Connecticut’s over-burdensome regulatory environment is impeding needed growth and contributing to job and business losses and out-of-state migration of our young residents.

We need a regulatory environment that encourages individuals and companies to invest, locate and expand in Connecticut, thus creating jobs.

Specifically, Connecticut’s land-use regulatory process has become incredibly expensive and time consuming, discouraging investment and growth, and costing the needed jobs, housing, and revenue.

How to Improve Connecticut’s Land-Use Regulatory System:

• Establish a specialized land-use court that could handle all appeals and require immediate “show cause” hearings to establish actual aggrievement for interventions and appeals. This would make the appeal process timely so that investors would not have to wait years for an outcome.

• Remove discretion in “as-of-right” approvals. Currently applicants can spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, and meet every single rule, regulation, and objective test, yet still be denied.
• Provide land-use education to local land-use commission members.
• Adopt land value taxation for specific areas chosen by local governments to encourage development as a municipality chooses.
• Support complete brownfield liability relief for innocent purchasers of land to encourage cleanup and reuse of contaminated areas.
• Provide tax credits for developments meeting smart design criteria.
• Support greater planning capacity and voluntary regional cooperation.
• Promote and support local planning and local land-use approvals.