Last week’s special session was supposed to be simple, a short return to Hartford to make sure families relying on SNAP and essential programs could continue putting food on their tables. Our food banks are now reporting levels of demand higher than at any time in recent memory, which should have been the primary focus of the session. But as often happens, something else was slipped into the spotlight. Gov. Ned Lamont reintroduced a housing bill he had already vetoed once, and in the span of three rushed days, from Wednesday to Friday, HB 8002 was pushed through with almost no time for the public or legislators to meaningfully digest what was inside.
The bill is being presented as a solution to Connecticut’s housing crisis, homelessness, and affordability collapse. But let us say what so many residents, advocates, and even legislators know but hesitate to say publicly. This is not a homelessness bill. This is not an affordability bill. This is, once again, a development and zoning bill that continues the same pattern we have seen for years in Connecticut, a pattern where developers walk away smiling while our seniors, working class families, and lower income communities continue to fall into homelessness or displacement.
Months ago, I wrote about the Fair Share and Transit Oriented Development agenda and why it was being misrepresented as a form of housing justice. HB 8002 recycles many of the same concepts, just under new headings. Yes, some pieces of the bill include positive ideas. But the core structure is still a one size fits all approach that weakens public process, expands “as of right” zoning, ties municipal funding to compliance with state preferred planning models, and does very little to create truly affordable housing for those who need it most.
Let us be real. HB 8002 is aimed squarely at smaller towns. It creates penalties for municipalities that refuse to opt into regional housing plans or fail to submit required housing growth frameworks. It ties access to state grants to adherence with zoning models that many suburban towns have resisted for decades. The intention is to push “exclusive” municipalities to participate in housing growth, which is a fair goal in principle.
But the mechanism matters. And here, the mechanism is coercion through funding, the weakening of protest petitions, and the removal of public process in key zoning decisions. “As of right” development in transit areas, summary review for certain middle housing types, and restrictions on who can object to zoning changes combine to silence residents, especially those in communities vulnerable to displacement.
The impact of these reforms is wildly different in a town that builds one multifamily project per decade compared to a city like Stamford that has undergone one of the fastest and most aggressive building booms in the state. Stamford does not need this bill. Stamford is not a town refusing to build. Stamford has been flooded with development for fifteen years. We have built to the point of destabilizing entire neighborhoods, especially in the South End and West Side.
Families were pushed out by property taxes inflated by surrounding “luxury” buildings. Developers bought affordable homes, let them rot for years, then declared them blight to replace them with high priced rentals. Our seniors were priced out, our retirees pushed to Bridgeport, and our working class made invisible by glossy marketing brochures calling $2,500 one bedrooms “attainable.”
When the Fair Share and TOD lobbyists told us that Stamford was not building enough, many of us laughed at the absurdity. Stamford already exceeds the numbers they spent years waving in our faces. What we lack is not units. What we lack is affordability, stability, and protections for the people most at risk of becoming homeless.
Yet none of that is the focus of HB 8002.
To be fair and honest, the bill does contain provisions worth supporting. We can acknowledge them without pretending the overall direction is right.
First, the ban on hostile architecture is long overdue. Spikes, anti-sleeping benches, aggressive landscaping to keep people away, these tools dehumanize the unhoused and create a culture of cruelty. Banning them is a moral victory.
Second, the portable shower and laundry pilot for people experiencing homelessness is a humane step forward, though still too small for the need.
Third, Section 32 prohibits the use of revenue management software that manipulates rental prices. Companies like RealPage artificially inflate rents statewide through algorithmic collusion. This measure is genuinely important.
Fourth, the bill expands Fair Rent Commissions to every municipality with at least 15,000 residents, which is crucial for tenant protection, although municipal enforcement without state oversight remains inconsistent.
Fifth, landlords can no longer evict tenants for late payment if their online rent payment system malfunctions, a small but meaningful safeguard that prevents avoidable homelessness.
Sixth, Section 43 allows housing authorities and nonprofits to purchase existing buildings and deed restrict them as affordable. This could help preserve affordability in places where speculation has turned housing into a casino.
Seventh, new safety requirements like annual elevator inspections and mobile home park fire hydrant reporting help protect elderly tenants and low income families living in neglected complexes.
All of these are good steps. But we cannot confuse these elements with the bill’s central function.
Once again, the bill’s heart is a planning and zoning framework meant to accelerate development, expand “as of right” approvals, and reduce the public’s ability to contest projects that may not serve their communities.
Section 24, which weakens protest petitions, is clearly aimed at places like Stamford. Paired with “as of right” language in transit districts, it effectively removes one of the strongest tools residents have to slow or challenge harmful development. And when you combine that with the influence of groups like People Friendly Stamford, whose leadership has been tied to developer law firms that spent years suing the Board of Representatives and losing, it becomes impossible to ignore what is happening. These groups claim to care about trees and sidewalks while supporting the eminent domain taking of a Haitian family’s home after forty years of paying taxes.
Now, the state has handed these same interests a stronger legal framework and stripped residents of procedural tools that were essential in protecting neighborhoods for decades.
If the Governor and leadership were serious about addressing homelessness, this bill would have included policies that actually prevent homelessness.
Where is the cap on rent increases, the single most effective way to prevent displacement?
Where is Just Cause eviction, which stops landlords from evicting tenants for profit.
Where is the mandate that all new construction include deeply affordable units at meaningful percentages?
Where is state-funded support for seniors and retirees on fixed incomes?
Where are anti-displacement protections for long time residents in gentrifying neighborhoods?
Where is the requirement to use vacant state-owned or city-owned buildings for housing?
Where is a statewide homelessness prevention fund?
Where is the restructuring of affordability requirements to begin with the lowest income tiers?
Where is the real commitment to ending family homelessness?
And perhaps most importantly, where is statewide funding for the Homeless to Housing (H2H) model, a pilot program under DMHAS that has shown remarkable success. H2H recognizes that anyone who has been homeless for six months has endured trauma that traditional shelter based pathways only worsen. Instead of forcing people through the shelter pipeline and then into a multi year-wait for Section 8, followed by an additional wait to find vacancy to use it, H2H places people directly into housing with supportive services. This approach bypasses bureaucratic delays, stabilizes individuals more quickly, and treats homelessness as the trauma crisis it is. HB 8002 should have funded H2H statewide. It did not.
The bill creates grants, loans, and financial incentives for municipalities, but only if they play by the state’s zoning and planning rules. This is not collaboration. This is coercion. And it is not designed to help cities like Stamford that have already built more than our share. It is aimed at the suburbs, but in doing so, it strips urban residents of public process and hands developers a smoother, faster path to approval.
It is no wonder that lobbyists showed up this session with renewed energy. It is no wonder that what failed repeatedly in full sessions suddenly sailed through in a special session when legislators received the bill the day before voting. There was no deep caucus discussion, no chance to bring concerns forward, no opportunity for public testimony to shape the outcome.
This should concern every resident of Connecticut. The process was rushed, opaque, and tilted toward special interests, not toward public good.
We can no longer pretend that this pattern is accidental. Connecticut has allowed development interests to shape policy for nearly four decades, and the cost has been the slow erasure of working class communities, Black and Brown neighborhoods, and the elderly who built our cities long before developers discovered them. HB 8002 continues this trend. It gives more leverage to those who already dominate planning decisions and further marginalizes the residents who live with the consequences.
Housing justice is not achieved by fast tracking luxury apartments near train stations and calling them progress. It is not achieved by weakening public process. It is not achieved by handing out grants to municipalities only if they deregulate their zoning codes. And it is certainly not achieved by passing a one hundred page bill in a special session with less than twenty four hours for legislators to review it.
Connecticut’s housing crisis is not a crisis of zoning. It is a crisis born of political decisions that prioritize developers over people, revenue over human dignity, and “units produced” over stability and belonging. We can build all the transit adjacent towers we want, but if our seniors are still getting evicted, if our families are still being priced out, if our retirees are still sleeping in cars, then we have failed. Period.
Real leadership means confronting the interests that have captured our housing policy. It means capping rents, protecting tenants, funding H2H statewide, and mandating deeply affordable units in every major development. It means putting the lives of our most vulnerable residents ahead of the profit margins of the most powerful players in the room.
Connecticut stands at a crossroads. We can continue down the path of developer driven policy dressed up as equity, or we can finally choose the harder, more honest path, the one that puts people before profit and communities before speculation. HB 8002 chose the wrong path. It is now up to the rest of us to demand better.
Because if we do not fight for real housing justice, no one else will.
—
David Michel was a state representative for the 146th district from 2019 to 2025, a part of Stamford that includes the South End, Downtown, and Shippan.
It’s a scheme made famous by a nearly 30-year-old episode of the sitcom Seinfeld.
Hoping to earn a quick buck, two characters load a mail truck full of soda bottles and beer cans purchased with a redeemable 5-cent deposit in New York, before traveling to Michigan, where they can be recycled for 10 cents apiece. With few thousand cans, they calculate, the trip will earn a decent profit. In the end, the plan fell apart.
But after Connecticut raised the value of its own bottle deposits to 10 cents in 2024, officials say, they were caught off guard by a flood of such fraudulent returns coming in from out of state. Redemption rates have reached 97%, and some beverage distributors have reported millions of dollars in losses as a result of having to pay out for excess returns of their products.
On Thursday, state lawmakers passed an emergency bill to crack down on illegal returns by increasing fines, requiring redemption centers to keep track of bulk drop-offs and allowing local police to go after out-of-state violators.
“I’m heartbroken,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, who supported the effort to increase deposits to 10 cents and expand the number of items eligible for redemption. “I spent a lot of political capital to get the bottle bill passed in 2021, and never in a million years did I think that New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island residents would return so many bottles.”
The legislation, Senate Bill 299, would increase fines for violating the bottle bill law from $50 to $500 on a first offense. For third and subsequent offenses, the penalty would increase from $250 to $2,000 and misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in prison.
In addition, it requires redemption centers to be licensed by the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (previously, those businesses were only required to register with DEEP). As a condition of their license, redemption centers must keep records of anyone seeking to redeem more than 1,000 bottles and cans in a single day.
Anyone not affiliated with a qualified nonprofit would be prohibited from redeeming more than 4,000 bottles a day, down from the previous limit of 5,000.
The bill also seeks to pressure some larger redemption centers into adopting automated scanning technologies, such as reverse vending machines, by temporarily lowering the handling fee that is paid on each beverage container processed by those centers.
The bill easily passed the Senate on Wednesday and the House on Thursday on its way to Gov. Ned Lamont.
While the bill drew bipartisan support, Republicans described it as a temporary fix to a growing problem.
House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, called the switch to 10-cent deposits an “unmitigated disaster” and said he believed out-of-state redemption centers were offloading much of their inventory within Connecticut.
“The sheer quantity that is being redeemed in the state of Connecticut, this isn’t two people putting cans into a post office truck,” Candelora said. “This is far more organized than that.”
The impact of those excess returns is felt mostly by the state’s wholesale beverage distributors, who initiate the redemption process by collecting an additional 10 cents on every eligible bottle and can they sell to supermarkets, liquor stores and other retailers within Connecticut. The distributors are required to pay that money back — plus a handling fee — once the containers are returned to the store or a redemption center.
According to the state’s Department of Revenue Services, nearly 12% of wholesalers reported having to pay out more redemptions than they collected in deposits in 2025. Those losses totaled $11.3 million.
Peter Gallo, the vice president of Star Distributors in West Haven, said his company’s losses alone have totaled more than $2 million since the increase on deposits went into effect two years ago. As time goes on, he said, the deficit has only grown.
“We’re hoping we can get something fixed here, because it’s a tough pill to be holding on to debt that we should get paid for,” Gallo said.
Still, officials say they have no way of tracking precisely how many of the roughly 2 billion containers that were redeemed in the state last year were illegally brought in from other states. That’s because most products lack any kind of identifiable marking indicating where they were sold.
“There’s no way to tell right now. That’s one of the core issues here,” said state Rep. John-Michael Parker, D-Madison, who co-chairs the legislature’s Environment Committee.
Parker said the issue could be solved if product labels were printed with a specific barcode or other feature that would be unique to Connecticut. Such a solution, for now, has faced technological challenges and pushback from the beverage industry, he said.
Not everyone involved in the handling, sorting and redemption of bottles is happy about the upcoming changes — or the process by which they were approved.
Francis Bartolomeo, the owner of a Fran’s Cans and Bart’s Bottles in Watertown, said he was only made aware of the legislation on Monday from a fellow redemption center owner. Since then, he said, he’s been contacting his legislators to oppose the bill and was frustrated by the lack of a public hearing.
“I know other people are as flabbergasted as I am because they don’t know where it comes out of,” Bartolomeo said “It’s a one sided affair, really.”
Bartolomeo said one of his biggest concerns with the bill is the $2,500 annual licensing fee that it would place on redemption centers. While he agreed that out-of-state redemptions are a problem, he said it should be up to the state to improve enforcement.
“We’re cleaning up the mess, and we’re going to end up being penalized,” Bartolomeo said. “Get rid of it and go back to 5 cents if it’s that big of a hindrance, but don’t penalize the redemption centers for what you imposed.”
Lynn Little of New Milford Redemption Center supports the increased penalties but believes the solution ultimately lies with better labeling by the distributors. She is also frustrated by the volume caps after the state initially gave grants to residents looking to open their own bottle redemption businesses.
“They’re taking a volume business, because any business where you make 3 cents per unit (the average handling fee) is a volume business, and limiting the volume we can take in, you’re crushing small businesses,” Little said.
Ritter said that he opposed a move back to the 5-cent deposit, which he noted was increased to encourage recycling. However, he said the current situation has become politically untenable and puts the state at risk of a lawsuit from distributors.
“We’re getting to a point where we’re going to lose the bottle bill,” Ritter said. “If we got sued in court, I think we’d lose.”
NEW BRITAIN, CT — Stanley Black & Decker on Thursday said it has decided to close its manufacturing facility in New Britain.
Debora Raymond, vice president of external communications for the manufacturer, said the decision is a result of a “structural decline in demand for single-sided tape measures.”
The New Britain facility predominantly makes these products, according to Raymond.
“These products are quickly becoming obsolete in the markets we serve,” Raymond said, via an emailed statement Thursday.
The decision is expected to impact approximately 300 employees, according to Raymond.
“We are focused on supporting impacted employees through this transition, including providing options for employment at other facilities, severance, and job placement support services for both salaried and hourly employees,” Raymond said.
As of Thursday at 4:30 p.m., no Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice had been filed with the state Department of Labor.
The company’s corporate headquarters remains at 1000 Stanley Dr., New Britain.
Gov. Ned Lamont released the following statement on the decision:
“Although Stanley has made the decision to discontinue operations for manufacturing outdated products, a change in workforce opportunities is difficult for employees, their families, and any community.,” Lamont said. “However, I am hopeful that these skilled workers will be repurposed with the help of Stanley Black & Decker, a company that will still proudly be headquartered here in Connecticut. My administration is working closely with local and state leaders to support affected workers and to reimagine the factory site so it can continue to create opportunity and strengthen New Britain’s economic future.”
New Britain Mayor Bobby Sanchez said he is “deeply disappointed” the company will be closing its Myrtle Street operations.
“For generations, Stanley Works has been part of the fabric of our city, providing good-paying jobs, supporting families, and helping build New Britain’s proud reputation as the ‘Hardware City,’” Sanchez said.
According to the mayor, his office’s immediate focus is on helping affected workers and their families. The mayor has been in contact with Lamont’s office, and they will be working closely to make sure employees have access to job placement services, retraining opportunities and support, Sanchez said.
“We will continue aggressively pursuing economic development opportunities and attracting businesses that are looking for a true community partner, a city ready to collaborate, innovate and grow alongside them,” Sanchez said. “New Britain has reinvented itself before, and we will do so again.”
Stanley Black & Decker, founded in 1843, operates manufacturing facilities worldwide, according to its website. It reports having 43,500 employees globally, and makes an array of products, such as power tools and equipment, hand tools, and fasteners.
Newly released police video shows former WWE executive Vince McMahon ram his luxury sports car into the rear end of another vehicle on a Connecticut highway last summer as he was being followed by a state trooper.
McMahon, now 80, was driving his 2024 Bentley Continental GT at more than 100 mph on the Merritt Parkway when he crashed in the town of Westport, according to state police.
A trooper’s dashcam video shows McMahon accelerating away, then braking too late to avoid crashing into the back of a BMW. The Bentley then swerves into a guardrail and careens back across the highway, creating a cloud of dirt and car parts.
“Why were you driving all over 100 mph?” state police Detective Maxwell Robins asked McMahon after catching up to the wrecked Bentley, which can cost over $300,000.
“I got my granddaughter’s birthday” McMahon replied, explaining he was on his way to see her. The encounter was recorded on police bodycam video.
No one was seriously injured in the July 24 crash, which happened the same day that WWE legend Hulk Hogan died of a heart attack in Florida.
Besides damage to the rear of the BMW, another vehicle driving on the opposite side of the parkway was struck by flying debris. The driver of that third car happened to be wearing a WWE shirt, according to the police video.
McMahon was cited for reckless driving and following too closely. A state judge in October allowed McMahon to enter a pretrial probation program that will result in the charges being erased from his record next October if he successfully completes the program. He was also ordered to make a $1,000 charitable contribution.
McMahon’s lawyer, Mark Sherman, said the crash was just an accident.
“Not every car accident is a crime,” Sherman said. “Vince’s primary concern during this case was for the other drivers and is appreciative that the court saw this more of an accident than a crime that needed to be prosecuted.”
State police said Robins was trying to catch up to McMahon on the parkway and clock his speed before pulling him over. They said the incident was not a pursuit, which happens when police chase someone trying to flee officers. They also said it did not appear McMahon was trying to escape — though in the video the detective suggests otherwise.
“I’m trying to catch up to you and you keep taking off,” Robins says.
“No, no no. I’m not trying to outrun you,” McMahon says.
An accident information summary provided to the media shortly after the crash did not mention that a trooper was following McMahon.
The Associated Press obtained the videos Wednesday through a public records request. They were first obtained by The Sun newspaper.
The trooper’s bodycam video also shows him asking McMahon whether he was looking at his phone when the crash happened. McMahon said he was not and adds that he hadn’t driven his car in a long time.
After Robins tells McMahon that his car is fast, McMahon replies, “Yeah, too (expletive) fast.”
The videos also show McMahon talking to the driver he rear-ended. Barbara Doran, of New York City, told the AP last summer that McMahon expressed his concern for her and was glad she was OK. She said she was heading to a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard at the time of the crash.
After McMahon was given the traffic summons, he shook hands with Robins and another trooper and they wished him well.
McMahon stepped down as WWE’s CEO in 2022 amid a company investigation into sexual misconduct allegations. He also resigned as executive chairman of the board of directors of TKO Group Holdings, the parent company of WWE, in 2024, a day after a former WWE employee filed a sexual abuse lawsuit against him. McMahon has denied the allegations. The lawsuit remains pending.
McMahon bought what was then the World Wrestling Federation in 1982 and transformed it from a regional wrestling company into a worldwide phenomenon. Besides running the company with his wife, Linda, who is now the U.S. education secretary, he also performed at WWE events as himself.
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