Hartford – Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed the $37.6 billion biennium budget for 2014 and 2015 into law on Wednesday. If Medicaid and other federal reimbursements had not been moved off budget, the two-year budget would have been $44 billion.

“The budget makes historic investments in growing jobs and improving our public schools,” Malloy said in a press release. “It makes the state’s finances more transparent and honest by complying with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.”

The budget funds the state pension obligations and contains "no new taxes," he said. It also maintains funding for towns and cities. Some municipalities will receive more funding under the new budget, he said.

However, the two-year budget relies on a format change to stay under the spending cap, extends temporary taxes, such as the energy-generation tax, and relies on one-shot revenue streams, such as the fiscal year 2013 surplus.

Malloy said his administration worked hard with legislators to keep municipal aid as whole as possible in order to help prevent local property taxes from increasing, to fund education and to invest in job creation.

“At a time when it would have been easy to cut and run on education, we went in another direction and invested nearly half a billion dollars into our public schools, most of it going to chronically struggling districts,” Malloy said. “Connecticut used to lead the world when it came to innovation – we had more patents, more groundbreaking discoveries than anywhere else in the world. Somewhere along the way the world caught up. This is about to change.”

j.somers@theday.com