The following is the UNEDITED transcript, as recorded by our transcription service. While we strive for accuracy, this transcript may contain errors or omissions due to the automated nature of the transcription process
Moderator (00:00:00):
Issues. The only rule is that the total time used by each candidate, by the conclusion of the debate be approximately the same. Greenwich High School students. Sarah Hook and I will take turns posing the questions, but as Sandy mentioned, the questions themselves have come from the public. The candidates are not required to stick to one minute or 32nd responses. Instead, they can spend as little or as much time within reason as they feel is appropriate to discuss each issue. Our goal is to encourage some debate. The candidates will take turns being the first to respond to a question and following the question. Each candidate will make a two minute closing statement. Members of the league are serving as timers and they’re going to keep the candidates and informed of the time that’s been expended. If a serious imbalance and time should occur during the course of the debate, I will call it to their attention and we’ll see that it’s corrected. Our first debate now is between the candidates for the state senate in District 36. Those candidates are and beginning to my immediate left is Ryan Fazio, the Republican candidate, and to his left is Nick Simmons, the Democrat candidate and out of the debate, and the first candidate to respond will be Ryan. And the question from Zara is,
Person asking the question (00:01:28):
Recent research confirms that Connecticut faces uphill battles when it comes to affordability. What policy proposals do you support to lower the cost of living?
Ryan Fazio (00:01:38):
Thank you to the League of Women Voters for organizing tonight’s debate in all of you for being intendance and for being informed voters. The cost of living in Connecticut is just too high every single day. I talk to working families and seniors who have to make impossible decisions about whether they’re going to afford to pay their electric bill or their kids’ school supplies or their prescription drugs. We need to give good people like them better choices. In this state, Connecticut, because of years of mistaken policy suffers from the second highest taxes in the country, the third highest electric rates in the country and healthcare costs that go up far too much every single year. Every year, every session that I’m in the Senate, I introduce at least two dozen comprehensive proposals to cut taxes, cut energy costs, and cut healthcare costs for all families in our state.
(00:02:33):
I have a comprehensive tax reform plan that would reduce income taxes by $2,000 for the average family in our district and finance it by broadening the tax base, eliminating those special interest deductions and loopholes in the tax code, limiting spending growth, extending those fiscal guardrails that democratic leadership in the Senate and House want to get rid of and limiting debt issuance. We also need a property tax cap that’s been in other states to stop places like Stanford and Greenwich from seeing their property. Tax bills go up year after year at unreasonable paces. We need to cut electric bills in this state. They’re too damn high. The third highest in the country after Hawaii, which is an island in California, which is lost its mind.
(00:03:19):
My six point proposal would eliminate that public benefits tax from your electric bill that costs you over $500 per year. It’s a hidden tax. It funds 40 different government programs. It’s totally unreasonable. There’s five other points. I’m proud that my opponent has copy and pasted two of them. Unfortunately, he hasn’t copy and pasted the elimination of the public benefits proposal. He believes in forcing you to pay the public benefits $500 per year. I support eliminating them. I’ve also worked across the aisle to reduce healthcare costs. I have a proposal with three Democrats to Republicans, including both doctors in the Senate, so it’s doctor approved that would reform certificate of need laws in other states. It’s been tried. It’s reduced healthcare costs by four to 10% in those states and improved access. We need to reduce the cost of living in the state and provide economic opportunity for all. That’s why I ran for office in the first place and I’ll fight for it every single day in another term. Thank you ladies. Gentlemen, please.
Moderator (00:04:20):
I don’t want to waste time with let hear Nick, your response to the same question. Well thanks. Kay. Get your mic on.
Nick Simmons (00:04:28):
Good. All right. I’m push the button. Thank you. Kay. And to the league and to Zara for hosting us tonight. You guys are such a treasure for democracy in our town, so thank you for all that you do. And Zara, what a rockstar doing this as a senior in high school. You’re totally right. It has absolutely gotten unaffordable 2, 2, 2 and affordable in the state of Connecticut. As a new dad and husband who just moved back to the state, it’s a lot different than what it was like for my parents who moved here in 1981. I believe that the cost of their house was like most of the home buyers in the early eighties was something about 15 to 10% of their overall income. And for our generation it’s more like 30 to 35%. Electric rates are the second highest in the country. Our tax burden is the second highest in the country.
(00:05:22):
So I think there’s numerous, numerous things that we should be doing in Hartford to make it easier for families to be able to get by. I mean, we haven’t even talked about childcare costs or insurance costs with increased flooding. So what we could do in Hartford are a few things and all of this has been part of my proposal. Property tax relief. I completely agree, Ryan. It has to happen and there’s more we can do there. I would cut numerous taxes like the car tax. We’re one of the only states to have such an onerous car tax. It’s just an extra couple thousand on our bills every year. We can cut the gift tax, we can cut the estate tax. The estate tax is for a certain percent of the population, not for everybody, but it’s still if we do that, we bring back and keep here some of our highest earners and highest contributors to the budget overall. So I couldn’t agree more the cost of living, I feel it every day. A lot of us feel it every single day. It is hurting families and it’s got to be a tough priority.
Moderator (00:06:20):
Alright, we’ll come back. We have questions that we’ll delve into more detail on some of the issues that you’ve both raised. Alright, the next question and NICU are the first to respond. Connecticut has some of the strongest gun safety laws in the country. Do you believe any of our regulations have gone too far and or where do you feel more work needs to be done?
Nick Simmons (00:06:42):
This is one of the most important issues in contrasts in our election. I believe deeply in our gun safety laws. I speak about this as a former teacher who was in the classroom teaching me in Harlem, New York. When the shooting at Sandy Huck happened, my principal came in the room and said, there’s been a mass shooting out in Connecticut. This could be a copycat event. Be ready for anything. That was my guidance. I had to look around the room and pick out where I would take a bullet for my students if a shooter would come in. My students lived in Harlem. They already had so much on their plate and that was just the start of another four or five years of active shooter drills. Sandy Hook should have changed everything forever for all of us, for all public leaders, and I was proud to be working in the governor’s office when he introduced and got passed the nation’s most comprehensive gun safety bill, a bill that would make sure Sandy Hook would never happen again.
(00:07:39):
A bill that would make sure we would reduce gun shootings and crimes in this state significantly. It was such a celebrated bill nationally. President Biden flew to Hartford for the signing of the bill. That’s how celebrated it was. My opponent did just vote against that bill. He decided to take part in a filibuster that lasted until 4:00 AM in the morning introducing 14 amendments that would’ve reduced gun safety outcomes in Connecticut. I spoke last debate about a young woman who was eight years old when Sandy Hook happened. She was learning in the classroom next door and heard 17 to 20 of her peer classmates get shot next door. She’s now 19 years old. She reached out to my campaign to say, what can I do to help? I want to come work on your campaign because I can’t believe that you were running against somebody who voted to weaken gun storage laws.
(00:08:38):
And as we know, 62% of all gun shootings and in the country happen because of weak gun storage situations. Can’t believe that you are running against somebody who voted to weaken red flag laws, which if you look at some of the last school shootings, Sandy, Parkland, Uvalde, all the shooters showed red flags and thank God that law is in place because this year alone in Connecticut, we’ve had numerous, numerous young people say that they’re going to shoot up their schools. What’s that? That’s a red flag. That family and that student will no longer be able to get a gun because of those red flags. These are saving lives and I just think it’s unconscionable that my opponent would vote against that bill. Finally, the vote is one thing and if he wanted to come up here and have a debate about his belief in the Second amendment and that he thought that the government was going too far, let’s have that debate interesting. Let’s do it. That’s not what he’s doing and it’s unconscionable. He’s sending out mailers to every doer in the district saying he’s the bipartisan leader in Hartford on gun safety. It’s wrong, it’s immoral. Stand behind your votes and I hope they change.
Moderator (00:09:55):
Brian, same question.
Ryan Fazio (00:09:57):
I think it’s very unfortunate that my opponent has chosen to run one of the most negative and deceptive campaigns in this town’s history. I know he doesn’t live in this town, but we have a great history of working collaboratively and constructively across the aisle and focusing campaigns on issues, not on attacks. There’s not a day that goes by that there isn’t. People are probably forgetting that I actually exist in color. I don’t just exist in black and white from all those ads. I support strong gun safety laws for our state. Connecticut has maybe the second or the third strongest gun safety laws in the country. I not only support those laws, I actually support enforcing them. If we do not enforce them, they are not worth the paper they are written on and they actually make us less safe. They make us less safe because then only the criminals are the ones who are not coming from under the thumb coming under the thumb of those gun safety laws.
(00:10:52):
So I actually never, speaking of dishonesty, I never participated in a filibuster. I spoke for four minutes on the Senate floor that night simply introducing three amendments that would strengthen that gun law. It would provide a state support system for school resource officers, which studies show do increase student and faculty safety. It would reintroduce proactive policing policies like consent searches, which have been shown to take hundreds of LIPA legal guns off the street in Connecticut. My opponent opposes state support for school resource officers. He opposes giving police the tools to take hundreds of illegal guns off the street because of his tenure as deputy chief of staff, the administration introduced a pardon and paroles policy without any public notice and without notice to the victims of families of shootings, including the mother of Elizabeth Carlson who stood with me at a press conference arguing that this policy must end her daughter would be alive if we were actually enforcing our gun laws in this state.
(00:12:05):
My opponent as the deputy chief of staff opposes proactive policing policies like consent searches, which take illegal guns off the street. He opposes state support for school resource officers and he opposes strong criminal justice laws that punish people who actually commit crimes and undermine the public safety. I support enforcing our strong gun safety laws, including the longstanding assault weapons ban in the state among others. There is more we can do to provide gun safety in this state. I am proud to have the endorsement of the Stanford Police Association and the Fraternal Order of Police in this state who actually put their safety at risk every day to reduce gun violence and I will always fight for public safety as your senator.
Moderator (00:12:52):
Alright, anything further on that?
Nick Simmons (00:12:54):
Yes, of course. It’s just disappointing because we know how smart you are. I know how smart you are. You were a really smart guy.
Moderator (00:13:00):
Let’s just, let me remind you the question related to whether we need any more gun safety regulations.
Nick Simmons (00:13:08):
Yes, we do. Not only we do a
Moderator (00:13:09):
Lot of other things here.
Nick Simmons (00:13:10):
We not only need more, but we need steadfast champions who will no matter what comes up in the state legislature, God knows federally will always, always, always stand up and be a champion for gun safety. Please just don’t take my word for it. Ryan has an F from Connecticut against gun violence. He’s endorsed by one of the most pro right-wing gun groups in the entire state. Just made up a bunch of things about my positions without a shred of evidence. I’m not attacking me personally. I’m not trying to make this negative. I’m talking about your votes. You had the opportunity to vote on the most comprehensive gun safety bill. Another Republican in your caucus voted for it. You did not. You voted for all 14 amendments that weakened gun safety laws in the state of Connecticut. You talk about crime and wanting to get guns off the streets that Bill proposed capping the amount of guns an individual can buy in a year at 36.
(00:14:11):
Why the hell would anybody need 36 guns in a year? What do they do with those guns? They go out in the streets and they sell them in the black market onto the streets. A gun bought in bulk is 64% more likely to be used in a crime for me. What would I do to add more gun safety to the state? I would limit it at 12 or fewer. Why would anybody need 36 guns? I don’t know. Why would you vote against that when you know those guns are the ones that end up in crime? So I think we can’t just have a gaslight conversation here. Let’s go to the record. Folks can at home go take a look at Ryan’s voting record. Take a look at the seven to six different gun groups safety groups that have endorsed me, given you Fs, and we’ll have to just take it from there. Thank you.
Moderator (00:14:53):
Alright. Okay.
Ryan Fazio (00:14:55):
Again, let’s not go over an old ground. I won’t. I won’t. I’ll be quick. We’ll back to the next. Again. The people who put their lives and safety at risk every day to protect us from gun violence. The police have endorsed me and they have endorsed me repeatedly because they know that I support strong common sense gun safety laws and actually enforcing those laws. The state government currently drops or dismisses roughly 75% of all gun charges in our state. That is wrong. We need to enforce those laws. We shouldn’t be paring people who shoot and kill innocent victims in this state. We shouldn’t have expedited parole, which I voted against, and your administration passed in 2023 for people committing gun crimes. Again, while there’s been large democratic majorities in the state government and a democratic administration over from 2020 to 2022 shootings and homicides went up by roughly 40%. 40%. I support enforcing our strong gun safety laws. I have never voted to roll them back and I will continue to do so in order to protect the public safety in Connecticut.
Moderator (00:16:05):
Are we ready for another question?
Ryan Fazio (00:16:06):
I think
Moderator (00:16:07):
So. Okay. Yes, let’s do it. Zara, what’s the next question?
Person asking the question (00:16:12):
Next question is what will you do to try to reduce the cost of electricity?
Moderator (00:16:19):
And I’m sorry, Ryan, you’re the first to respond.
Ryan Fazio (00:16:22):
Well, the cost of electricity is too high in this state. I mean the hundreds of messages and correspondences I’ve had with constituents begging us to act as a state to call a special session makes it, I think unforgivable that the state leadership has not acted already two years dollars even if it was in Greenwich, because that is not good standard operating procedure and it’s inflating costs. We need an all of the above clean energy strategy for our renewable portfolio standard in the state. I partially passed that in senate bill seven two years ago, including some forms of nuclear and hydropower and putting them on more equal footing with wind and solar. But we need to go further. We were first in the nation for that addition, but we need to go further and place them on fully equal footing. Anything that’s clean should be treated equally.
(00:17:18):
In order to make our grid more affordable and more environmentally friendly, we need to restructure the state bureaucracy. The maker of state policy deep should not be in charge of the adjudicator of state policy. Pura Pura needs to be strong in order to check our utilities. I was very happy to co-author senate Bill seven with my Democratic colleague again last year, which will give us stronger oversight of the utilities. But there’s still more we can do. We need to secure our winter natural gas supply. I’m worried that in 10 years time the demand will be outpaced by the supply, will outpace the supply in winter and cause rolling blackouts in New England. That means people’s lives are at stake. We need to secure the winter natural gas supply from both the west and the east. And finally, we should and should have used unspent one time federal ARPA dollars to relieve one time public benefits costs, including the unpaid bills from the four year long shut off moratorium that would’ve caused your electric rates to go down not up in this past pay period. That plan was rejected by the state leadership because they wanted to spend that money on ongoing governmental bureaucracy. I believe that’s your money. It should be returned directly to you, the rate payer in order to make Connecticut’s cost of living lower.
Nick Simmons (00:18:43):
Okay, same question. Yeah, the first to say, I think Ryan’s been great on this issue. We agree on a lot of the points that he made. I add a little bit of context. One again, great on the is issue in the solutions, but let’s just also be honest about the cause. You just said most of the increase in your bill was due to the social benefits portion. That’s not true. 77% of the increase in the bill was due to a deal that was made in 2017 made by both Republicans and Democrats to prop up the millstone nuclear power plant with a company called Dominion. And we’re locked into that for a lot, much longer time than we should be. It was a bad deal. Democrats equally blame as much as Republicans, but it is causing us right now to overpay and it caused 77% of the increase in our bills.
(00:19:34):
So you’ve got great solutions. Let’s just make sure we’re also being honest about the causes of what happened. Other things I would add on to what Ryan is saying right now is a once in a generation opportunity to get federal funding through the inflation reduction Act and through the infrastructure bill to upgrade our grid. I was in the governor’s office when we were fighting for that money every single day from the federal government. It’s a little frustrating. They see the northeast as, oh, you guys are already on your way with clean energy, so we’re just going to go send this to somewhere else. But they don’t take into account price. Yes, we are investing more in clean energy than other parts of the country, but we’re also paying more than any other parts of the country. So we need to upgrade our grid with more storage and more reliability and if we get more money from the feds, we should be doing that and just as a state we can allocate more of our bonding dollars to upgrade the grid. So I would add all that. And then also just that nuclear, we got it, got it. Got to do more. We finally lifted the moratorium on being able to build nuclear power plants that was in place since 1979 and I think we got to do a lot more there because we just saw in Pennsylvania, they just turned three mile islands back on, which is awesome. That’s adding more clean energy to the grid for a Microsoft data plant. We should be doing more innovative things like that.
Ryan Fazio (00:20:51):
Go ahead. Yeah, and just quickly, to be clear, I have a full accounting of what the public benefits were for the full year of 2023. 475 million of it was 40 different government programs, totally unrelated to millstone in 2023, about 75 million of it was due to millstone. But that means for the average rate payer in Connecticut, if you eliminated the public benefits charges, even without millstone, you would cut electric bills by roughly $400 per year in this district. ICE probably can suggest to you confidently that it’s even higher than that, maybe 50% higher. So by eliminating these charges, these government programs, this hidden tax from your electric bill, we could cut your electric bills by roughly $600 every single year. And that is something that other states do not impose on their citizens. So talk about the art of the possible. This is possible. We just need the will to do it and we need balance in Hartford in order to do it. We cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Moderator (00:21:55):
Alright, next question. And Nick, you’re first to respond. Do you support the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act which protects providers from retaliation when treating a patient from out of state? And do you support other legislation to expand or limit access to abortion and reproductive healthcare?
Nick Simmons (00:22:14):
Yes, absolutely. I supported that support that bill. This was a bill for those who aren’t familiar, that did two things. It expanded access to abortion by empowering other providers like nurses to be able to provide more types of abortion, expanding access. And two, after the Dobbs decision, which got rid of Roe v, Wade Wade, we started to see crazy things happening from other states, right? Texas not only started enforcing their ban on abortion, but they passed a vigilante law, which meant that anybody who had any information about a woman leaving the state of Texas could give that information to the authorities and then to help those authorities prosecute those women, throw them in jail for trying to get lifesaving abortion procedures. So states like Connecticut said, that’s insane if you come here, not a doctor nor anybody else should be able to share that information with any state seeking it. It’s called the safe haven law. I think that’s the moral and absolutely right thing to do as well as expanding care. Now, Ryan voted against that bill. We had a big debate about it last week.
(00:23:30):
We brought up how 17 other Democrats voted for the bill and we could also bring up how numerous Republicans voted for the bill. I don’t want to get into each of those people’s for their reasons and Ryan brought up one Democrat in particular. Who did I think we should be judging Ryan based on the experts objectively who are the experts? I think we should all agree that the National Institute of Health division of Women’s Reproductive Health, planned Parenthood and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists are the clinical experts on whether these procedures were safe. They all adamantly supported it. Planned Parenthood said it was the greatest bill on expanding reproductive care in a generation. So I will just say again without saying mansplaining, we put that away. You and I as clinical with no clinical experience should be saying that we know more than them.
(00:24:28):
So that’s just on that bill alone. But if you add that together with that, Ryan in 2018 wrote in an op-ed that Roe v. Wade was offensive to the rule of law. He wrote that in a right-wing paper called The Federalist, the National right to an abortion. Ryan said that was offensive to a rule of law. Then he votes against the Reproductive Defense Act combined altogether. The record doesn’t look great and it’s really, really, really, really troubling to me. It’s one of the reasons I’m running That’s not Greenwich, that’s not Stanford, that’s not new Cannan that aren’t art values. I can never imagine somebody voting that way growing up here. So it’s just something we need to hold you accountable to.
Ryan Fazio (00:25:06):
Ryan. I support keeping abortion legal in Connecticut. That has always been my position. It’s my position now and it will be my position in the future. I’ve been attacked on this issue in previous elections because they thought it would help the candidates thought it would help them win the election. But I have a record and my record is clearly that I support keeping abortion legal in Connecticut and I will do even more in order to expand access to reproductive care. I co-authored and passed a new law that will expand access to oral contraceptives in Connecticut. It makes Connecticut one of 15 or 20 states in the country that has now passed and implemented this tried and true program to increase access for women, especially lower income women and women in more rural areas to contraception. I voted against 5, 4 1 4 2 years ago alongside 17 Democrats for context 17.
(00:25:59):
Democrats don’t vote against almost anything that comes to the full Senate. I’m not kidding. They don’t. And they did so because they were concerned that the provision that Nick was talking about would lower the standard of care by allowing aspiration, abortions and invasive abortions that could go into the 16th week to be performed solely by nurse midwives without the consultation of a doctor. There were six independent medical organizations that testified during the public hearings, including the Connecticut State Medical Society critical of the bill saying this may not be the legislation that is wise to pass in a short session and without the benefit of a full working to explore the many complex facets presented. Again, this was a specific regulatory change and the question was would this improve safety for women or diminish it? And I was concerned it would diminish it. And guess what?
(00:26:58):
Like many complex regulatory issues. I could be wrong in the long run and I’m open to that possibility, but the evidence at that point made me concerned that it would undermine health and safety. And so that’s why I joined 17 Democrats, none of whom are being challenged by my opponent, none of whom whose opponents in either primaries or in general elections have been endorsed by my opponent because I think putting health and safety first was the right thing to do. And guess what? If that part of the bill had been locked, had been changed and we only voted on the interstate legal protections, I would’ve voted for the bill. But guess what? Under the constitution and under state law, we would never, ever extra extradite someone for following the law in Connecticut. We would never do that. We never will do that. The Texas law is crap. It was a terrible law and it was unconscionable. And so under the constitution and under state law, both before and after 5 4 14, there is protections. My opponent should stop lying about my record and stop scaring the general public into thinking something is at risk when it isn’t. We can have civil conversations about narrow regulatory changes and find the right answer.
Nick Simmons (00:28:15):
Do you believe in a national right to abortion, you always say in Connecticut you believe in abortion in Connecticut. I think it’s important. It’s one of the most pressing issues of our time.
Ryan Fazio (00:28:23):
Yes.
Nick Simmons (00:28:24):
Okay, so I just wanted to make sure we’re being clear here. I’m not lying about your record. I just laid out your record. You wrote in 2018 you thought Roe v Wade, the national right rights of abortion was defensive to the rule of law and then you voted against the Reproductive Defense Act. So I’m not lying. Those are the facts on the table. A 20 20 21, 1 of those pro-life groups in Connecticut endorsed you fully give you a perfect grade and said, we believe in Ryan’s heart and we’re happy to endorse him. So I’m just laying out the facts and also I noticed you went back to the 17 Democrats when I said, I don’t think that’s who we should be listening to. We should be listening to the health experts. Those Democrats very well could be pro-life and I’m not afraid to say I disagree with their vote.
(00:29:08):
There’s also Republicans that voted for this bill. So this election is about trust in my view. Again, I think you’re incredibly smart and you know that I respect you in a lot of positions sending out a mailer saying you are a bipartisan leader on gun safety and you are a bipartisan leader on choice. I’m glad you’re clarifying your national position, but the facts aren’t always backing up those views and these are just cold hard facts. And so we’re going to have to have a conversation about accountability on those positions, on issues that are this important. We are a coin flip away from radical Republicans owning the presidency, the Senate, the house. Yeah. I think Donald Trump’s a pretty radical Republican owning the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court Project 2025 says very clearly they want to have a national abortion coordinator that the attorney general’s office is going to have an abortion coordinator who is going to track data on women that Attorney General in Texas could be the National Attorney General. He’s already filing claims to gather data on women leaving the states. We cannot have questions about someone’s record on choice in this critical, critical time and it needs to be very, very black and white on people’s positions.
Moderator (00:30:19):
Anything else or you want to move to the next question quickly? Go ahead, Ryan.
Ryan Fazio (00:30:22):
Again, I can say that I helped lead on an issue because I was the co-author with Senator Heather Summers of a new law that expands access to oral contraceptives in this state. I am proud of that law and I support the existing law on abortion in the state of Connecticut and keeping it legal and I will continue to do so and if I do not do so in the future, then you should take issue with me. I think it is scare fearmongering to say that I support persecuting women, prosecuting women which you have in the mailers or that I’m dangerous or that I’m an extremist. When you know full well in your heart that that’s not true, again, you got good ideas, put ’em forward, you want to change policy, put it forward. Fortunately in the state of Connecticut we have the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans in the legislature, myself included, who support keeping abortion legal in Connecticut. So you shouldn’t scare the public into thinking something that isn’t going to happen in the state of Connecticut will. We should be honest with the public and always aim to bring people together, not exploit divisions in our politics in this state or town. This is somebody you already said.
Nick Simmons (00:31:32):
I’ll just say in the 2020 election when you were running, you said, I don’t need to talk about abortion. It’s already codified in Mob v. Wade. Look what happened two years later. These are real serious threats and consequences. The bill was literally called the Reproductive Defense Freedom Defense Act, the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act. You voted against it. This is not fear monger.
Moderator (00:31:56):
Anything new to say on the subject? Alright, then let’s move to the next question. Zara, would you accept the question?
Person asking the question (00:32:04):
A pressing concern for many is the personal and professional cost of congestion along our I 95 corridor. What are some short term and longer term solutions to address traffic? Ryan, it’s
Ryan Fazio (00:32:19):
Thank you. I guess one point I would just make to follow on is that you shouldn’t necessarily judge bills by their titles. Just because someone votes against the Patriot Act doesn’t make them unpatriotic. Just because they vote against the No Child Left Behind Act doesn’t mean that they’re in favor of leaving children behind. We have to read the bills, we to read the bills, and that’s where we can have disagreements. Remember the proponents of bills name the bills. I think there is a lot we can do to improve congestion on 95 and on other roads. So raise three points. First, Connecticut has the second or the third highest per mile cost of roads and highways in the country. According to a study from the National Association of State Budget Officers after I think North or South Dakota. Again, I think we can do better than this.
(00:33:07):
Part of the reason is because of very onerous and costly state regulations, including things like project labor agreements, which in certain studies have been shown to inflate the cost of infrastructure construction by 30 or 40%. In the case of schools in Massachusetts, that’s totally reasonable on our taxpayers and on our commuters. So we have to reduce the cost in order to build more infrastructure and do more infrastructure. We should be prioritizing funding and efforts and policy on the economic engine of our state, which is lower Fairfield County. I think the top priority among those should be to elongate and improve the traffic flow for on and on off ramps where most of the studies say the bottlenecks occur, unfortunately as it’s currently constituted Greenwich to Stanford is basically like a local road. I mean think about how narrow Stanford is and there’s four exits and people coming on and off.
(00:34:06):
That’s why there’s so much congestion and elongating those exits and improving the traffic lights at the bottom of those exits I think will help alleviate that should be a top priority. But also locally we need local control of zoning and development decisions. So we do not exacerbate these traffic problems. If the majority in the State House and the state Senate gets their way and they eviscerate local control of zoning and have highrise development anywhere they want, that means that the local regulators, the zoning boards cannot give input on how it will affect traffic. So I think those are the three answers. We need to be more effective with how we spend taxpayer money. We need to focus the investment on elongating and improving traffic flow for on and off ramps and we need to have local control of zoning and development.
Nick Simmons (00:35:04):
The increase in congestion and traffic and infrastructure failure in our talents is one of the most pressing needs I think we have. And it’s what I hear all the time at the doors I hear from parents who say, it is just not sustainable anywhere for me. I need to drop my kid off at school. It’s supposed to take 15 minutes, it now takes 45 minutes. Parents who say I can’t get home because I’m to tuck my kids in bed because what’s supposed to get me home in about 50 minutes is now taking two hours. Parents are leaving jobs. They say, I love my job. It’s just not sustainable anymore. I can’t sit in this two hour commute each way. And we have the most congested highway in America from Greenwich to Norwalk is more congested than Boston, Los Angeles or dc. It’s gone on for years and years and years.
(00:35:57):
We are the most in need state senate district in the 99th percentile in America for badly, badly needed infrastructure investments from the state, from the federal level. We also have the highest percent of commuters on Metro North and we have one of the highest exposures to flooding in the entire state. Now this is another reason where my disappointment comes in because with all of those facts and the facts that the Department of Transportation spends a billion dollars a year that we bond as a state for infrastructure projects, we bond over a billion dollars a year, let alone what we built, what we bill, sorry, the billions that we put in for school reconstruction that we let four to five schools sit here that needed to be rebuilt decades ago. Central middle School, old Greenwich, Riverside and that Ryan has a lot of passions up in Hartford, but this is clearly using coauthoring COPA and threatened to filibuster.
(00:36:56):
That’s why that bill got done. Where have you been on this? We looked, there is almost no record of you co-sponsoring or introducing a bonding bill to address this problem. There’s almost no record of you gathering other Republicans and saying, this is absolutely my top priority. We’re the most congested highway in America. Central Middle School is falling down. Those kids are sitting in a crumbling school and shout out and huge hats off to our three Democratic state reps. Who knew this was absolutely the top priority. Should have seen Hector Arno up in Hartford about Central Middle School. Everybody knew up there. There was nothing else that was going to be prioritized except for getting that money. Rachel and Steve, what they did for Boys and Girls Club and what they did for the Glendale Corridor, they brought back a hundred million dollars because I was there. I saw it. It was all they pushed for. They used all their leverage to get it done. Again, I think you’re smart. I think you’re super effective and you can neglected this issue. When I’m up there, it’s going to be absolutely my top priority. We are going to not do anything. We’re going to hold up the Senate floor if we need to get that money to make sure this is prioritized. Our families are really, really suffering.
Ryan Fazio (00:38:11):
I think that the question was about traffic on 95 and listen, Nick was the deputy chief of staff in the executive branch of the state government. The Department of Transportation is in the executive branch of the state government. The bonding commission is chaired and basically controlled by the head of the executive branch of the government. So when you had responsibility and direct cognizance over transportation issues and traffic in lower Fairfield County, you didn’t apparently do anything about it By your own standard, your setting, if you want to be upset at someone, I suggest that it might be the deputy chief of staff who has cognizance over the Department of Transportation in the state. And by the way, as for laying down on the Senate floor for things to get done, people in the majority don’t stop the Senate calendar. I stop the Senate calendar in order to do two things.
(00:39:13):
One was to stop the passage of 5 4 9 oh which would’ve undermined local zoning controls, especially in places like Riverside, old Greenwich and cos Cobb. And also in order to pass Senate Bill 3, 3, 3, which gave back our towns and cities basic rights over planning and zoning and to make changes regarding planning and zoning to their town or city charters, which were totally taken away from them. But in 2017 when one of the Senate Democrats voted against the Democratic budget, she had her office taken away. So there’s certain leverage in the minority. You don’t lay on the Senate floor. I think you should know that, or I think you might know that because you’ve been in Hartford for a couple years. Let’s be real. I think we can improve the traffic issues on the margins. We probably just need to put our heads together and focus on it.
Nick Simmons (00:40:05):
It’s not on the margins. There’s a billion dollar transportation bucket. There’s a plan right now that is sitting there. They’ve studied this for a decade. You actually mentioned the points. We have to elongate the ramp. We have to take a very close look at exits six, seven and eight in Stanford. We have to fix the lights, we have to expand the breakdown lanes because if somebody breaks down, they just sit right now in the lane and that causes all the traffic to back up. So there is a plan. The DOT spends a billion dollars a year, the last four to five. They do transformative projects all the time. The last four to five of them was the new London Bridge was a connector in Maran and was an I 84 fixed to Waterbury. It’s not coming here. It’s not the role of the deputy chief of staff to get that done.
(00:40:52):
There’s an appropriations process. The budget gets passed in the legislature. The role of the staffer to the governor is to serve at the pleasure of the governor and you can’t, there’s no conflict of interest. They can’t give Greenwich special treatment. When you’re in that role, your job as the elected senator for the district is to fight like hell and use every tool in your box to get these things done. And we know they can be done because we have three incredible democratic state reps that went up there and put their heads together and got it done. And we can do much, much more of this if we don’t act now, if we don’t go up there and make this a top priority. My son was just born, he’s going to be sitting at three hour traffic in 10 years. We can fix this. We have just half to prioritize it.
Moderator (00:41:34):
And I’m sorry to say that that’s the end of our question time. So it’s time to move to closing statements. Each of the candidates will have two minutes, so let me be sure that the timers can shift their shift, their stopwatch. Let me know when you’re ready. Alright, Ryan, you’re the first and you have two minutes.
Ryan Fazio (00:41:56):
Thank you to the League of Women Voters for hosting us tonight. Representing my hometown for the last three years has been the honor of a lifetime. There’s not a day that goes by for me that I don’t feel the awesome responsibility of doing my best to protect our district and make our state a better place. I’m proud of my bipartisan record of leadership in that time, co-authoring and passing into law six new laws to do everything from returning basic rights to planning and zoning to our municipalities, to expanding birth control, access for women, and to strengthening oversight of utilities in order to protect our consumers. But there’s a lot more work to do. I’m rather disappointed that my opponent has chosen to make this campaign about negativity and deception. My view of politics is that if you have good ideas, put them forward and hopefully people will support you.
(00:42:51):
I’ve always focused on bringing people together and achieving progress, which is how even as a member of the minority, I’ve been able to pass six laws of substance in just two years in order to protect our district and also to kill some bills that needed to be killed, including major overreaches that aim to eviscerate local control of zoning so developers could build high rises in any neighborhood, in any town in the state. There is a lot more to do. There is a lot more at risk, but there is a lot of potentiality. We need to have balance in the state legislature. We cannot have 70% super majorities, but if we have balance, we can bring people together to cut taxes for all families and reduce electricity bills. We can reform eight 30 G and protect local control of zoning while finding bipartisan solutions to our housing crisis. And we can bring people together to make our politics more constructive and stop the division. I believe in the future of this district, and I believe in the future of this state. I believe that days in the future can be brighter than ever before. And for that reason, I’m more excited than ever to run for another tournament and I ask for your vote. Thank you. Thank you,
Nick Simmons (00:44:11):
Nick. Your two minute closing statement. Yeah, well thanks again to the league and to Kay and to Zara for your great word tonight and for everybody for showing up to listen. I absolutely love this town. It’s where me and my four siblings were all born at Greenwich Hospital where my parents bought their first house over 50 years ago. They’re going anywhere because they now have six grandkids that are right nearby. I’m so thrilled that my wife and I are raising our baby here, starting our family here in the States and the district. I agree with Ryan. I think the future is as bright as ever. I mean, this is a town that gets things done when it puts its mind to it. This is a town, it’s one of the most philanthropic and generous towns in America. If you look at the numbers. It is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place.
(00:44:58):
I’m very excited to be here. We disagree on some issues that I find very core to our values. Specifically tonight. You heard about gun safety and about choice. It’s one of the big reasons that I’m running. I think that those are our core values and we’ve got to invest. We’ve got to invest. I mean, we are sitting on the shoulders of giants who created this incredible town for us on the coastline with traffic and amazing, amazing schools. The Greenwich Library at the Bruce Museum. But you look at the flood maps and in 15 years, I mean Todd’s almost underwater. And I know we want all for all of our kids and for our grandkids, for them to be able to enjoy all the beautiful things that we’ve all enjoyed here. We’ve got schools to fix. We can’t have another central middle school. Those kids couldn’t even learn in the building after the earthquake that happened in Greenwich.
(00:45:54):
In Greenwich. So we’ve got to invest. We can fix I 95. We can absolutely do it. We can absolutely do it. We can fix, we can create amazing schools. We can protect our coastline from flooding. We can make this a more affordable place for all of us. We can boost our education system. We can have more quality teachers in the classroom. We can do all of these things. And it would be the honor of a lifetime to be able to be your state senator and get that done for us, our kids and our grandkids. Thank you so much.
Moderator (00:46:30):
Thank you very much. Candidates we’ll ask you to step down and ask the candidates.
Moderator (00:46:39):
Come up and take the candidates for state representative in the 149th district. That is to my immediate left. Excuse me. Republican candidate is Tina Por, and to her left is the Democratic candidate Rachel Con. Next are the candidates for state representative in the 150th district. They are Paul Capelli and Steve Messer. And last but not least, the candidates for state representative in the 151st district are Todd Legia and Hector Zen. So now that the debate and the first candidate to respond will be Tina, and the question is, are blocking. Alright, here we go. And Zara, you
Person asking the question (00:47:38):
Have the first question. Most candidates express support for local control when it comes to zoning policy. However, as potential members of our state assembly, what role do you believe the state plays in addressing the challenge of affordable housing?
Tina Courpas (00:47:56):
Thank you to the League of Women Voters for this event. Thank you Sahara and Kay. I am a strong advocate for local control of zoning because I believe the decisions that are made close to home officials that make those have more accountability, better information, and more at stake. Eight 30 G is a law that’s been on the books since 1989, and I think we can all agree that has not been successful. The relatively nine 90,000 affordable units that the state is lacking have simply not been built under eight 30 G. Therefore, I believe that while the state can have a role in funding and the state can have a role in permitting federally allocated housing vouchers to be more portable around Connecticut so that people who need affordable housing can pay for it. I believe that the state’s role should not be expanded. It should be retracted.
(00:48:49):
My opponent voted on the single most significant erosion of local control of the 2024 legislative season. The work live ride bill. The work Live ride Bill was a classic example of saying one thing on the campaign trail and voting a different way. All three of the house Democrat candidates voted for this bill, placing the interest of their party above those of their constituents who significantly audibly and frequently reiterate that local control is a priority. Furthermore, issues such as the environment and infrastructure are directly impacted by state mandates, which increase our housing density, but don’t give us as citizens or localities the ability to deal with infrastructure, environment, sewage, water, et cetera, the way that we know how to and would. So the state can play a role, but with respect to the main framework that we have today in housing in the state, it needs to be rolled back, not expanded. Thank you. And again,
Moderator (00:49:51):
I would just remind all of you since we have a short period of time to be succinct as possible. Next. Rachel.
Rachel Khanna (00:50:00):
Thank you. Kay. Thank you to the League of Women Voters for hosting this debate. And thank you all for being here this evening. My family and I moved to Greenwich 24 years ago. It’s our home. I love the feel of this community and I don’t want the state telling us where and how to build housing. I remain steadfast in my commitment to protecting local control. In 2023, there was a bill known as the fair share bill where each community would have to build the number of units mandated by the state. I broke with my party to vote against that bill in 2024, the work, live ride or transit oriented development. Bill was moving through the house and was going to pass. And my colleagues, representative Meers and Representative Garo and I intervened and engaged Margarita Alvin, our Commissioner of Planning and Zoning, and Francis Pickering, the director of the Western Connecticut Council of Governments, to help us craft language to help protect local control of zoning.
(00:50:57):
Another bill, house Bill 54 74, which I voted for, would allow us to get more points toward an eight 30 G moratorium. So when my opponent accuses me of violating my promise, I respectfully respond that I did the exact opposite. By protecting Greenwich’s right to decide whether and where moderate income housing is built, there’s no arguing that we need more housing to grow our economy. By some estimates, the state needs about 90,000 units. This needs to be driven by us at the local level, local municipalities, because local leaders know best about the town’s needs on density and infrastructure. And this is why I’m so pleased to have had the endorsement of the Connecticut Realtors elders.
Ryan Fazio (00:51:42):
Paul,
Paul Capelli (00:51:46):
You need to push the button. Thank you. I find it hard to believe when I drive around town right now and the political signs are out already. And there’s actually a sign out there that says, support Democrats support local control. When you just heard for yourself that although this candidate added some constructive points to the bill inevitably voted for it. In the end, I do think that Hartford has a role to play. I agree with Tina in the vouchers affordability. I think there’s areas I would like to see more of our firefighters, our police officers and our teachers being able to live in Greenwich. But I don’t, we’re talking about the traffic and everything else Right now, Connecticut needs growth, but it doesn’t need it on the back of Greenwich. Greenwich right now can’t afford that growth. And there are other towns that can, which is why each of these towns should be able to make their own decisions. Decisions need to be made locally so that they can best be understood as it relates to the public utilities, sewage, I mean, there’s a litany of things, but again, all three of our representatives voted for this, and that was not something I would’ve done.
Moderator (00:53:15):
Thank you, Steve.
STEPHEN MESKERS (00:53:21):
I find it offensive to be accused of voting for a bill that limited local control. When the bill did the opposite, it was an opt-in provision that allowed us to do what we chose and wanted to do in consultation with planning and zoning. I’ve always supported local control. I’m not in favor of high rises. I was born in the Bronx. I lived in Brooklyn before I moved to Greenwich. If I wanted high rises, I would’ve stayed in Brooklyn. I don’t understand how this accusation could be made, and it bothers me that people would make that accusation and then hope to have a bipartisan relationship. So I find the defensive,
Ryan Fazio (00:54:03):
Todd.
Tod Laudonia (00:54:07):
I think it begins with a, well, first of all, thank you to the league for spending all the time. And I organized things like this in my other life and I know it’s not easy and I appreciate all your help and thank you to everyone in the room for taking the time to come to town Hall tonight on this. As I would like to call it cold night, but there’s more ahead of us. The state has no business being involved in making determinations about the cost of our real estate.
(00:54:42):
I describe myself as an accident of nature in the town of Greenwich because I am lucky enough that I live in a home that one of my grandfathers built in 1918, and my daughter lives in a home that my other grandfather built in 1914. We are here because of the foresight and the determination of our ancestors passing this property down to us. We plan to stay here. We’re not going anywhere. But I don’t believe that the state should be involved or bureaucrats in Hartford making decisions as to what is affordable and what don’t. We determine who the word affordable. It is a subjective term. It’s not something that you can take it and put a number on. And as far as workforce housing, it seems that the private sector, the schools, the private schools, Brunswick Country Day, they have done things to help their workers, their teachers, their administrators, given them places to live and worked at economic deals with them so that they can be in town if they want to be. I have several teachers in my family that would never consider living in the town they teach in. They don’t want to go to the stop and shop or to the ShopRite and live their lives and see the parents of their children because it’s not necessarily a comfortable situation. So why are we allowing the legislature or the bureaucrats to make the decisions for us in our local town?
Moderator (00:56:22):
Hector,
Hector Arzeno (00:56:24):
Thank you. And yes, some of the questions came on a debate at the Grange High School, and I heard your answer when I mentioned that back when Chief Hive started his career in the police fall, 75% of the police officers live in Greenwich today. Less than 10% live in Greenwich. So his answer was that maybe as you said it with teachers and others, they prefer not to live in Greenwich. Well, I have a different view to that. In fact, I am very proud that my two of my four children are back in Greenwich and they want to raise their children in Greenwich and they want to send the children to the party schools. And going back to what we do in Harford, in Harford, when bills come up, some of the bills like it happen in 2023, we didn’t have a time to do anything.
(00:57:23):
So that came in the weird hours of the night. And so what we did, the three of us, we lobby against that bill and that bill passed 76 to 72. It was a bad bill and we voted against the majority bill, the majority house, the majority in the house. And in 2024, when another bill came in housing and we had time, you have two options. One not to do anything. If it is a bad bill not to do anything, vote no and the bill will pass. We knew that that bill had devo to pass. What we did, we sit down not only with our planning and zoning in Greenwich Planning and zoning in Fairfield, planning and zoning in Westport, and we all together work with Westco to make all and every change in that bill to be sure that that Bill did not have any poison bill and didn’t have any mandates to any town.
(00:58:24):
And with that in mind and with their blessing, we voted yes that bill does not have any mandates and doesn’t roit any local housing authority. Furthermore, I think that if we touch the subjects of affordable housing, I would recommend some of the people look into what Westco Reich is a member just publish a work on affordable housing financing affordable housing for towns, and this is something that we have to start considering in Greenwich. Some of the conclusions are number one, affordable housing and local housing authority doesn’t have anything to do. You can build affordable housing respecting local zoning authority. However you need instruments like the affordable housing trust that I supported. You need an affordable housing plan. You need the town to get involved. Now have Greenwich communities in one side that are doing and working hard in building extremely good project for affordable housing and without any support in the town.
(00:59:34):
When I start looking into this in 2019, the house unit points and that’s how you apply for the moratorium at the housing authority. They are not known by the town, they are not including in the calculation that we have five years later. I was looking into a presentation today, we don’t know how many housing points we have at Grange community to qualify for a moratorium and this is something that we have to start doing and I said in 2022 we have to start talking to one another, listening to everyone advocate in the RTN for the affordable housing trust and plan strengthen and by partnership with the Grange communities.
Moderator (01:00:23):
Alright, thank you Hector. I think we want to move on as to say we’ve got short time. Does anyone else have another comment on that particular question or are you ready to go to the next one? Alright, next one. And I’ve neglected to say that their placement behind the That’s alright. Their placement and the order of answering questions was decided ahead of time by a drawing so in case it looks a little weird, trust me. Alright, next question and the first answer will be Paul, and the question is, what are your priorities when it comes to tax policy?
Paul Capelli (01:01:08):
As we heard in the last debate, Connecticut is the second highest tax state in the country. My priority would be to address that immediately and there’s different ways to do it, one of which would be government spending. I remember, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years ago when the USB bank was being put up in Stanford and they started to put an on-ramp on and apparently they got in a tuffle with the state that they couldn’t do it. The state workers had to do it and they made a deal that the workers at USB can do it. I drove by it one day, there was no on-ramp. I drove by it the next day. There was an on-ramp. It seems to take us 15, 20, 80 weeks to get a project done. We need to be more aggressive with our unions. We need to find every opportunity to get rid of wasteful spending and we need to be honest about these taxes as well.
(01:02:15):
I think we’ve all experienced recently where we opened up our electric bill and found that it went up dramatically. It was a shock at my house and when I looked into it, I went onto the Eversource website. I don’t have the benefit of the resources that these folks have up in Hartford and Eversource put a video on their website where, and I encourage all of you to go home and look at this, where they clearly distanced themselves from this and they explained what this was and it was exactly what Ryan said it was. This is a tax that they are forced to put into the bill because they’re a public utility and it is a tax that they’re forcing you to pay. So first of all, there’s transparency, wasteful spending and just better addressing the taxing that are there. Thank you
Tina Courpas (01:03:12):
Steve
STEPHEN MESKERS (01:03:14):
Todd. Tax policy is one of the biggest concerns we all have in this state managing our tax policy. There are two issues that concern me most in the short term. One is the convenience tax, which is not a convenience tax on convenience stores. It’s the convenience of the employer, which means that residents of Greenwich paying your estate tax and exempt from paying Connecticut tax. So lett, anyone think that my next step is that I want to double tax. That’s not the issue. The issue is to negotiate and renegotiate with the state. Approximately $456 million of earned income is taxed in New York state because the negotiated contract, which was done years ago between New York and Connecticut allowed that privilege. What I’m looking for and it’s going to take a Supreme Court decision and I’m urging the governor and the staff to move forward to bring out and clarify the legitimacy of the convenience tax so that we can recapture that revenue.
(01:04:28):
That’s one source that could reduce our taxes and four $56 million is a lot of lost revenue that’s paid into New York City. The second piece obviously are the fiscal guardrails. The fiscal guardrails are dealing with an enormous amount of past spending. The state has been on a fiscal diet over the last couple of years. They’ve reduced the workforce, they’ve reduced their expenditures to some extent and what we need to do is continue to pay back or pay down unfunded liabilities. We have teachers and state workers who have worked for 30 and 40 years in this state and those pensions for bad decisions in the seventies and eighties were never funded. So those pensions are sitting at 30 and 40% of their funded levels. What we’ve been doing over the last five years, I believe it’s five could be six. We have under the fiscal guardrails, we have taken the tax revenue and we’ve built up a rainy day fund and everything in excess of that has gone down to pay our unfunded liabilities.
(01:05:39):
We paid down about 11 billion in unfunded liabilities. That’s part of the process of getting our fiscal house in order. If there’s a short answer and a short solution, it’s going to take time and effort right now holding the level on taxes and last year enacting our first, I believe it was 250, although I always defer to Rachel, it was 250 or 350 of a tax cut that we enacted in the state. We did that. The second thing we did, we began or finished the process of exempting pension and retirement income such that the first $75 million of retirement income for a single person is exempt from taxes and I’ll make a public service announcement. I was challenged on that last year. If you’re in a level of income and you have withholdings and you don’t file your taxes, you won’t get that rebated to you because in some cases public employees or retirees have a withholding, but we’ve exempted for $75,000 for an individual and I believe we’re at 115 or it could be 125 for a married couple that that income as pension income is tax exempt. We’re working to improve the tax situation in the state, but like everything, it takes time.
Moderator (01:06:59):
Thank you Todd.
Tod Laudonia (01:07:04):
The world that we’re all some of us are involved in and some of us are trying to become involved in the legislative political world is full of euphemisms. I hear the word revenue when it’s related to taxes. It’s not revenue. The state is not in a business. It does not there to make money. That revenue that they like to call your taxes is money taken out of your pockets. My priority when it comes to tax policy is to eliminate as much as possible of it. Obviously we need infrastructure. We are in a state with crumbling infrastructure. We have, as Steve says, unfunded liabilities. These things all need to be caught up, but I think that the biggest problem that we have is a spending problem. It’s not a revenue problem, it’s not a generational problem. It’s not something that we can tax our way out of. We need to stop spending needlessly.
Moderator (01:08:10):
Doctor, thank you again. Excuse me. Just all of you remind you to take a look at your time expense.
Hector Arzeno (01:08:17):
Yes. Never no worry where she’s, anyway. Certainly and following what we are saying, we all agree that we would like to see less taxes. I think that our governor is doing a tremendous job and we are supporting him and this is bipartisan in bringing fiscal stability to our state. Connecticut today is a AAA is investment grade state, which brings our cost of debt down. We have reduced substantially to the general billion dollars over the last two years. Our public debt, our unfunded liabilities that are as a result of mismanagement by both Republicans and Democrats in the past, they’re being put into place still a way to go. We are working on that. We will like to see less taxes and we have to grow our economy and this is what we are doing trying to grow the economy. The governor had a tremendous trip to Germany, our largest trade partner outside in the world and so he’s bringing investments. We have one company a day applying to open business in Connecticut in 2023 and this is what we are focusing in doing that that will allow us to manage fiscally the state and bring taxes down for all of us.
Moderator (01:10:00):
Alright, Tina,
Tina Courpas (01:10:06):
People probably know this, but Connecticut has been plagued for overspending for a number of decades and we had consistent numbers of unbalanced budget between 2010 and 2017. Finally in 2017 we began to turn it around. In that year we implemented the fiscal guardrails, which are three legs of a stool, a spending cap, a volatility cap, and a revenue cap. Suffice to say that that was a framework that began to control spending and it worked. It was passed in a year where the Republican and Democrats were evenly matched in the Senate and that was no surprise because it was a bipartisan bill that went through, but regardless of who was responsible for it, I’m so glad we did it because it began to work. We had consistently balanced budgets. We began to pay down debt and the overspending was controlled with all due respect and I mean that sincerely, Steve, the election is a week away if you vote early, so people really need to know and understand this.
(01:11:07):
So I’m just going to stick to the record. In 2024, a vote came up on whether the would be adhered to. It was the stabilization bill. My opponent voted to overspend by $700 million of covid relief money that was in Connecticut’s budget. One time money to plug holes in the operating budget of a number of failed institutions in our state. That is not fiscal discipline, that is not adhering to the guardrails. And so it concerns me that just when they were starting to work, the huge barge of our economy started to turn around. At the first opportunity there was a footfall and a major one, the Connecticut mirror reported that there could be a billion dollar deficit in next year’s budget as a result of that vote. That’s number one. Number two is what’s coming down the pike.
(01:11:58):
We are very close in this election to reaching a one state party. Democrats could control 70% of the legislature if three seats flip in the house. This means that things that the majority party wants that are radical that people don’t like will have little to no opposition even from a moderate governor like Ned Lamont who has done a credible job. So what is this referring to? In the matter of taxes, a statewide property tax is in the works. A statewide capital gains surcharge is in the works and an additional mansion tax on not mansions, but homes of a million dollars and above a 4% conveyance tax is all in the works. My opponent has voted with her party 98% of the time and the other house delegation 99 and 98% of the time. I hope that if those things come down with the majority party to increase our taxes that they will radically, it would take them radically voting differently than their track record in order to oppose those things that are coming.
(01:13:00):
Third is our electric bills. We’ve talked about and agree that this is a hidden tax, but where was the delegation other than Ryan Fazio in fighting for us, the reason we had $200 million of unpaid Eversource bills that were distributed to all of us in the form of that increase in our electric bills was because there was a one-time opportunity to take Covid relief money and fill that hole. But my opponent voted to put those monies elsewhere. The problem could have been avoided in May and it wasn’t. The problem could have been solved in July and August and it wasn’t. The legislature leaders like Ryan Fazio circulated a petition to call a special session to deviate covid relief funds to fill that $200 million shortfall that would’ve taken that bill, taken that charge off of our electric bills. Now a single one of our house delegations signed that petition. There were two opportunities to fix the electric bill tax and none of those opportunities were taken. The election is a week away for early voting. People need to know and understand where our representatives have stood on these very important issues, not just on the campaign trail but when they voted. Alright, and Rachel,
Rachel Khanna (01:14:18):
Thank you. Greenwich. Stanford and Southwestern Connecticut overall contribute mightily to the state when it comes to taxes and in 2023 we passed the largest tax cut in Connecticut’s history and expanded exemptions for pension income as my colleagues Representative Mexico has noted. But importantly, having a seat at the table with the majority helped us secure a lot of money for the district and bring some of our taxpayer funds back for projects. We have worked very strongly as a delegation to leverage more funds for critical projects in town such as the reconstruction of Central Middle School, the Glenville Corridor project, the elevators at Greenwich Library and overall our fiscal health is the best it’s been in decades. We’ve paid down our pension debt by $8 billion, which is going to save taxpayers about $700 million a year. Our rainy day fund is fully funded at 4 billion and several of the major credit agencies recently upgraded Connecticut’s debt ratings.
(01:15:24):
They don’t do that to be nice. They do that because we’re headed in the right direction. The stabilization bill that my opponent mentions that I voted in favor of did not bypass the guardrails and as a matter of fact, she has noted that she would’ve voted against that stabilization bill. That means that she would’ve voted no to use it or lose it. Federal ARPA money that was used to fund many, many projects in Greenwich, like I said, elevator repairs at Greenwich Library, roof replacement at Parsonage cottage, Barbara’s House, river House, the United Way, and many more. So these funds have come back and we have advocated for them for our district and gotten a lot of money back.
Moderator (01:16:08):
Thank you. Anyone who’s used less time has something to add on that. Okay,
Paul Capelli (01:16:15):
So I just heard two things that I find mind boggling. One of the representative said great job as it related to taxes and we just heard we’re heading in the right direction for the second largest tax state in the country. Well what other direction are we going to head in? I mean that’s crazy. This is why we have to be weary of a super majority in Hartford. I think some of these people are living in La la land, they need checks and balances. We need Republicans and Democrats in Hartford so that we can keep check on each other. I mean there’s a check and balance and we’re about to lose it and it’s about to get even crazier up there.
Moderator (01:16:56):
Alright, the next question and I’m sorry.
STEPHEN MESKERS (01:16:59):
Thank you. Go ahead.
(01:17:01):
I don’t think anyone other than my daughter has ever accused me of living in la la land. So what I would say is that where we’ve stepped up to the plate with this house delegation solely has been to bring the resources back to this town for the rebuilding of Central Middle school for the Boys and Girls Club, for our nonprofits to basically provide the town with resources to do what it wants to do with its own funds. What we’ve done and what we’ve hoped to do and what you need to think of because I sit on the RTM, is we are trying to improve the quality of life for this town. That means we’re trying to take care of our children, our seniors, and public safety in the road beds. And when I sit and look at public policy here, what I see is an attempt to privatize the town home, nursing home and I see an attempt to shrink the budget for the school district by pushing the school district out of a public building into a rental unit. And all I know is I’m trying, we are as a group trying to improve the quality of life here and that’s something you should need to think about.
Tod Laudonia (01:18:11):
Okay, come back to you Rachel. We’re hearing lots about how much money was returned to the town, but I believe it was also mentioned how much money we send. The answer to the question is send less and we can fund all these programs ourselves.
Moderator (01:18:30):
Rachel do you? Yes, I’ve just met Rachel. Yes, sorry, Rachel was next. Okay, sorry Rachel.
Rachel Khanna (01:18:39):
Thank you. Republicans seem to be very concerned about an imagined democratic super majority in Hartford but not the Republican super majority right here in Greenwich. This argument assumes that all Democrats vote the same way but in the house there are progressive Democrats and there are moderate Democrats. Representative Arno Meers and I are all members of the Monte caucus and I’m quite capable of breaking with my party as I did when I consistently voted to protect local zoning and voted to restore police consent searches. The advantage of being part of the majority is that we have a seat at the table and we get stuff done. This job is about representing our constituents and serving the district.
Moderator (01:19:21):
Alright, one more comment after.
Hector Arzeno (01:19:23):
Yes, let me add, and we mentioned Central Middle School. Sometimes when we leave town and with the projects, and by the way, yes we sent quite a lot of money but in the past we didn’t bring anything back. Now we are bringing money back, thank God and thank God for this delegation and sometimes I feel that when I left town and when we leave town to work on Central Middle School, even just listening at the remarks on the vote on the last vote at the BET seems that our own people were working against us. We were working against the clock. We miss the deadline to have the project in the priority list and we had to work, I mean day and night to have that project back and we had sometimes I believe that we have our own people thinking that Harford will not do anything for you.
(01:20:24):
I mean you will get zero from Hartford and it’s not the case. It’s not what we work for and if I have time I will last absolutely. I would like to touch on the special session since that was brought by Mrs. Corpus. Special sessions are for just a pill that has a deadline and needs a quick vote and usually they are one day pills and for example in September we were called to Hartford from a special session we have to approve a specific issue. It was by partisan and suddenly just days before the aquaquarium sale was brought into the special session, you may recall that and I voted against that special session because I believe that we didn’t have a committee, we didn’t have public hearing and that required more thinking. Let’s go to the special session that Sinat requested that many of you accused us of not supporting. I mean I do not support bandaids. I do not support political circus in an electoral ear. I support and I am quite concerned with the cost of furniture and that requires the first day that we are in Hartford. To get into the table
Moderator (01:22:07):
We need Hector, I’m going to have to stop you there. You use more time and we’d like to get in a couple of more questions if you possibly could. Very good, thank you. Alright, the next question Todd, you’re the first to respond and Zara pose the question,
Person asking the question (01:22:22):
How can your district become a more competitive place for business? For what business? For business.
Tod Laudonia (01:22:35):
I think that’s the basis of the question is how much do you have from a zoning standpoint, we’re going to go back to local zoning is going to determine the availability of business spaces. Unfortunately what’s happened in the town and I think as a result of the push for more affordable housing units, the small businesses, we used to have business zones that were a lot of LBR, lbr one, lbr two zones in town, which LBR is a local business retail zone. We used to have, I tell my daughter the story when I, when I grew up used to be able to ride my bike to seven grocery stores in a matter of two blocks because there were local businesses, everyone had their own local business. I think what we’ve done, and I think it’s because of regulation coming out of Hartford, is we’ve eliminated the availability of small businesses. And when I say small businesses, unfortunately small businesses, I’m not sure what the number is but it’s categorized some absurd number like under 500 employees. Well my wife and I ran a couple small businesses in our lives and our small business consisted of she and I. That’s a small business and that’s what these local business zones were designed for and that’s the best way to propagate more business activity in town is to encourage small business use.
Ryan Fazio (01:24:13):
Hector.
Hector Arzeno (01:24:14):
Well we have an office in Harford that does see and goes beyond any effort possible to bring a business and to solve issues. Last week I have the opportunity to go to and visit and celebrate the hundred and two anniversary of the largest lumber provider in the state, which that is based. Environ is based in our district and in Greenwich and I mean third generation, they are expanding in Connecticut, they have severe branches in Stanford and in two more places upstate Connecticut. They were just asking us how we can solve the shortfall on labor that they have. They cannot get employees and they cannot get people to work. We talk about trade schools, that is something that we are in education and serving education we are looking into. So I mean so excited about the prospects of growing business in Connecticut that certainly keep us working hard, trying to do better and improve what we are not doing. I like usually to see that the glass is three quarter full and not a quarter empty. Certainly there is more to do but we are doing quite a lot.
Tina Courpas (01:25:44):
Alright Tina?
(01:25:49):
Yes, so the one 49th district includes part of North Stanford and Westover. Stanford used to have the third highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the country at 18 and now it has four. So it comes as no surprise that we are not doing a good job of attracting businesses to this state. A few things I think we could do better. First of all, in the 12 month period ending June, 2024 jobs in Connecticut grew a paltry 0.7% versus the national average of 1.7%. According to our own department of labor, only 10% of the job growth in the last 12 months has been in the private sector. The other 90% has been in pure public sector jobs and or healthcare or Medicaid funded jobs which are essentially financed by the government during that same period of time. Oh sorry. No, not during the same period of time.
(01:26:44):
Since 2019, public sector pay grew 33%, whereas private sector pay grew 10 percentage points lower 23% over the same timeframe. In short Connecticut which has the highest paid public sector employees in the country is paying itself more and growing its own government. This is not a productive part of our sectors to grow, we simply must get more revenue producing businesses into the state. A few suggestions we need to, my campaign did a tour of 50 businesses in the one 49th district back in June and one thing that was resonating throughout our tour was that people feel nicked cut burdened hassled by licensing fees and small taxes in a myriad of industries. A home entertainment installer in Connecticut has to complete 900 hours of education in order to perform that service. We are making it almost impossible for small business owners. We’re making it impractical for small business owners to function in that state.
(01:27:52):
We need to decrease the burdens we place on them. Second, we need tax incentives for businesses to locate here of all of those Fortune 500 companies that left Stanford, many of them located to Massachusetts so you can see that we’re dealing with a very low bar if that’s where they went as an upgrade from Connecticut. We also need to lower our corporate tax rate and we simply have to get our energy costs under control. Someone said to me, if you think about your electric bill and what went up in your electric bill, imagine if you have a factory, imagine if you have a warehouse, imagine if you have a large office building. All that we’re seeing on our electric bills is magnified when you look at businesses. We simply need better management and to become an aggressively pro-business state. Thank you Rachel. Thank
Rachel Khanna (01:28:44):
You. Small businesses are the economic engine of our state. As a former small business owner, I know firsthand the challenges that small businesses face. Improving the landscape for our small businesses is something that I promised to focus on when I first ran for office and plan to continue focusing on if reelected. I’ve spoken to many, many small businesses in my district. I attended the meeting last week with Representative Zaino and just today I was on a phone call with a small business putting him in touch with our department of economic cooperation development to learn about small business loans we need to make it easier and more affordable to do business in Connecticut. I’ve supported bills to address healthcare costs. I’ve looked at capping licensing and certification charges. As a matter of fact, I co-sponsored a bill introduced by Senator Fazio in the last session. We didn’t vote on it and in the house but I hope it’ll come back. We need to continue to run our state in a fiscally responsible way to make our state attractive to businesses large and small. I’m honored to have received a hundred percent score from the Connecticut Business and Industry Association in recognition of my legislative record to improve conditions for Connecticut’s businesses large and small.
Paul Capelli (01:29:59):
Alright Paul, thank you. Tina stole much of my thunder so thank you for sharing that. But competitive place for business is something that we should be trying to achieve and we’re going in the other direction. The conversations that we had prior to this I think all flow into this as well with these energy costs, higher taxes, I was going to bring up the professional permits. The need for those to be relaxed, I mean barbers, everybody, the government’s got their hand in everything. We’re continuing to grow government and not businesses. We’re continuing the tax at a rate in which our largest tax contributors just get fed up with it and leave and we are, we’re suffering for what’s been going on in Hartford and the only thing that only people we can blame about what’s going on in Hartford is the majority which are the Democrats. So how can we encourage competitive business practices? We can put more Republicans in Hartford and start to balance some of the arguments out up there. Have more thoughtful discussions. Thank you.
STEPHEN MESKERS (01:31:20):
At the local level, in order to encourage small businesses and people to move to Greenwich, we need to focus on quality of life issues, which is why we focused as a state delegation on quality of life issues and the infrastructure that people would look for, which are good schools supporting our aging traffic safety and pedestrian safety. We have forcefully worked for that. This past session I was made co-chair of the commerce committee. In that role on commerce we created a small harbor fund. What’s the value of that? For small business, it’s to make those harbors safe and commercially viable for sports fishing, for commercial operations to grow the economy of the state. This past year I was approached on various funding requests in the mystic tourism region and they lacked a coherence and that they became to be pet projects from various groups have assembled a group that we’ve been meeting on a regular basis to formulate a plan to further develop the tourism industry in New England, particularly in the mystic area so that we can compete with Rhode Island and Massachusetts potentially with spending money, which apparently we shouldn’t be spending any. We spend about 5 million or $6 million a year in Connecticut on the tourism industry, I believe Massachusetts, which has twice our population spends on the order of 15 to $20 million. So if you want people dropping money in your towns, you need to fix the traffic, you need to make the tourism and destination a location here. You need to improve the atmosphere and I certainly have done, I’ve initiated a fair amount of progress there. I hope to complete that project with this proposed bill in the coming session. We’re in the work study phase right now.
Moderator (01:33:23):
Any other comments for anyone on that question? Alright, then the next question first to respond will be you, Rachel, and the question is what specific policies can encourage ridership on buses and make it safer for residents to bike and walk? And on this one again, we’re getting close to needing to catch the closing statements so brief on this one.
Rachel Khanna (01:33:50):
Yes, I drive to Hartford and back on a regular basis. I run and bike on these roads so I understand the concerns about being able to access our roads and our public transportation. I’ve successfully partnered with the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the Greenwich Department of Public Works to bring money home for key pedestrian and traffic safety projects. I mentioned before the Glenville corridor traffic project. We also recently received an $800,000 community connectivity grant from the state for pedestrian and traffic improvements at Railroad Avenue. I voted in favor of adopting the recommendations of the Vision zero Council and to allow municipalities to adopt speed and red light cameras as well as address wrong way driving. There’s much more that can be done and I look forward to doing that.
Tina Courpas (01:34:43):
I assume that by the question I’d like to address in addition to buses, mass transit in general, so our infrastructure has been underfunded by the state. Nowhere is this more stark than in the case of Metro North. Last year the Lamont administration announced a $315 million investment in 60 state-of-the-art rail cars at a $15 million slashing of funding for Metro North. Those 60 rail cars were in the center of Connecticut in a very underutilized line of not the New Haven line that’s the most heavily commuted line in the country, but an underutilized line to me that raises the question, why are legislators from New London and Danbury out advocating the legislators from Greenwich? We have a significant need for infrastructure down here. Imagine if Metro North’s rails were upgraded to the point where people’s commutes could go from 60 minutes to 30 minutes. Imagine what that would do for our town.
(01:35:40):
Its revenue base, its property values, its jobs and its quality of life. Secondly, with respect to infrastructure development, as Ryan FIA mentioned earlier, so I’ll just touch on it. We have project labor agreements right now that our Department of Transportation is obligated or required to use. A portion of these are very expensive contracts to build infrastructure projects. If we could do away with those, our costs would decline significantly and we could get some of the improvements that the question asked for the cost of what we’re doing now we could build two schools where we’re building one. We could build two roads where we’re building one. We could build a bike lane where there isn’t right now. Third, local control is the elephant in the room. We cannot be talking about safety and bike lanes when we are looking at the unbridled hand of the state coming into our towns and cities and bypassing all kinds of concerns that deal with precisely these issues.
Moderator (01:36:43):
I’m going to have to stop you there just because we’re running out of time and I would like to give everybody a quick comment on this question. So next would be Steve.
STEPHEN MESKERS (01:36:54):
I would’ve hoped not to hear any questions about local control because I think we’ve made our position clear in relation to development development north of Fairfield County is part of the solution to our tax concerns. So investing north of Fairfield County is going to help and support the development of the state because if we sit here and think that we should be the only taxpayers in the state, we need to think about the direction we’ll head. So we’ve worked forcefully on that in relation to buses and bicycles, which I think were the original equation in the last electoral cycle. I heard promises made and I saw our bicycle group strongly advocate. I have not heard about one kilometer of commitment to bicycle paths. So until we have commitments at the local level for bicycle paths, it’s going to be very hard for me to walk up to Hartford and secure funding for them. So I need to see plans and execute the plans. This is what we did with Central Middle School. We were challenged on the issue of whether we could secure extra funding. We went extra through the session and we improved the funding and there hasn’t been a comment or a thank you for the work we’ve done.
Ryan Fazio (01:38:12):
Paul,
Paul Capelli (01:38:16):
I’m sorry that Steve thinks that talking about 10 80 G is overrated, but this all comes back to infrastructure and the fact that we’re going to be underwater and infrastructure if we continue to let Hartford dictate how our town is going to be filled and the potential high rises that could be here to hear about bike paths when we’re in the middle of this infrastructure crisis is crazy. I am hearing things about doing things north of Fairfield in Mystic. We need attention placed on Greenwich right now. We need attention on the infrastructure that is here and the problem that is staring us all in the face, which is the eight 30 G and the potential influx of that many more people living in this already congested area.
Hector Arzeno (01:39:16):
Happy to see Ernest here in the audience and having such a big supporter of for his initiative in town for the bike path and a part quotation and unfortunately as Steve mentioned, we need to do more in our town and we are ready to support every single initiative and bring things back to our town, but we need more, more from us and that’s what I would like to say on the subject. I am a big fan. I cycled all my life and I hope that Greenwich turns around and start moving in that direction.
Tod Laudonia (01:40:05):
Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m confused with what the original question was because I don’t think that there was any discussion about local congestion and buses.
Moderator (01:40:15):
The question was what specific policies can encourage ridership on buses and make it safer for residents to bike and walk?
Tod Laudonia (01:40:23):
I think that’s invasive government. I don’t know why. We are creating policies to tell people how they’re going to travel around, how they’re going to get from place to place. This is the United States of America. You are free to make your own decisions about how you want to get from point A to point B. Second of all, we’ve had a lot of discussion here about congestion. Congestion everywhere our roads were built originally, most of them were horse paths. Let’s face it. So they’re not that, they’re not that big. I understand that people want to ride bikes, bicycles are lawfully on the road as another vehicle. The problem I think is an education problem. Let’s have the bike riders out there on the road if they want to be on the road, follow the rules of the road Buses. Buses are a thing of the past. Buses are going to get stuck in the congestion of the cars. So by putting 20 people on a bus is not going to solve our congestion problems and our streets are not going to get wider. We’re not going to, the next step is an eminent domain to take away people’s personal property to make the streets wider so we can have bike paths and bus lanes. I think that that’s invasive government and I think we need to stay away from these things.
Moderator (01:41:43):
Alright, it is time to turn to closing statements. So I would ask the timers to clear their stopwatches. Pardon me? You’ll each have two minutes and they will let you know when you have a minute and 30 seconds left and when to stop. Are we set? Alright then Tina, you are first with our two minute closing state.
Tina Courpas (01:42:08):
Thank you again to the League of Women voters for hosting this event. Thank you to my fellow candidates for running and for your service. My opponent is not my enemy, but the election is two weeks away and she says one thing on the campaign trail and votes differently in Hartford and the votes are the votes. My opponent claims to have put Connecticut’s fiscal house in order, but she decided she voted to overspend by 700 million, setting the state up for a billion dollar hole in the coming fiscal year. My opponent claims to care about lowering electric bills, yet fail to address the problem on two separate occasions in the last five months, my opponent claims to stand for local control of zoning, yet voted to erode local control in the single most significant bill of 2024. Work, live ride. My opponent claims she is for public safety but votes against reasonable policing like allowing police to pull someone over who’s visibly smoking cannabis while driving.
(01:43:11):
My opponent claims to be a moderate, but she votes to advance some of the most extreme ideas in Hartford, such as mandatory voting in Connecticut. I have over 20 years of robust legal and financial experience and will be the strong advocate that this district needs, not constrained by the political pressure to bow to a controlling party. I have a track record of advocating for women across the state of Connecticut. I am a strong pro-choice candidate regardless of my opponents almost constant, including today obfuscation of my position. We need a change in the one 49th district. We need balance in the state of Connecticut’s government. Our best days can be ahead. I am asking for your vote on November 5th and thank you. Alright, thank you and Rachel, your next two minutes.
Rachel Khanna (01:44:03):
Thank you to the League of Women Voters for hosting us this evening and to all of you for being here. I love this job because I love helping people. Two years ago as I was meeting with constituents in the district, I learned from local firefighters that their job was putting them at risk for getting sick. The very gear that they have to wear to protect themselves increases their cancer risk. And despite that job related risk, they were struggling to get disability coverage for a cancer diagnosis. I made it my mission to show them that we have their bag as they have ours. And in my first term I worked with colleagues to create a firefighter’s cancer fund. Not only have I delivered for the firefighters, but I’ve delivered for my district. I secured $100 million in funding for school construction and road safety projects and nonprofits in our district.
(01:44:54):
I’ve delivered results that help Greenwich and Stanford thrive. Something else that I’m proud of is that 98% of the bills I supported had bipartisan backing. I stand up to my party when necessary, prioritizing the district’s best interests, including supporting police consent searches and protecting local control by opposing the so-called Fair Share Housing Bill. When I ran in 2022, I promised fiscal responsibility without sacrificing our values and I’ve delivered my common sense approach to governance and my fiscal responsibility is why I’ve been endorsed by both the democratic and independent parties. What a lot of you don’t know about me is that I’m a triathlete. This is a challenge that I started when I turned 50. In the past two years, I’ve swam 329 miles, biked 4,700 miles and run 2,500 miles. I bring that same grit and perseverance to everything that I do. Serving as your representative is the greatest honor and I humbly ask for your vote from I reelection. Thank you.
Moderator (01:46:02):
Thank you. Next ladies and gentlemen, get to the end. Alright, next is Paul.
Paul Capelli (01:46:11):
Thank you everyone.
Moderator (01:46:12):
As we
Paul Capelli (01:46:13):
Close tonight, I want to emphasize that the decisions we make in this election will shape the future of our community and state. Connecticut’s heavy tax burden is holding families back and small businesses and overall economic growth. We must put men to over taxation and prioritize sensible tax relief and efficient use of taxpayer dollars. I will work to cut wasteful spending and ensure every dollar works for you, not against you. I’ll stop hidden taxes like the one we recently saw in our electric bill. Public safety is not negotiable. We need strong policies that empower law enforcement to keep our streets safe, especially as we face rising auto thefts where more criminals, when they’re apprehended, are apprehended with weapons. I’m committed to reversing recent laws that hinder our police force, ensuring we all feel secure in our homes and our communities. We are living on a border town.
(01:47:13):
It may have been good for the rest of the state to pass a police accountability law that limited the ability for police departments to pursue a someone who’s evading them from a property crime like car theft. I was surprised that the candidates up here voted for that. When we’re in a border town, the town next to us doesn’t have a pursuit policy. So all of these kids are coming over here and causing these crimes in our neighborhood. Lastly, preserving local control over housing is crucial. We can’t let Hartford dictate the future of our neighborhoods. I’ll fight to keep those decisions in our hands. Advocating for thoughtful community driven housing solutions. I’m running to ensure fiscal responsibility, public safety, and local control. Together we can bring a brighter future, more prosperous, and I ask for your vote to make that happen. Alright, thank
Moderator (01:48:13):
You Steve. Your closing statement.
STEPHEN MESKERS (01:48:16):
Thank you Kay, and thank you Sarah for patiently putting up with us all is been my privilege and honor to serve for the last six years for the House of Representatives. In that time for the hundred 50th district, I’ve walked thousands of doors. I’ve visited with you. I’ve heard your concerns, I’ve addressed your needs. As best as my heart guides me, I’ve done my best to bring back the resources the town needs for the things we do here. It has been my privilege and honor to serve you. I have risen in the ranks to become co-chair of commerce to drive policy that’s going to improve the economic prospects for the entire state. So we aren’t the only place that gets taxed and to shift the burden. My concern for our seniors and for our children and our most vulnerable residents is why I serve. It’s why we brought back money for the Parsonage Cottage. It’s why we brought back money for River House. It’s why we brought back money for the Boys and Girls Club. It says a lot about the delegation that I have the privilege of serving with, that their dedication to our community and knows no bounds and all of us care deeply about the community. Each of the representatives who’s been here with me in the trenches in Hartford, Hector, and Rachel, I have been so privileged to serve with them and I look to continue to serve with them and I humbly ask for your vote.
Tina Courpas (01:49:55):
Thank you, Todd. Your hosting statement.
Tod Laudonia (01:49:59):
Thank you to the League of Women Voters for hosting tonight’s discussion. I hope everyone learns something new and the focus was not on personalities or parties. Civility must return to our politics. Everything runs through cycles. We seem to be mimicking the divisiveness of the early 20th century. We need to return the government to weed the people. We can do that by returning a concept of representation to the legislature replacing governance. Elected officials need to remember they’re all sent to represent all of their constituents, not just their party constituents. The one 51st District is comprised of 30% Democrats, 30% Republicans, and 40% unaffiliated voters. My opponent has voted with the Democrat caucus 99% of the time. I’m asking for your vote on November 5th so I can go to Hartford and be a voice for all of the people of the hundred 51st District. Please check my website, vote for todd.com for more information. And if you’re so inclined, donate a little help My campaign as I’m the only candidate not taking the state funding. I don’t believe in it. Thank you. Please vote whenever convenient for you after October 21st and vote for Todd. Thanks.
Moderator (01:51:36):
Enter.
Hector Arzeno (01:51:39):
Thank you very much and thank you to the League of Women Voters, Kay and Sarah, for coping out with us and all of you for spending the last two, three hours here in this debate. And I honor to serve with the leadership in the health that works and debate each bill to reach consensus at the end. 98% of the bills I repeat. 98% of the bills that we vote in Harford are bipartisan in Harford. I serve in three committees, four Calculuses and one subcommittee. I am in education, the largest and one of the most bipartisan C communities. I choose education because I don’t want any child left behind. I am convinced that education together with family and friends are the best way to progress and improvement. I serve in environment because I am a strong believer that we have to live our children, the children to be born and others, people, children, a better planet and address altogether global warming, helping to keep our drinking water safe and our wild ecosystem intact and in higher education and employment because they play a pivotal role in the state economy.
(01:52:53):
Total enrollment on our state colleges, including community colleges, are 65,000 students, plus 35,000 in the state flagship Yukon. 90% of the state colleges graduates remain in Connecticut after graduation. They are the state workforce. As the governor said, I deliver measurable results with my colleagues. We have expanded voting in rise. We fund the local program for children and seniors in Greenwich, close to 8 million in both sessions. We reduce income and returnment tax and ensure infrastructure from ES to pedestrian safety to schools like Central Middle School where we deliver 20% of the total approved construction amount. To be sure the project will go forward. In this uncertain time, I will continue to stay focused. This is why I am humbling as you to send me back to Hartford on November 5th. You can start on the 21st. Yes. On
Moderator (01:53:51):
Behalf of the league women’s voters, I would like to thank the candidates for not only being this evening, but for their willingness to serve their community. It’s sincerely appreciated and thanks also to the timers.
