Your Voice

I recently joined a political letter writing club.  It is a facinating group of women who all care deeply about the future of our town, state and country.  Even more impressive is that they understand the value of their voice and that if they do not use their voice and speak up in the process it will not be heard.  They get together once a month, much like a book club, and they discuss a relevent issue of the day.  The best part is after a healthy conversation, with often differing views, they put pen to papar and write letters to elected officials (even more clever is to have laptops on sight and write and send thoughts on the spot).

 I am hosting the next meeting of the group and the issue for the month will be clean vehicles and the idea of putting tax incentives in place to encourage people to drive more energy effiicient cars.  This is actually a timly issue because the Connecticut General Assembly is due to discuss this idea during thier session that begins next month.  I am interested to hear what a group of mothers turned community activist have to say abou the idea?

I attended my first constituent event. The idea is that people (in this case friends and neighbors) get together and talk about their concerns about our future. It is supposed to be a helpful, insightful, grassroots approach to learning about what matters to voters. I am looking forward to attending many of these, I think it will be the best way for me to determine if the issues I care about are also concerns of my constituents.

We talked about traffic and schools; I expected those. The two issues I found most interesting were Fair Share Health Care legislation and a state legislators role in economic development? Two different issues, I was surprised and impressed that these were in the forefront of people’s minds.

Fair Share Health Care legislation is being discussed all over the country and many people simply call it the Wal-Mart bill because in many cases the legislatures are using these new laws to try and force Wal-Mart and other big businesses to provide better health insurance coverage to their workers. A nice idea in theory. Interestingly, the impact of such laws may not have the desired result. One of my neighbors mentioned that in Maryland, (where a law like this has passed) Wal-mart decided to move 800 jobs out of the state in protest.

Really it is the root of the issue that is the problem — access to health insurance and affordable health care. I am not sure I have an opinion on the Wal-mart legislation but it seems that this type of law would serve only as a band-aid approach to fixing the much deeper rooted issue of access and affordability.

The other question that came up was the role of a State Legislator in helping or supporting locally based economic development projects. Can a legislator effectively work in a state capitol and help develop the corporate tax base through legislated incentives? Another story that was brought up was (I do not know it to be true) but that GE, an important corporate partner to my district and the Fairfield community, recently chose to grow a new division with several hundred jobs in Ohio instead of in Fairfield, CT. The question was if this is true, where were our locally elected legislators, did they know and could they have done anything to help keep those jobs here in Connecticut?

I told you two big whammy’s for a first time constituent event. Regular voters have some pretty forward thinking ideas. I will work on finding answers and let them and you know.

Hi! My name is Kim Fawcett and this is my Blog.  I have never had anything like a Blog before so this is all new to me.  Actually, alot of what is going on in my life recently is new to me. About a year ago I decided to explore the idea of running for political office,  that is to run for politcal office for all the right reasons.  Because I care about the future of my town and our state, because I truly believe we can all have voice in the public policy process and make a difference.  I am a determined idealist! 

I am setting up this Blog to share my campaign experiences with the world, get feed back and hopefully eventaully encourage others to join me in bringing the voice of the grass roots back into government.

 My actual campagin began last Tuesday, January 17th with a press conference and a media splash.  We did a good job of getting attention and letting people know there will be a contested race in Connecticut’s 133rd Legislative district this year.  This will be the first time a Democrat (me) runs against the locally elected incumbent in seven years.  And honestly, seven years is too long for any elected official to run unchecked. Now the work begins.  The planning, the fundraising and the issues!!  There is a lot of work to do.  AND it is overwhelming.

 This Blog I hope will be about the issues.  My plan is to run a grass roots camapaign and talk to as many people as I can.  I plan to use this Blog to share with you the issues that regular people in my community care about.  If I am sucessful in reaching out to enough people my voice should over time truly become their voice in the process and that is my campaign slogan YOUR VOICE..FOR CHANGE!