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10/21/2020 08:30 AMIncumbent Democrat Sean Scanlon is unchallenged in his bid to retain his 98th Assembly District seat, which covers Guilford and southeastern Branford. First elected in 2014, he has chaired the Insurance and Real Estate Committee and has also served on the Public Health and Transportation committees.
Running unopposed for the third consecutive time, Scanlon said he doesn’t take this implicit endorsement by 98th District voters for granted, vowing to keep constituent needs at the forefront as he heads for fourth two-year term.
“I’m deeply grateful that barring any unforeseen circumstances, that I will be re-elected, and I don’t take it lightly not to have an opponent,” he said. “This job is the greatest honor of my life, and doing it during this very difficult time has been an even bigger honor. I’ve had more people call my office and call me for help in the last six months that I [had] in the first six years of doing this job.”
Local political leaders have assumed an outsized role across the state across the country during the pandemic as many people have found themselves desperate for reliable information to make decisions regarding their businesses, health, or family. More people have had to rely on government programs and aid, creating another responsibility for someone in Scanlon’s position to quickly identify and address these needs through government action.
Public Health
Health care—maybe the most urgent need when a serious and hyper-contagious virus spreads across the world—has been one of Scanlon’s signature issues. He had introduced bills before the pandemic that would have given people access to the state’s health plan: the so-called “public option,” which is a program he claims the pandemic has made even more obviously important.
“We need to divorce people’s insurance from where they work,” Scanlon said.
The State of Washington became the first to pass public option legislation last year, while other states have seen the initiative whither in the face of intense lobbying from insurance companies.
But Scanlon said that the way he has structured a plan, there is a common sense, universal benefit that “would not necessarily” be a cost born by the taxpayers.
“The bill I introduced last session would have opened up the state employee plan...to small businesses and nonprofits,” Scanlon said. “I’ve always believed, why should I have good health care when my constituents can’t have the same good health care as their representative—I think that’s wrong.”
State negotiators would have more leverage in negotiating the plan with more people on it, Scanlon said, and a “stop-loss” stipulation, which Scanlon described as effectively putting the risk of the plan’s potential failure on its customers instead of on Connecticut taxpayers, would ensure no large financial burden on the state.
“It’s really not a new program that’s going to cost a lot of money, or cost a lot of money to get it going,” Scanlon said. “It just allows people who are having a hard time finding affordable insurance to buy the same plan that I do as your politician.”
The Budget
On the subject of money, Scanlon lauded the biennial budget that ensured the state wouldn’t touch a large rainy day fund—close to $3 billion—which would help offset the tremendous financial impact of the pandemic. He cautioned that the state was still “in uncharted territory,” and that Connecticut needed to be ready for anything and continue to look for aid from the federal government.
“The economy works in strange ways, and there are undoubtedly a lot of people who are out there hurting right now,” he said.
Scanlon also claimed that the budget was driven by a small number of wealthy Wall Street leaders living in the state, who overall have not suffered as much as the average working resident, providing an element of stability.
All these factors made him “cautiously optimistic” that the state would weather the immediate short-term hit of the pandemic as business begins to fully open up.
Regionalization
Another issue that often sparks controversy on the shoreline and has received increased attention recently is regionalization. Scanlon pushed back on the “boogeyman” that this term has become, saying in his mind it did not include things like “busing Guilford students into New Haven and visa versa.”
“That’s not what that is. Regionalization is all about finding savings, and doing it in a small way, and starting small,” he said. “We should be rewarding communities that voluntarily decide that sharing some kind of service is in their best interest.”
Grant funding incentives should be the priority, Scanlon said, and he lauded Guilford for already working in this direction as the town seeks to share economic development responsibilities with Madison.
Scanlon has been outspoken in the past in favor of an overall move toward county-based governance. He said it didn’t necessarily “make sense” to have a county school district including all of New Haven county, but said Guilford and other shoreline towns should “look at” the potential or possibility of combining schools with other towns that “make sense.
“But again, I don’t think that’s anything that the state should mandate, I think that’s something that towns should voluntarily decide that [it] makes sense,” Scanlon said.
The push toward regionalization, Scanlon acknowledged, is due to “the tremendous inequities” between communities and schools in the state, often drawn along racial lines.
Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, for instance, has about 60 percent of its students qualifying for free lunches, around a 75 percent graduation rate, and an 18 percent proficiency in math and 38 percent in reading.
In contrast, Guilford High School (GHS) has around 5 percent of its student body eligible for free lunch, 65 percent percent proficient in math and 87 percent proficient in reading, with a 98 percent graduation rate.
The GHS student body is 90 percent White, while Wilbur Cross is about 90 percent non-White.
Scanlon said that while some people have made arguments that regionalization can address these vast disparities, he said it isn’t “something that we can do overnight,” and also needs to be something that is “mutually agreed” to by the parties involved instead of dictated by the state.
Disparities in both schools as well as other areas can be addressed “as they stand now,” according to Scanlon, without these wholesale changes. These inequities extend across a broad spectrum of landscapes, from wages to education and beyond, and Scanlon said his immediate priority would be to find solutions through things like job training, affordable housing, and health care.
“The American dream is not necessarily as possible as it was 50 years ago,” Scanlon said. “We can almost look at this from a different perspective, which is, what can we do to improve the quality of life of people who are trying to...pursue that dream and start a business or buy their first home?
“I think we need to focus on how can we give more people more opportunity,” he added. “And that should definitely be one of our biggest focuses going into next year.”.