Gubernatorial Candidate Shares His Vision And Plan For Connecticut

Addressing the Newtown Democrats at their monthly meeting November 11 at Edmond Town Hall, John DeStefano, Jr, mayor of New Haven and candidate for governor in 2006, put forward an agenda designed to expand Connecticut’s economy, relieve the state’s dependency upon property taxes for education funding, and solve the intractable and growing snarl on Connecticut’s roads.

Mr DeStefano advocates making Connecticut “a place of urgency, a place of excellence, a place that organizes itself to win and strives to be the best at creating jobs; the best at preparing kids to enter the school system ready to learn; the best trained and best educated workforce; and we shouldn’t accept for a moment that we can’t do those things.  This is a self-interest that extends to both ends of Route 34 and all across the state.

“Without creating jobs and without creating wealth, we cannot do anything else we want to do as a state,” he emphasized.

Human resources are absolutely crucial to Connecticut’s competitiveness, he added. “I don’t understand a state that accepts kids arriving in kindergarten unprepared to learn.”

Chairman of the state’s blue-ribbon commission on “Smart Growth,” whose recommendations have been embraced by municipal executives across Connecticut, Mr DeStefano laid out the connection between programmatic matters and quality of life: “We have lost 400,000 acres of the 2,000,000 acres of undeveloped farm and forest land we had in Connecticut in 1988.  The reason the big box retail and strip mall construction is taking place in rural areas rather than economic centers is because our tax policy compels [us] to do this, and our land use strategy places no value on preserving open space in our rural and suburban communities and placing commercial development in our cities.”

Mr DeStefano’s remarks can be seen in their entirety on the Newtown Democrats’ regular cable television program, airing on Tuesday evenings at 8 and again at noon on Fridays on Charter’s  Channel 21.