In a development that municipal leaders throughout the state have hoped for fervently, an affiliate of the powerful Connecticut Education Association has agreed to wage concessions.

The deal means about $630,000 in savings for Guilford, but it has a far broader impact statewide: It's the first - or one of the first - giveback agreements from any CEA unit this year.

"I'm very proud of our teachers. It's a courageous thing they did; they stood up to a lot of pressure," Guilford First Selectman Carl Balestracci said. "Every single town employee is now making some kind of concession."

Since midwinter, numerous school administrators and mayors throughout the state have privately complained that despite the abysmal economy, the CEA has rejected wage freezes, furloughs or similar contract givebacks. Relations were especially strained this year in Farmington and Enfield, where school boards publicly warned of layoffs when teachers refused to make concessions.

"What we're hearing is that public employees are coming to the table, except for the teachers - there's a lot of disappointment that the teachers' unions aren't contributing," said Jim Finley, executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.

Efforts to reach CEA leaders in Hartford were unsuccessful.

The union represents more than 35,000 of Connecticut's roughly 50,000 teachers, and its contracts typically have an enormous effect on local taxes: Education is the biggest part of municipal spending, and teachers' salaries and benefits drive school spending.

Teacher concessions became a divisive issue this month in Southington, where teachers are in line for a 5 percent raise on July 1 because of a contract negotiated long before the economic collapse. Some residents castigated the teachers for refusing to sacrifice any of the raise, but local parents' groups ripped into the finance board when it publicly suggested that teachers should have negotiated givebacks.

In Guilford, school administrators met with the union's executive committee for months to reach a deal. In mid-May, they announced that they had traded a no-layoff guarantee and an early retirement incentive in exchange for teachers' giving back about half of their roughly 4 percent raise that takes effect July 1.

Coupled with concessions from nonunion employees and unionized administrators, aides and other workers, the teachers' agreement means that Guilford can get through a rough budget year without losing staff or eliminating programs, school board Chairman William Bloss said. Taxpayers approved the budget proposal at a referendum last week.

Despite job losses, benefit rollbacks and pay cuts in the private sector, taxpayers and town boards have been passing budgets on the first vote: Canton, Southington, Enfield, Vernon, Suffield, Portland and Westbrook all adopted budgets last week, and New Milford, Wallingford, Hamden, Clinton, Plainville, Branford and Salem approved plans recently.

But some of those communities are still banking on getting concessions from workers or resorting to layoffs. And looking ahead, Plainville Town Manager Robert Lee has said that if police and other municipal unions currently negotiating new contracts win big in arbitration, he'll implement layoffs to balance out the loss.

Nearly all towns and cities so far are putting forward relatively austere budgets with little or no increase and, in a few cases, spending is actually scheduled to drop when the new fiscal year starts July 1.