On June 17, 2026, Governor Ned Lamont announced he had signed a side letter to the NP-2 Collective Bargaining Agreement requiring the State of Connecticut to extend uninsured and underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage to Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) employees. The agreement, reached with the Connecticut Employees Union Independent (CEUI), provides up to $1 million in coverage per person for DOT workers injured by uninsured or underinsured drivers while doing their jobs—including when they’re outside their assigned vehicles in active work zones.
The coverage will be administered under the state’s self-insured auto liability program through the State Insurance and Risk Management Board, and it mirrors protections already in place for the Connecticut State Police.
The signing honors the memory of CTDOT maintainer Andrew DiDomenico, who was 26 when he was struck and killed by an impaired, uninsured driver in a Wallingford work zone on June 28, 2024. Transportation Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto said that tragedy “exposed critical gaps in worker coverage that demanded immediate action.”
The numbers behind this are sobering. Between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2025, Connecticut recorded 5,586 crashes and 18 fatalities in work zones. In 2025 alone, more than 100 CTDOT vehicles were struck by other drivers, with 15 of those incidents causing injuries serious enough to require medical attention. Over its 131-year history, CTDOT has lost 39 employees in the line of duty.
Jake’s Take
This is good news for state workers, and it’s also the perfect chance to explain something that I wish every single driver in Connecticut understood before they got hurt—because by the time most people learn what UM/UIM coverage is, they’re learning it the hard way, from a hospital bed, wondering who’s going to pay for it all.
What is uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage?
Start with a simple, ugly truth: when someone hits you, your ability to be made whole depends almost entirely on their insurance. And a lot of people on the road carry either none or nowhere near enough.
Uninsured (UM) coverage protects you when the at-fault driver has no insurance at all. That includes hit-and-run drivers who flee the scene and are never identified—legally, an unidentified driver is treated as uninsured. So the guy who clips you on I-91 and disappears? UM is what you have left.
Underinsured (UIM) coverage is the one that catches more people off guard. Connecticut only requires drivers to carry $25,000 in bodily injury liability coverage per person. Twenty-five thousand dollars. That sounds like a number until you’re the one with a fractured spine, a $90,000 hospital bill, surgery on the horizon, and months out of work. When the at-fault driver’s policy maxes out at $25K and your damages are $250K, UIM coverage fills the gap between what they carry and what you actually need—up to the limits you had the foresight to buy.
In other words: UM/UIM coverage is the one part of an auto policy that protects you and your family directly, rather than protecting other people from you. It’s your own safety net for the moment when the person who hurt you can’t—or won’t—make it right.
Why this matters so much from an injury standpoint
Here’s what I see in my practice over and over. A client comes in after a serious wreck. They did everything right—they weren’t at fault, they have a strong case, the liability is clear. And then we pull the at-fault driver’s policy and it’s a $25,000 minimum-limits policy, or there’s no policy at all. A clear case and a badly hurt client can still walk away with a fraction of what the injury is truly worth, purely because the person who caused it had no money and no coverage behind them.
The injuries don’t scale down to match the other driver’s insurance. A herniated disc costs what it costs. A surgery costs what it costs. Lost wages from three months out of work are gone whether the other driver had $25K or $250K. The bills don’t care that the person who caused them was uninsured. UM/UIM coverage is the only thing standing between a serious injury and financial catastrophe when the at-fault driver can’t pay.
This is exactly the risk a DOT worker faces in a live work zone, magnified. They’re on foot, feet from highway-speed traffic, fully exposed. The driver who hits them is statistically more likely to be impaired, distracted, or—as in Andrew DiDomenico’s case—uninsured. Before this agreement, a worker catastrophically injured by an uninsured driver on the job could have been left with the same gap any of us would face: a devastating injury and no one with the coverage to answer for it. That gap is what this side letter closes.
And the lesson generalizes to everyone reading this who isn’t a state employee: go look at your own policy. Most people carry minimum UM/UIM limits without realizing it, or decline it to save a few dollars a month. It is, dollar for dollar, some of the cheapest and most important coverage you can buy. The time to find out you’re underinsured is not after the crash.
The fine print, because it always matters
Now, the realistic part. The headline is “$1 million per person,” but this side letter—like every UM/UIM arrangement in Connecticut—comes with reductions:
The state expressly reserves the right under Reg. § 38a-334-6(d) to reduce the $1 million by sums paid by the at-fault driver, sums paid or payable under workers’ compensation, and liability-settlement payments, and to treat collateral source benefits as a credit. For an injured worker, who will almost always have a workers’ comp claim running alongside, that comp offset matters: the gross exposure is $1 million, but the net a claimant actually collects can be meaningfully less.
The coverage is also secondary to any other available coverage when the worker is injured while not occupying their DOT vehicle—which is precisely the on-foot work-zone scenario. And the statute of limitations is three years from the date of accident under C.G.S. § 38a-336(g)(1). That UM/UIM deadline runs independently and can lapse before you’ve even finished sorting out the at-fault driver’s coverage, so a hurt worker can’t sit on a claim.
Finally, the agreement is explicit that it creates UM/UIM insurance coverage only—not a separate contractual death benefit or any standalone entitlement. Carefully drafted to stay inside the four corners of UM/UIM law.
Bottom line
This is a genuine, overdue protection for the people who keep our roads moving, and Governor Lamont and CEUI deserve credit for getting it done in the wake of a preventable tragedy.
But the broader takeaway is for all of us: UM/UIM coverage is the part of your insurance that protects you and your family when someone else’s negligence meets someone else’s empty wallet. If you’ve been hurt by an uninsured or underinsured driver—whether you’re a DOT worker navigating this new coverage and its comp offsets, or anyone else staring down a minimum-limits policy that doesn’t begin to cover your injuries—talk to a lawyer who handles these claims before you accept any offer or let a deadline run. The difference between knowing how this coverage works and not knowing can be the difference between recovery and ruin.
Leave a Reply