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For Lonnie Reed, The Work Continues

In her 10-year career as Branford’s 102nd District State Representative, Lonnie Reed built a remarkable track record of working to protect and enhance her community—but the work didn’t start on her first day in office, and it won’t end now that she’s officially retired from the post.

“I’m going to stay engaged. There are issues that I care about, going forward,” says Lonnie.

Earlier in her legislative career, Lonnie received the prestigious Toll Fellowship Award—one of the nation’s top recognitions for state legislators—from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which led her to serve on the NCSL Energy and Environment Committee. In Hartford, Lonnie was House Chair of the Energy & Technology Committee. As part of her legacy of legislative work, she played a key role in developing two innovative models for the nation: the enactment of a master plan to go after clean and renewable energy goals statewide, known as CT’s Comprehensive Energy Strategy; and the nation’s first Green Bank, fast-tracking energy efficiency and clean energy development through a public/private partnership.

Now, with the Council of State Governments, she’ll be working to help bring together the New England region and the states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland around regional energy issues that can help de-carbonize the atmosphere.

“We’re working very hard to pull all these legislatures together so we’re not working at cross-purposes,” says Lonnie. “These are really regional issues. Billions of dollars are going to be spent, and it’s really important that we cooperate and coordinate and partner on a lot of this stuff.”

Lonnie, who was co-chair of the Bipartisan Life Sciences Caucus, has also taken up a request from non-profit BioCT to assist in its work to support and grow the state’s bioscience sector.

“They want me to stay very engaged in helping them to keep growing that sector and advocating for it in smart ways, and also change the narrative about Connecticut in general. This great myth that everybody wants to flee and nobody wants to be here, we really need to change that. There are all kinds of companies that are interested in coming here, and so I’ve agreed to be involved with them, as well,” she says.

Looking Back

Even as she looks forward to these and other challenges, Lonnie says she’s only just beginning to take a moment to look back at some of the milestones she experienced during her tenure.

“You know, I was taking my office apart the other day, and going through things, and stacking up the stuff that every legislator gets over time; and I was looking at stuff I’m so proud of, that I sort of hadn’t yet circled back to think about,” says Lonnie. “Like we were the first state to ban bisphelol A [BPA] in baby bottles and water bottles. And also cadmium—we banned cadmium in children’s jewelry. Toxic chemicals. I drove those bills, and I took those bills out; and they were hours and hours and hours of debate.”

Lonnie was recognized by the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy Connecticut for her work to ban the toxic chemicals. The backstory on Lonnie’s research, drive, and bipartisan work to bring in the laws, and to overcome the fight put up by the state’s manufacturing base and lobbyists sent from Washington, D.C., is just one of many great stories this former award-winning reporter can tell. But for Lonnie, it was simply about doing the right thing.

“It was a slippery slope, passing those bills. Again, I pulled people from both sides of the aisle—because I knew there were people on the other side of the aisle who didn’t want their babies drinking out of bisphelol bottles [and ingesting an] endocrine disrupter. So we got that through. And there were a lot of moments like that,” she says.

Early in her legislative career, Lonnie authored and guided a bill to ban financial advisors from falsifying their credentials to lure senior investors.

“That was going on in this state—they were doing things like selling annuities that wouldn’t mature for 10 years to 80-year-olds. The things they were getting away with! We used to have all these advisors who called themselves senior certified financial advisors. And we don’t have them now, unless they’re credentialed,” says Lonnie.

To help pass the bill, Lonnie reached out to a U.S. Senator at the time who was trying to pass a similar bill on the federal level, Senator Herb Kohl (WI).

“He said if you can get this through on the state level, I would do it; because the push back here from lobbyists—nobody wants anybody to touch the financial industry at all,” Lonnie recalls. “Well, it was hard. The banking industry didn’t want it. There were all kinds of people who had a financial advisor title, they didn’t want you meddling. And we got it through. So I was really proud of that, because it was really transformational, in ways a lot of seniors don’t even realize now. Now, if you falsify your credentials in this state, you can go to prison for it. So that was a game changer. And I hadn’t really thought of that until I was in my office, pulling down these things, and being reminded of it.”

In 2017, Lonnie voted in favor of the bi-partisan state budget, a move that helped shift a mired political dynamic up in Hartford at a time when it was needed, and that was Lonnie’s aim.

“I was very proud of that, because I knew, going in, I was going to take nothing but heat and criticism,” she says. “So I knew I was standing up for what I believed. And I had done a lot of studying—I’d gone coast to coast; I was in Washington state, I was in California. I was talking to legislators and legislatures that had gone through this. I had done my due diligence. So I knew that what I was doing was right, and I was going to take a lot of heat for it. But I hoped it would move us forward. And of course, now the new governor is saying we want a bipartisan budget. So now, we’re in the bipartisan lane, which we were not traveling in before.”

Even before she arrived in Hartford, Lonnie had already experienced her first milestone as an elected official. In 2004, as a member of Branford’s RTM, Lonnie spread the alarm—and helped bring about the defeat—of Broadwater Energy’s plans to build a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Long Island Sound, about 10 miles off Branford’s coast in New York waters.

“The whole anti-Broadwater movement really started here in Branford,” says Lonnie.

She recounts how her past work in D.C. as speech writer for Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who chaired the Energy Committee, had helped her become familiar with an unsuccessful bid to moor a LNG terminal off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

“And so years later, I’m in Branford, and I see in The New York Times they’re going to put this huge floating LNG plant in Long Island Sound. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow—why did that never happen in Santa Barbara, in all the years in the interim?’”

Lonnie did some investigating. She found out the bid failed in California due to what was reported in an environmental impact statement. But the statement was issued before the age of digitizing reports and making them available online. So she tracked down an activist in Long Beach, California, who dug up a copy stored in a warehouse and sent it to Lonnie.

“I opened it up, and among the reasons that they didn’t build it in the ocean was something called catastrophic mooring failure of this huge, explosive LNG plant [and] also a fear of offloading LNG supertankers colliding with the terminal and exploding. And that was in the ocean, and they wanted to do this in our ‘pond’!”

Lonnie took her findings to the RTM, which wrote a bipartisan resolution against Broadwater.

“That’s where it started,” says Lonnie, who went on to help form Hands Across Our Pond, a grassroots group of Connecticut and Long Island, New York residents. That group was gathered thanks in part to contacts she’d made as a reporter following what became the successful protest against starting up Long Island’s Shoreham nuclear power plant.

“When I had been a reporter in New York, I talked to a lot of people in Long Island [about Shoreham]. So I called them up and said, ‘Are you guys okay with this LNG plant?’ And they said, ‘Oh my God, nobody’s listening to us!’ So that’s how we formed Hands Across Our Pond.”

From holding the first anti-Broadwater rally in her Pawson Park neighborhood to seeing the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hold Broadwater public hearings in Branford, Lonnie helped lead the fight which ultimately defeated Broadwater’s bid to enter Long Island Sound. Her passion to protect the sound continued in Hartford, where she was co-chair of the Bipartisan Long Island Sound Caucus and served on the Shoreline Preservation Task Force.

Proud to Have Served, Excited for the Future

Like her legislative peer in service to Branford, State Senator Ted Kennedy, Jr. (D, District 12), who also decided not to seek another elective term in 2018, Lonnie is confident about the new elective leadership that’s stepping in to take their place. State Representative Robin Comey (D) and State Senator Christine Cohen (D) were sworn in on Jan. 9.

“Ted and I have talked about this,” says Lonnie. “It feels good to know that the people filling our seats are really strong, and they’re unique individuals. They’ve got a multitude of talents and both are driven by a desire to really help. They’re both community people and they want to do more. So to have those two folks step up and have done so well, I think everybody feels not only very comfortable, but confident and excited.”

Lonnie says she’s loved every minute of her 10 years as Branford’s 102nd State Representative.

“It’s just been the honor of a lifetime,” says Lonnie. “I’ve loved being around constituents. I loved hearing what’s really going on with them, and staying engaged in the real world. I wanted to really help people, and on some of my best days, I’ve been able to do that. At the end of the day, what I’ve been able to do for constituents and for the town—we brought a lot of money in for businesses, and for the town, and we got projects up at the top of the to-do list—it’s an honor and privilege to be able to do that. So I take an enormous amount of pride in that.”