I am the Democratic candidate for Killingworth First Selectman.

I moved to Killingworth 13 years ago. Before that, I had lived in New Haven, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York. It took me a while to break the big-city habit of thinking, “They oughtta do something about that” when a road needed repair or the recycling system could be improved or another open space was about to be lost. In Killingworth, I realized that “they” is “us.” There’s no anonymous bureaucracy, no huge staff of functionaries—only us. That was when I started to get involved in the town government.

For the past two years I have represented you on the Board of Selectmen. I have also served on the Haddam-Killingworth School Facilities Committee, the Board of Directors of the Killingworth Library, and the Pay as You Throw Committee. I am currently on the Board of the Killingworth Foundation. On the Democratic Town Committee, I have held the position of secretary and chairperson.

I have seen Killingworth citizens on these and many other committees put in countless hours of work for our town, and remarkably, I have not seen anyone who is in it for personal gain. I have watched, though, as good people miss opportunities for progress because they don’t listen to each other, don’t reach out to others, don’t find ways to work together. If I am elected, I will seek to build consensus about both our priorities for the town and the means we should use to achieve them. We are a small town with limited resources. If we don’t all work together, we will not only waste our financial resources, we will lose the most important resource of all: the willingness of all of us as neighbors to lend a hand.

Killingworth can become a model of sustainable growth, environmental stewardship, and local democracy in action. But we can do this only if we nurture our community as well as our infrastructure.

I look forward to meeting you in the coming months. I want to hear your hopes for Killingworth and to tell you about my own ideas and plans.