Old Lyme — Politicians in Hartford aren't talking about pension debt because it is too depressing, a leading state government reporter told a breakfast meeting Wednesday at Old Lyme Country Club.

Keith Phaneuf, a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror known for his expertise on state budget matters, told about 45 attendees of the networking group Lyme-Old Lyme Community Connections that paying off state debt currently accounts for 30 percent of the budget — and it's likely to increase in the future.

"It's not that Connecticut is incapable of paying the bill; it's just putting it off," said Phaneuf, a former reporter for The Day and the Journal-Inquirer in Manchester who appears regularly on Connecticut public radio stations.

Gov. Ned Lamont is proposing a variety of remedies for state budget woes but, when it comes to pensions, he essentially is kicking the can down the road, Phaneuf said. Only a can doesn't get bigger when it's kicked down the road, he added, so the analogy is more like a snowball that grows larger as it plummets downhill.

Phaneuf said Lamont's current plan is to refinance about $8 billion in state debt that will add to the burden of the next generation of taxpayers. It's a legacy of debt that goes back to the first state pensions starting in 1939 that essentially were paid for by taxpayers as the bills became due, without any set-asides by the government or the employee.

Phaneuf called this period a lost opportunity for "free money" when legislators could have been funding pensions through state and employee set-asides and investments. Instead, a legacy of debt was created, he said.

"By far the biggest problem is not the generosity of the pensions; it's the free money we passed up," he said. "Our parents threw a party ... year after year, and left us the bill."

Then in the mid-1980s, he said, this arrangement became unsustainable, and the state started borrowing money to pay for its pension obligations. He estimated that about 85 percent of current state pension liabilities relates to "sins of the past."

Taking 1985 alone, he said, the state failed by $200 million to cover pension liabilities. Funding those liabilities then would have shaved nearly $1 billion off the current price tag, Phaneuf said, and these shortfalls have happened year after year for more than three decades, under Republican, independent and Democratic governors.

At the current pace, he said, debt will account for more than half of the state budget, crowding out many other spending priorities.

Gov. Lamont, who promised not to raise the income tax or sales tax rates during his campaign, has proposed several new revenue sources, including tolls, added sin taxes and expanding the number of items targeted by the sales tax. But Phaneuf indicated that such incremental changes are probably not enough to solve the pension problem.

"There's no scenario where Connecticut doesn't take a hit over the next 10 years," he said. "There's no such thing as a good root canal. There's differing degrees of bad."

l.howard@theday.com