virtually all of her tax proposals and significant parts of her spending plan.”

The Courant Reports:

“It turns out that there’s a lot less than what meets the eye,” said Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, D-Brooklyn, the highest-ranking senator. “This is going to be a very difficult budget year. … This budget has a lot of flaws that did not reveal themselves immediately.”

Standing next to Williams at a press conference at the state Capitol, the co-chairwoman of the legislature’s tax-writing committee, Sen. Eileen Daily, D-Westbrook, said Rell’s tax plans are “a real gut-punch to the middle class and to the poor.”

The Democrats “just couldn’t sanction” Rell’s 10 percent, across-the-board increase in the state income tax, the repeal of the estate tax, and the phase-out of the popular $500 property tax credit, Daily said. She also cited opposition to the elimination of the personal property tax on cars, and using annual revenues from the casinos to help pay for the car-tax elimination.

Speaking more pointedly than usual, the mild-mannered Daily said, “We intend to work very hard to be sure that we don’t end up with that kind of budget in the end.”

But in the end the Senate Dems didn’t provide any alternative budget plan, which after this length of time seems odd. Why bother waiting to say you reject the plan if you don’t have an alternative to pitch? Not so strangely, Rell spokeman said teh same thing, sort of:

“It’s more than a little telling that all the Senate Democrats are doing is criticizing the governor’s [budget] proposals instead of offering their own,” Harris said. “The governor is a lot less interested in politics than she is in getting real results. Let’s get it done. Instead of trying to create castles in the air that fall apart, let’s put real, workable solutions on the table.”

It’s hard to see where this one is going. Republicans aren’t exactly behind Rell’s budget either. Raising taxes, particularly when the State is in a surplus doesn’t sound like fiscal conservatism. But we won’t really know what the real budget of the state is as long as the state doesn’t adopt GAAP. On that issue, nothing but silence out of the legislature.

Source: Hartford Courant , Dems Say It’s No Good,  By CHRISTOPHER KEATING, March 8, 2007