Aging infrastructure and decreasing taxes.

Our beautiful Cove Island Park is the most popular park in the city, but sadly it doesn’t get enough funding or attention. It needs new bathrooms up by the entrance of the park and deserves to be better maintained. The marina needs to be dredged as boats cannot get in or out during medium or low tide which is a shame.

We have great teachers but our school facilities are not giving our children what they need to thrive. There needs to be more accountability because the mold crisis could have been prevented if we had better management of our facilities.

Too many people in District 8 have experienced destructive flooding and moisture problems due to lack of proper drainage. The city’s engineering department needs to pay better attention to pitch and grading at all construction sites which may be causing flooding in abutting properties. We also need to make sure that our storm water team gets the manpower it needs to effectively maintain and clean out our thousands of storm drain catch basins, before the water ends up in our residential basements.

Living in Stamford is a shared experience by all of our residents and landowners. Unfortunately, some entities, like large residential developers have been given special deals that result in large sums of money being diverted from the general fund. These special agreements must be reexamined as Stamford has become unaffordable for many regular working class people.

Our public schools need hundreds of millions of dollars in repair and new construction if we are going to do it right. The band aid approach isn’t working. The residents of Stamford can not afford to foot the majority of the bill. We need our state representatives & senators along with our federal representatives and senators to lobby Hartford and Washington for available funding. We all need to collaborate, including the city boards and the public, in a transparent way in order to achieve school infrastructure that our children deserve. All plans need to be publicly discussed and vetted. I have been attending most of the Board of Finance meetings and in working with members of the Board of Education it is clear that there are many possible solutions to the problem of our educational infrastructure that are better than any public/private partnership has to offer our children and the generations of Stamford’s students to come.

If elected, I plan to mail out a questionnaire to all of my constituents that asks them for specific feedback on local issues and also gives them my direct contact information so we can keep in touch. I want to know what my neighborhood thinks about everything from how garbage gets picked up to parking congestion on our neighborhood streets. I want to know what your experience has been like in District 8 so that I can help make it better. I will also be asking residents to opt into an email mailing list that I will use to keep people informed about upcoming issues in our district and important votes coming up on the Board of Reps. The more people that get involved and share their thoughts the better representative I can be.