Your Voice

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.