Tami Z: Regional Cooperation for Lower Taxes

To the Editor:

It’s no great secret to those who have known me for a while that I am a strong supporter of regional cooperation.  With ever increasing demands on resources, unreasonable state mandates, and a sluggish economy, our small towns need to do whatever they can to deliver good quality services at the lowest cost to taxpayers.   Some of our towns are doing exactly that.  For example, East Granby and Suffield now share animal control services.  Suffield and Granby Board of Education are seeking joint proposals to install wireless service in their schools.  There is also a lot of inter-town cooperation in public safety. 

There is potential to do more, especially in education, and especially at the high school level, where the recently adopted common core standards has the potential to dramatically increase local taxes.  I applaud the regional cooperation now in place, which includes some Advanced Placement classes and coursework for credit at Asnuntuck Community College.  This represents a good start, but our students can benefit even more from the increased options and opportunities, which may be available by working with neighboring school districts. 

However, there are barriers which restrict even greater sharing of staff and services.  One of these is the current structure of the state’s ECS (Educational Cost Sharing) program, which is calculated on a town-by-town basis and discourages regional cooperation.   

As a state legislator, I will support removing  barriers to regional cooperation.  However, I will strongly oppose forced regionalization, in which the state will make decisions about regional boundaries and create another layer of costly and ineffective bureaucracy.  Town elected officials and managers, with input from residents and businesses, know what works best for their towns.  They do not need the state telling them which towns to share services with and which services to consider consolidating.  But our towns do need the freedom to make sensible choices.  

Come November, you will have an opportunity to make a choice.  That choice will be to allow me to go to Hartford and work on issues such as Regional Cooperation - removing the “red tape” to make Regional Cooperation just that – cooperation.  Our towns have the right to make decisions that work best for our communities.  With your support in this fall’s election, I will champion this and other common sense ideas in the State Legislature.   

Sincerely yours,

Tami Zawistowski

Candidate for 61st District State Representative

Paid for by Tami Z for the 61st.  June Cameron, Treasurer.  Approved by Tami Zawistowski.