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To the Editor:

On Monday, the West Hartford Republican Town Committee graciously nominated me as one of their candidates for Town Council. Over the years, I’ve written and spoken about my beliefs in various forums, including Council meetings and in op-eds on We-Ha.com. I’m truly honored to be given this opportunity and hope to make our town a better place.

One of the reasons our nation is great is that we can engage in productive debate and exchange of ideas. As a proud member of the Republican slate, I stand firmly for free speech – even uncomfortable speech. We cannot have a functioning society if we are afraid to talk to each other. I hope to have productive conversations with people from all points of view. I hope to present rational plans, free of identity politics and hysterics, and I will always be open to constructive criticism.

Why am I running? I strongly believe that we need to rebuild our sense of community and bring back middle class opportunity to West Hartford. These are my priorities.

Community and opportunity means making our roads safer to bring back a sense of connectedness, and especially to give our children and elders the independence they deserve. Stopping the madness on our roads will help restore a sense of basic human civility that has been shattered by watching drivers routinely run red lights and speed with impunity. We must restore a sense of unity that has been damaged after seeing members of our community killed on our roadways. In my work with Bike West Hartford, my most joyful moments have been fitting excited kids for helmets so they can embark on adventures around their town, and handing out stickers for them to decorate said new helmets. The most upsetting work has been organizing vigils after each traffic fatality. Yet, the vigils are important to process these tragedies and build solidarity with one another, to salvage some semblance of community in the face of tragedy. I believe the government has a moral responsibility to do everything possible to protect the safety of our citizens. This includes CTDOT by the way, which has been conspicuously passive about deaths of our community members on their roads. Traffic deaths are not inevitable. Being scared to let our kids cross the street is not inevitable.

Building community and opportunity means supporting homeownership. While I think rentals play an important role, we’ve swung too far in the large multifamily direction. A few years ago I thought that building affordable single family homes in today’s economy was nearly impossible. It wasn’t until I visited places like Dallas and Denver that I realized that starter homes still exist. We simply have regulated them out of existence here. We need to look at zoning and permitting reforms to remove regulation and make smaller starter homes possible, as we see in places like Texas where middle class families are thriving. I think West Hartford can be both an engine of middle class opportunity AND a wonderful community for already successful families. We shouldn’t be a high income enclave because I don’t think it’s in our DNA. Homeownership builds wealth and investment in our community but the reality of the current housing market is that we have too much regulation and delay. We must consider allowing smaller lot sizes, faster permitting times, removal or reform of parking mandates, redevelopment of poorly used land (such as too-massive parking lots), and form-based code with community input that ameliorates concerns about new developments being out of scale or out of character from surrounding neighborhoods. One of my greatest fears is that our costs balloon out of control like California or Massachusetts, making West Hartford a place where our children can no longer return to settle. We owe this to the next generation. Twenty years from now, do you want to walk down your street and still hear the sound of children playing, or do you want those kids to grow up in Texas or Arizona?  If you want the former, then we need to get our housing costs under control.

Building community and opportunity means we must be more careful with every single tax dollar that we are entrusted with. We need to spend less on expensive consultants who are producing low-yield recommendations. We need to write fewer studies that are the length of novels. For example, why did we pay Stantec to write a 71-page West Hartford Center Master Plan which was barely a plan at all, but rather just a vague menu of options? One of their few actual recommendations, which was to market-price our parking, was copied directly from the op-ed that I wrote in May 2024 for free. We need to take our focus away from excessive process. Glossy reports don’t matter. Only results matter. In 2025 we are only repaving 7.3 miles of our roads with a relatively paltry $3.1 million. The town itself admits we are well below the goal of 10 miles of repaving per year. In the schools, we are asking our children to sacrifice in order to cut $1.5 million from the school budget compared to the “roll-forward” budget figure, resulting in a painful loss of 9.6 teacher FTEs. Yet, without debate or fanfare whatsoever, somehow we are able to find $10 million over two years to renovate the underused Blue Back Square parking garages. The escalators alone will allegedly cost $5 million! Escalators and parking, largely for out-of-towners, largely underused, do not matter more than our teachers and children! If the escalators are going to cost $5 million, let them be stairs!  A contractor is getting rich from this garage renovation, while we ask our kids to learn in more crowded classrooms. It is a scandal. We must be better stewards of dollars entrusted to us by the taxpayer.

But wait, there’s more. In addition, we should work to end unfair DEI practices, ban smartphones in school, reduce our electricity costs through municipal solar, and expand before- and after-care in our schools. I look forward to talking with you the voters about the issues that are important to you. I am approaching this process with the utmost humility. I’m sure I will learn a great deal. If I change my views due to encountering new information, I will explain my thinking. But my guiding principles won’t change. Government must either make people’s lives meaningfully better – or get the heck out of the way.

Jason Wang
Candidate for Town Council, West Hartford