We are living through a time of extraordinary challenges. The global pandemic threatened everyone’s health and financial security, and has re-ordered the economy and changed the labor market in ways that are still becoming clear.

On top of that, in the past months we have watched a reactionary Supreme Court eliminate or threaten our rights under a pinched interpretation of the US Constitution that insists on taking us back to a time when women had few legal rights, racial discrimination and segregation were common practice, and the LGBT community was regularly persecuted by the state. Rights that aren’t expressly spelled out in the US Constitution (a category that includes the right to vote) are threatened with erasure, even when they have been recognized for half a century or more.

The court has throttled the federal government’s ability to tackle climate change, an existential and urgent challenge. And a case they have agreed to take up next year takes direct aim at democracy itself, potentially enabling further politicization of vote-counting in the states.

All of which makes it clear how important state and local government is, and, in particular, how important Connecticut’s legislature has been to protecting our rights.

Stable, well-functioning state government proved itself as a vital bulwark against the chaos sowed by the federal government during the pandemic, and now it provides some protection against a severe rightward turn in the Supreme Court.

The times call for steady leadership, communication that is accurate, timely and helpful, and a full-time commitment to the needs of our region.

My style of leadership is to make connections, not exploit divisions.

An essential part of my job, especially now, is keeping constituents informed, regardless of whether the legislature is in session. Since my term began, every week I have sent a video report and email newsletter to constituents, making them available on my website and through social media. During the height of the pandemic, when information was changing rapidly, I emailed the newsletter three times each week.

There will be tough conversations ahead and the Northwest Corner needs to have a seat at that table where the decisions get made. I have forged strong relationships with Connecticut’s legislative leadership and government officials in Hartford that have earned me that seat, reflected by my position as House Chair of the Public Safety & Security Committee in my second term.

I look forward to continuing to be a strong voice for the Northwest Corner as we chart our course into the future.

My own interest in criminal justice and public safety traces back to my time as a federal prosecutor, when I had an opportunity to work with many dedicated law enforcement agents. I saw firsthand both how law enforcement could make communities safer and how the system often has a disparate racial impact. It is that background and experience that led me to be asked to chair the Public Safety & Security Committee.

Having brought my own experience to conversations both with local and statewide police leadership and long-time racial justice activists in the legislature, I am proud to have helped shape legislation in this area, including a significant bill passed in a July 2020 special legislative session that will begin to address the disparate impact our policing methods have had on communities of color, through increased accountability, recruitment of more minority officers, improved and increased training, and an expansion of resources available to police officers such as social workers and other mental health professionals.

In the past year, the committee I chair introduced and passed legislation creating a Hate Crimes Investigation Unit, streamlining data collection, reporting, and information sharing. We extended employment protections to police officers that seek and receive mental health care services. We funded training and resources for law enforcement to address community health crises.

We also responded to juvenile crime, auto thefts, and pandemic-related crime by improving law enforcement’s access to relevant information and training, and creating job training and engagement opportunities for young adults in a bipartisan bill.

Protecting public safety also means continuing to enhance gun safety in Connecticut. In 2019, I supported legislation to strengthen safe gun-storage laws and ban ghost guns. In 2021, we strengthened Connecticut’s “Extreme Risk Protection Order” (or ERPO) laws. These laws save lives by creating a legal mechanism, with due process protections, for anyone to warn the police about a person they believe is at risk of imminent harm to themselves or others and who may have access to firearms. If police find a risk of imminent harm, they can ask a judge to issue a “risk warrant” allowing firearms to be removed. The legislation allows family members or medical professionals to approach a court directly, and will prevent firearm purchases by those under ERPOs as well.

Connecticut has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. It limits voting to a single day and restricts access to absentee ballots to those with a qualified “excuse.” Moreover, we have enshrined these restrictions in our state constitution, making them cumbersome to change. But that process of amending our constitution is now well under way.

In 2019 and again in 2021, we passed legislation calling for an amendment to our state constitution to allow for early voting, and now the question will appear on your ballot in November 2022.

We need to do the same for no-excuse absentee ballots, allowing people to vote by mail as so many did successfully during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Voting by mail, with appropriate safeguards, is safe and secure. It worked well for Connecticut in the pandemic, and several states have been using it for years. A recent study looking at more than 14 million votes cast by mail found only 372 potentially fraudulent votes, or 0.0025 percent. Current technology enables us to make this process even more secure.

In 2021, we passed legislation calling for a constitutional amendment to allow for no-excuse absentee ballots, the first step in the process. We will need to pass it again in the upcoming 2023-24 term in order to put it on your ballot in 2024, and I look forward to advocating for that resolution.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed glaring weaknesses in our healthcare system. It has claimed more than 11,000 souls in Connecticut, strained our ability to adequately protect our healthcare workers, exacerbated a mental health crisis, and upended everyone’s daily lives.

Tackling these weaknesses must be a priority. That starts with ensuring that everyone has access to high quality, affordable care. As I’ve learned from fighting for a “public option” in Connecticut -- that would allow small businesses and nonprofits to buy into the same insurance system that state employees benefit from – entrenched interests make this a tall order. I pledge to continue that fight.

As part of the right to increased access to healthcare in our rural district, I’m proud to have procured $3 million in bond funding to construct a new health center in North Canaan that will provide primary and mental health care for all residents, regardless of ability to pay. Construction is scheduled to begin this fall. I am fighting to protect Sharon Hospital from cuts being proposed by its owner, Nuvance Health. I am working with state officials, hospital executives, doctors, nurses, and community members to find a sustainable financial path for the hospital so that vital services including labor & delivery, after-hours surgery, and the intensive care unit will continue to be available to all of us.

During my time in office, we’ve tackled several important health issues:

• Reined in the costs of insulin and related supplies by capping costs at $150 per month - we were the first state in the country to do that.

• Expanded access to telehealth, a critical resource extended during the pandemic that was so successful we have made it a permanent part of healthcare, increasing access to a wide range of medical professionals by video or telephone-only platforms.

• Passed legislation that expanded Medicaid coverage, protected those with pre-existing conditions, and ensured that insurance companies cover mental as well as physical health needs.

In 2022, we:

• Strengthened the Certificate of Need process that regulates healthcare systems, helping increase access to healthcare facilities throughout the state.

• Established healthcare benchmarking, collecting data on what we spend on healthcare for the first time. This data will help create a road map to help lower healthcare cost growth.

• Made a significant investment in our childrens’ mental health, by increasing funding for infant and toddler care, increasing pay for childcare workers, assisting local childcare facilities with capital costs, providing grants to local schools to hire support staff (including in the areas of mental health such as social workers, psychologists, and counselors), funded expansions of school-based health centers, and expanded a new 24/7 emergency mental health response hotline.

We also continued Connecticut’s leadership in protecting access to reproductive healthcare, at a time when access to care is disappearing throughout the country after the Supreme Court’s erasure in Dobbs of a woman’s right to exercise autonomy over her own reproductive healthcare decisions. Connecticut remains a safe haven for an individual’s right to choose. In 2022, we set the standard in the nation on reproductive rights by bolstering and establishing protections both for those seeking abortions and those who provide such services.

• We expanded eligibility to perform abortion care to include advanced nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and physician assistants.

• We blocked Texas and other aggressive states from targeting Connecticut patients, doctors, and advocates.

• We protected individuals from extradition to other states for seeking, providing, or assisting others in obtaining reproductive healthcare that is legal in Connecticut.

When I was elected in 2018, it was clear Connecticut had work to do to get its fiscal house in order. Throughout my four years in office, I have worked on and supported the tough legislation that got us to where we are today, including two biennial budgets, balanced and passed on time, and a Rainy Day Fund that has exceeded its legal limits of just over $3 billion, allowing us to make significant payments toward our pension liabilities.

One of our challenges in Connecticut is high levels of income inequality: all of the economic benefits from the last recovery went to the top income bracket. The pandemic has not been even-handed, either, with economically vulnerable communities hit much harder than others. As we craft future budgets, and rebuild our economy post-pandemic, we must create structures that make it possible for all of us to participate in that rebuilt economy. That means building the framework to create good, stable jobs, and ensuring access to healthcare, to a quality education, and to affordable housing.

The environment is part of our cultural heritage in the Northwest Corner. It’s what connects many of us to this region. Our cleaner air and water are also economic assets that many local businesses and farms rely upon to survive. Our parks, protected lands and state forests bring much-needed tourist dollars to the Northwest Corner and have provided a sanctuary for us.

A healthy environment is crucial to our own health. Often, the very ones who benefit most from activities that pollute and degrade the air, the land, and the water are the least likely to bear the burdens that result. Once done, that harm is hard and sometimes impossible to repair. For these reasons, it is the responsibility of our government to step in and protect our environment for the common good.

The recent Supreme Court decision in West Virginia vs. the Environmental Protection Agency severely constricted the federal government’s ability to act in this area, making it more clear than ever that state action is necessary to protect clean air, clean water, open space, and family farms.

I support legislation that will attempt to slow climate change by speeding up the shift to renewable energy and looking at structural changes such as not building more gas pipelines and tightening restrictions on leakage from those pipelines.

In 2022, we passed the Connecticut Clean Air Act, speeding up the timeline for the electrification of the state fleet of vehicles, making it easier for renters and condo owners to install electric chargers, exempting electric charging stations from property tax assessments, and incentivizing school districts to use electric school buses. We set a goal of reaching zero greenhouse gas emissions from electricity supplied to you by 2040, and expanded financing to develop zero-emission vehicle infrastructure, build more solar power and fuel cells, and reinforce our electric grid.

We also invested in sustainable farming and open space, by making climate-smart farming and forestry practices more financially accessible, and preserving approximately 1,900 acres of land this year.

In 2021, we updated the state’s bottle bill, designed to increase recycling of glass and plastic containers, reduce costs for municipalities, and support redemption centers and the people they employ throughout the region.

We face a serious issue in how our towns will deal with solid waste moving forward as our regional waste-processing plant (known as “MIRA”) closed in July. The plant is now trucking waste to other places for disposal as it searches for other solutions, which should include both waste reduction strategies and investment in alternative strategies such anaerobic digestion.

Our region of the state has some of the biggest deficits in terms of access to high-speed internet. The pandemic laid bare the long-term consequences of that, as students were suddenly forced to use distance learning, adults worked from home, and many sought health care using telehealth services. Remote work and telehealth are here to stay, particularly in our region, and for the Northwest Corner to thrive in the decades ahead, we must invest in our digital infrastructure.

The federal government has dedicated resources to investing in rural broadband, and thanks to legislation I worked on in 2021, the state has created a program to allocate those resources. The process of mapping the need throughout the state is ongoing, and it will be critical in the months ahead to make sure that the towns of the Northwest Corner are positioned to take advantage of these resources as they become available.

Connecticut consumers pay the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. In 2020, Tropical Storm Isaias underscored the failures of Eversource management to meet our basic needs, leaving vulnerable residents and critical infrastructure at risk.

In response, in 2020 we passed the Take Back the Grid Act in CT, making our electric utilities more accountable for performance, and strengthening compensation for ratepayers who lose power for significant periods of time.

More recently, global inflation and the Russian war against Ukraine have caused further spikes in energy costs which make clear that our dependence on fossil fuels is not only harmful to the environment but puts us at the mercy of global events outside of our control. We will have to focus on ensuring that everyone in CT can heat and power their homes as the weather turns colder, increasing energy efficiency and making our electric grid more resilient and sustainable.