I understand the concerns of my constituents regarding the housing bill that passed the state House of Representatives and Senate. I am also aware we must do something to address our state’s housing challenges, which has had adverse effects on many across Connecticut. For those reasons, I would only support a housing bill that struck a balance between both concerns. I voted to pass the housing bill because I strongly believe this legislation addresses both issues effectively by positioning us to take meaningful steps forward on our state’s housing issues without compromising the authority of local municipalities.
The legislation that received my support in passing the Senate will examine ways we can determine the best future that will ensure all Connecticut families and seniors can afford to reside in our state. There were portions of the original bill that received criticism, as fears were stoked that part of the legislation would strip control from municipalities. However, in the final version of the bill, the legislation I voted to pass, will simply assess what the need is for increased affordable housing and then identify options for how towns and cities can go forward, empowering towns with knowledge to create more financially accessible living options.
Addressing the state’s housing challenges has been at the focal point of this legislative session, and with good reason. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), our state has a sizable shortage of affordable housing units and an overly large percentage of residents’ income are going towards housing, making it difficult to afford other necessities. With current housing issues facing people across the state, inaction would further hurt current Connecticut residents and attracting new residents, from out-of-state, extremely difficult.
What’s more, eventually addressing how we can develop more affordable places to live can have a positive impact on commerce and real estate in our community. In Massachusetts, their legislature passed the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Communities Act. The law enables communities to permit mixed-use projects, like commercial or ground-floor retail spaces, in new multifamily districts. Greg Vasile, who serves as CEO for the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, supported the legislation. He told the MetroWest Daily News, “There was no way that we could not embrace something like this that allowed for ground floor retail because it really builds communities. It’s great for businesses, it’s great for people and it gives a lot of ability for people in those communities to even start businesses.”
There exists so much we can do to strengthen our neighborhoods. I am committed to ensuring communities across the 26th Senate district remain places where young people who grew up and attended schools here can afford to return to after graduating college to live and work. Gathering more knowledge on how best to move forward can also help seniors living on fixed incomes, ensuring they will never be priced out of towns they call home. The answer to our state’s housing challenges should not be to stoke fear or to do nothing at all, as both will only exacerbate a problem that carries with it the potential to affect people in all communities, and at all stages of life, in more noticeable ways.
Democrat[ic] legislators that solely voted for Fair Share Phase 1, are now trying to justify their vote[s] in favor of SB998, and so will Gov. Lamont.
Phase 1 of FAIR SHARE requires OPM to set the allocation methodology for every municipality, but the [seven] cities with 20% or more poverty. What’s your fair share number in your home town? We have OCA’s fair share calculations and they sent a letter to senators saying, go ahead, just use our numbers. It is the same numbers from the prior two legislative sessions that failed to even get out of committee last year because the numbers were completely reckless and unworkable!
See Fair Shares and financial and exponential development impact on all of Ceci’s [eight] suburbs and the rest of CT: https://tinyurl.com/CT169FairShare. To read what is wrong with Fair Share Phase 1 with ALL the bill supporting documentation and votes of all House and Senate members, [visit] https://bit.ly/SB998FairShare
Ceci voted YES and passed SB998 with Fair Share PHASE 1, legitimizing a completely reckless and unworkable allocation methodology in the bill. We suggest Ceci actually reads [sic] the MA MBTA bill, instead of just pulling a random quote. The bill was comprehensive for true transit development not the Frankenstein bill of [Connecticut] she voted to pass. It focused on true mixed use development around transit, with a threshold of 15% multi-family in suburban transit towns. (90 of 169 municipalities in the entire state of CT already have over 15% multifamily.)
Another data point, [Connecticut] is one of the smallest states in the US, as well as the most dense. At some point, a reckoning must come that it is decades of anti-business policies of Democratic leadership that have stagnated our economy and made CT unaffordable. But Ceci’s YES vote for Fair Share that will legitimize bad allocation methodology and waste [Connecticut]’s limited land, financial and natural resources and that is nothing but completely irresponsible to her constituents and she is unburdened by these facts or chooses to hide them. Your constituents are watching your votes Ceci and they know what you have done.
Elections have consequences, and Ceci’s vote will also have consequences — bringing upon CT the largest unfunded mandate on municipalities when Phase 2 is pushed by the same Democrat[ic] leadership next session. The mandates will then in a few short years make [Connecticut] have the highest in local property taxes in the US, ahead of [New Jersey], ironically the only other state in 40 years that has adopted Fair Share — not a coincidence. We should name it the Un-Democratic Fair Share, since only Democrats passed this bill.
Fair Share is costly, resulting in unending litigation in [New Jersey] and will not improve affordability in CT. Poor process and bad policy was not a good reason to vote this bill through — the leadership could have stripped out Fair Share entirely and kept the rest[;] it even could have included a comprehensive study of affordability and Fair Share Allocation methodology instead, but they did not. This was not true leadership looking out for the best interests of residents. It is always the right time to do the right thing, this was not it.
You can call it ‘phase 1’ all you want, SB998 didn’t really do any of the things you’re worried about here – most of the actual meat of it was concerning tenant rights. (see more neutral coverage of it at https://ctmirror.org/2023/06/07/ct-housing-bill-tenant-rights/) Coming up with numbers for Fair Share is useful information for future discussions about Fair Share, but it doesn’t bind us more than any other study would; if the numbers produced by this methodology are not, in fact, fair to Wilton, then that seems like a great opportunity for members like Ceci to push another bill to conduct a study using a different method.
I sense a deep disappointment among Wilton Republicans that for the third straight cycle Democrats did not actually pass any of the Big Scary Bills you’ve been saying they were going to ever since Will Haskell first cracked Wilton’s red wall open in 2018. But the fact is that they didn’t, and all you have to go on is making up even more hypothetical bills and continuing to insist against all available evidence that our representatives support them.
“Coming up with numbers for Fair Share is” a waste of taxpayer dollars. Fair Share is deeply flawed. There is no evidence it works any better than PA’s affordable housing strategy that doesn’t even require set-aside units or MA’s 40B that includes design guidelines for its affordable projects (unlike 8-30g). However, it is very good at generating lawsuits and legal fees. Going down that path is a big mistake. There are better alternatives in plain sight.
I disagree; like most political debates, this is one that would greatly benefit from more hard data. Commissioning a couple of studies is many orders of magnitude cheaper than passing a bad law.
If anything, I would think that Fair Share opponents would welcome this study, because then they’d be able to go to voters in towns like Wilton and tell them exactly how much housing the state would expect them to build under that proposal. If the numbers come back and prove to be as bad as you’re all suggesting – and given the amount of housing needed and the space Wilton has to build it in, I’m fully prepared to believe that our ‘fair share’ will indeed be unworkable – then it should be obvious to Fair Share’s proponents that it has no chance of passing, which would hopefully convince them to move along to one of those ‘better alternatives.’
Why would you even want to study a deeply flawed concept? (See Roderick Hills “Saving Mt Laurel?” for an insightful critique). Also, have our representatives made the case that Fair Share is the best alternative for Connecticut? They haven’t. Most likely this being advanced at the request of the special interest “non-profit” housers and their corporate real-estate sponsors – at the expense of our communities.
My op-ed on a better alternative:
https://ctexaminer.com/2023/01/04/now-is-the-time-to-unleash-the-swarm-of-small-builders-working-from-a-pattern-book-of-timeless-design-principles/
How do you understand its purported flaws if you don’t study it? And why should they have to make a case for it if they simply want to gather data about it?
The anti-Fair-Share folks are trying desperately to make political mountains out of molehills here, but you only get to escalate so much; if you insist that the sky is falling because the CGA so much as *looks into* Fair Share then people will be much less inclined to take you seriously the next time.
(I’m not even trying to defend Fair Share, I just don’t think it’s worth getting worked up about a tiny piece of a larger bill which in reality is probably some combination of a) a good-faith effort to gather more information about a proposal and b) a meaningless bone thrown to housing advocates disappointed that they’re unlikely to see an actual affordable housing bill pass anytime soon)
Calling these Democrat legislators is correct. aAdding [ic] is grammatically incorrect and politically inaccurate. Editing letters to the editor undermine trust in the institution.
Wikipedia describes it as a disparaging epithet – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet) – embraced by Republican luminaries like Joseph McCarthy and Newt Gingrich. So no, not grammatically correct; if I wrote a comment in which I repeatedly referred to Republicans as the Greedy Obnoxious Party I expect I would likewise get edited, or rejected entirely.
Actually, GOOD Morning Wilton follows AP style, which uses the words ‘Democrat’ as a proper noun for a member of the political party; ‘Democratic’ as an adjective to describe a noun, as in Democratic Party, Democratic voters, Democratic operative, etc.; and ‘democratic’ with a lower case ‘d’ to describe the system of government. The words Republican and Democratic are capitalized when referring to the political philosophies.
Aside from being grammatically incorrect, using the noun Democrat to modify the other noun (legislators) is historically seen as derrogatory by most nonpartisan sources. Just see FactCheck.org (a website from the Annenberg Public Policy Center) as a starting reference place.
We have a published Terms of Use on GMW that explains our methodology and editorial policy, as well as several other hallmarks of transparent, credible journalism — several that are not available on your website. In that Terms of Use we let readers know that we reserve the right to correct for errors in spelling, grammar and style in comments, social media posts and letters without changing the author’s meaning. The use of brackets shows that we corrected those errors in grammatical usage without changing the author’s intent. It’s actually designed to further trust of our readers.
As a simple courtesy, people and organizations should be called what they want to be called. The distinction described above between “Democrat” to refer to individuals and “Democratic” to refer to the party is the correct phraseology.
Over the last twenty years (and even earlier) Republican Party leadership and conservative media have used the clipped phrase “Democrat Party” as an intentional slight. The misname has become so prevalent in some circles that I suspect many regular people who use the phrase in 2023 are doing so innocently (especially if they get their news from a limited group of sources).
George W. Bush famously apologized to Democratic legislators after using the phrase “Democrat Party” in a State of the Union. His apology and corrected use going forward helped relations in that Congress. In general when I hear regular people use the phrase “Democrat Party” or “Democrat legislators” I assume they are doing so with no intent to insult, but those who use the incorrect grammar knowingly should understand that it can create a small but unnecessary wedge.
Tom Dubin, Chair, Wilton Democratic Town Committee
State Senator Maher is being disingenuous here. It is not credible to believe this bill (which was snuck through in the dead of night) is simply an innocuous fair and balanced study. That would be like passing a bill to assess building a bridge that you have no intention of ever building, which, were that true, would be a total waste of taxpayer money. The whole underlying basis and methodology of this assessment appears arbitrary and designed to bring about a desired result. To be fair, she may understand our concerns, but understanding and caring are different things.