United We Stand, Divided We Fall

Hello, Branford.

Mr. John Hartwell recently wrote a letter to the editor about me. He signed it simply “John Hartwell, Branford.” For those who don’t know, Mr. Hartwell is also an elected Democratic member of Branford’s Representative Town Meeting and chairman of its Ways and Means Committee. So I am going to answer him the way I would answer any public official. Respectfully, and on the record.

I had asked this town to acknowledge the big orange elephant in the room and then set it aside. Mr. Hartwell picked that elephant right back up and listed what Washington has cut. Food assistance. Medicaid. School grants. Then he asked everyone, including me, three times, how we feel about that.

I do not usually answer letters like this one. A candidate who spends his time answering every critic is not spending it talking to you. But this one is worth answering, because it is a perfect example of the very thing I am running to change.

So here is my answer. I feel what you feel. If a family in Branford loses help buying groceries, that is a real problem. If people lose health coverage and end up in the emergency room, the rest of us pay for it. I am not going to defend every bill that comes out of Washington, from this president or any other.

But Mr. Hartwell wrote as though I have a seat at the table in Washington. I do not. Nobody on your ballot in the 102nd District votes in Congress. Not me. Not Robin Comey. The job we are both applying for is in Hartford.

He says I am the one asking you to look away. I see it the other way around. Pointing at Washington is how you look away from eight years in Hartford.

About that $3 million

Mr. Hartwell’s best example is $3 million the Board of Finance set aside in case federal school grants get cut. “Luckily,” he writes, “the town has the money.”

It was not luck. It was twelve years of discipline under the Cosgrove administration, with Republicans and Democrats on the same boards making the same hard calls.

And here is a fact. In May 2024, as chairman of the RTM’s Ways and Means Committee, Mr. Hartwell argued that Branford’s reserves were well above what the town needed, and his caucus passed a resolution asking the Board of Finance to draw more out of them.

I do not bring that up to embarrass him. I am glad he values that cushion today. It is there because this town saved when it would have been easier to spend. He made my argument for me.

Now let’s get back to the debate.

Mr. Hartwell would like you thinking about Washington. I would like you thinking about our debate on September 29.

I held up Rep. Comey’s own mailer and asked which bill in it she wrote or championed. She did not name one. I asked how she has voted on housing for Branford. I did not get an answer to that either.

What I heard, again and again, was “we.” We passed. We secured. We need to look at.

Who is we? “We” was not on the ballot. Robin Comey was. For eight years, the voters of Branford did not elect a committee. They elected one person to represent this town.

Here is that one person’s record. She voted yes on House Bill 6107. Yes on 5002. Yes on 8002, and no on all three amendments that would have softened it. Every one with her caucus.

So did anyone in Branford get the opportunity to sit down with her before those votes? Better still, did she ask Branford how she should vote on a housing bill that reshapes this town? Or did she simply vote the party line?

To those who say I have not proposed anything

I have been told by some that I do not propose bills. To those people, please take note.

I will write bills, not just vote on them. I will go after Section 8-30g itself, the 1989 law that lets a developer walk around our zoning, and work with anyone in either party to rewrite it. House Bill 8002 did not fix that law. It added insult to injury.

And the first thing I will put my name on is this. If housing help is being handed out in Branford, the people who built this town are first in line. First right of refusal for our seniors, so they can stay in the homes they paid for. For our veterans. And for the young people who grew up here and want to stay.

One question, and it is a fair one.

Rep. Comey has championed Birth to Three. My grandson went through that program, and I have thanked her for it publicly.

So here is my question. Mr. Hartwell, maybe you can answer it for Rep. Comey, since she has chosen not to.

After Birth to Three, where do we go from here? In a state that is clearly unaffordable for families, let alone single moms, what happens when that child turns four? And ten? And eighteen? Where is the plan for them?

Here is mine. I will take the work Rep. Comey has done on Birth to Three and champion expanding that same commitment, birth to eighteen, with a real opportunity at every stage.

And after eighteen, I will put Project 1829 and Beyond back on the table. Tax savings and down payment help for first time homebuyers. Tax discounts for the businesses that hire and train our young people. A plan that lets someone from 18 to 29, and into their thirties, afford to live and stay in Connecticut, and in Branford.

We owe our kids that. CNBC ranked Connecticut 23rd for business this year, the middle of the pack. Look closer, and it gets worse. 40th for the cost of doing business. 44th for the cost of living. SmartAsset says a family of four needs nearly $300,000 a year to live comfortably here, the fourth highest in the country.

No president did that to us. It was built in Hartford.

We have spent so much time pointing fingers that we have not looked in the mirror. Whose fault is it that our young people cannot afford the state they grew up in? Not theirs. It is ours. It is our generation’s fault that our children are struggling to live here affordably. This idea that they all want to live in their parents’ basement is a fallacy. Young people want to be proud of what they do. They want to earn a living and contribute.

I intend to change that. Not a handout. A hand up.

Elections have consequences. So do records.

Rep. Comey has the same opportunity to speak that I do. In this newspaper, or in one of her mail pieces, and I expect one will land in your mailbox right about the time early voting starts.

When it does, my question to her is not only what she will do. It is why it has not already been done. You cannot serve eight years and then campaign as though you just arrived. If Branford is harder to afford today than it was when she took office, she owes the people who hired her an explanation for that, and for the votes she cast along the way.

Mr. Hartwell, you have a seat at the table in this town. I would ask you to encourage her to answer, so the voters get a fair chance to decide.

And to both of you, and to anyone in either party who finds it easier to divide this town than to fix what it costs to live in it, I request one thing.

Let’s stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

The Independent Party put me, a Republican, on the same line as Senator Christine Cohen, a Democrat who beat me twice. If the Independent Party had the vision to see past partisan lines, then maybe we can do the same thing right here in our town of Branford.

United we stand, divided we fall. And a town that is divided is a town that is destined to fail.