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Dear Community,

As part of our campaign promises to the community, we are providing a policy update from your Republican elected officials to the citizens of West Hartford. We have been in office for nearly nine months. One of our commitments we have made to you is to communicate directly with you about what our agenda is and share our successes. We listen to you.

Our Town Council priorities fall into several broad categories. We want to work on affordability, safety, first-rate education and to invest in families.

Our first priority is to stabilize and reduce the tax burden on you. We learned a great deal during the past budget cycle. While we ultimately were able to deliver a mill rate increase similar to inflation, we are well aware that some towns in our area have beaten the inflation rate, and we understand the structural cost advantages that those towns have built. We are learning from their best practices. Sustainable budgets are a must and are achievable, but require courage, leadership, and careful prioritization.

Our budgetary priorities are:

• Work to make sure every tax dollar produces real value for you.
• Push for budget neutrality in currently money-losing departments such as permitting, fire inspections, and parking. It makes no sense to rely on new developments for new tax revenue, then lose money in the permitting and inspections.
• Fix parking policy. Currently, every time an out-of-towner parks in our center, they pay less than it costs to provide that parking, and YOU pick up the difference at tax time. We seek to implement a reduced parking fee structure for those who reside in town (for example, a low-cost resident pass), while allowing broader parking rates to catch up with inflation.
• West Hartford keeps NONE of its restaurant tax. This is wrong and hurts all of us. It is a three-million-dollar budget hole that is made up through higher property taxes. It effectively subsidizes all of those who come from another community to dine in West Hartford. The state legislature needs to correct this injustice ASAP.
• De-emphasize the use of expensive external consultants when in-house expertise can do the work.
• Find ways to reduce costly government technology purchases which often saddle us with annual cost increases well above the rate of inflation.
• Additionally, we share great concern over the rapidly rising cost of garbage collection, and we seek solutions to better manage solid waste, to the benefit of both you and the environment.

In addition to budgetary issues, your Town Council Republicans are working on safety and quality of life issues.

• School drop-off, pick-up, and bus stop safety are some of the biggest concerns we hear from residents. National data confirms that school drop-off and pick-up are some of the riskiest moments of the day for children. We are pushing for safety interventions to protect kids, who are both our future and our most vulnerable road users. We are advocating to deploy more quick-build measures, followed by permanent changes as new grant funding starts to come in.
• We hear residents loud and clear with respect to excessive speeding on neighborhood streets, and continue to work closely with town staff and advocacy groups to develop a more reasonable path towards neighborhood level traffic calming.
• We continue to be shocked at the level of red light running in our town, and strongly support ongoing efforts to tamp down on this unsafe behavior. Early this fall, new technology will catch these scofflaws and they will be fined for running red lights. This is an initiative we pushed hard for.
• Note: the red light and speed cameras have nothing to do with Flock cameras. We hear your concern and questions about Flock cameras, requested and gotten an opportunity for discussion about these in upcoming committee meetings.
• We want to add five to ten seconds to critical pedestrian crossings in town, such as at South Main and Memorial, North Main and Farmington, and South Main and Sedgwick. We are working hard on this, and we have recently secured a commitment to add time to the South Main and Memorial crossing.
• Our caucus is focused on creating a play space or a small kids-focused plaza in the Center or Blue Back Square. The lack of a playscape is an omission in our Center, which has rapidly shifted towards catering to out-of-towners and luxury customers. We want a place where you can bring your families to, have an ice cream, and let the kids play. We have proposed this formally in committee and look forward to collaborating with town staff and our Democrat counterparts to deliver this for you. We hope to soon have good news for you on this.
• Finally, the Republicans on both the BOE and Town Council are concerned about a severe and persistent socioeconomic achievement gap within our schools. We believe that our town should do right by all of its citizens, and that includes our most disadvantaged. To that end, in addition to BOE-only initiatives, we have proposed working with the Board to explore options such as increasing resources to the Hillcrest Neighborhood Outreach Center (HANOC) or Elmwood Community Center (ECC) for parents and students. We hope to adopt best practices from around the country to help struggling students get the most out of their West Hartford education. This is initiative has been formally proposed in committee, and we commit to work with our Democrat counterparts on this.

On the Board of Education side, we are resolutely focused on academic excellence and fiscal sustainability. We are concerned that, while we continue to have a high performing district, on many metrics we are not outperforming our predicted results based on raw socioeconomic demographics. Simply put, national comparisons suggest we are performing at par for an affluent community, but we should be doing better.

• With the increased needs of our student population, class sizes have created many challenges, especially for our teachers. These challenges impact our students’ learning and achievement. The school district has become imbalanced with too many administrators and support staff, and too few teachers relative to many similar towns in the region. This contributes to disciplinary issues and a greater need for special education services. Addressing class size policy and upholding teacher positions are a Republican Caucus priority, as student achievement is a school board responsibility. Given that our district is now in a reversed pyramid with fewer teachers than administrators and support staff, we believe that the staffing structure must be fixed, and that we must refocus on classroom instruction and reasonable class sizes with more impactful personalized attention to individual students.
• We seek to de-emphasize educational technology. Data nationally and internationally from non-partisan sources indicate that this is a valid and critically important area to study. Our Republican caucus has proposed edtech cuts which have been deferred. We are listening to the parents who have spoken for months at the public meetings. Our Republican caucus introduced and proposed that the entire West Hartford BOE pass a resolution formalizing district priorities around educational technology. We will be working on this with our Democrat counterparts on the board. Stay tuned!
• The district owns over 12,000 Chromebooks and iPads for a total enrollment of just over 9,000 students. School technology expenditures in this fiscal year will be approximately $1.8 million. There is mounting, difficult-to-ignore evidence that edtech harms learning and mental health, while enriching multibillion-dollar tech companies, and puts students’ privacy at risk. These concerns will be supercharged as AI enters the classroom. All Republican elected officials firmly stand in opposition to unfettered edtech penetration into our schools and will continue to work towards a rollback of this. We should invest in what we know works: teachers, books, pencils, and paper.
• Finally, curriculum transparency, alongside parent informed education are also Republican caucus priorities. Our Republican caucus brought forth the compliance requirement for the BOE to have a formalized curriculum committee according to state statute which had been in existence since 2008. The Democrat majority of the BOE voted to adopt the revised policy 8100, making the entire BOE the required curriculum committee. While the Republican caucus was opposed to the revised policy language, we are glad that our parents will now have access to more transparency in curricula that is used across the district and will be shared during public meetings. In accordance with the statewide Public Act 25-174 for curriculum transparency, the district has also updated their website for Curriculum- Objective, Scope, & Sequence. Check it out here: https://www.whps.org/curriculum-instruction-and-assessment/curriculumpages

Please join us at our next quarterly coffee meet-up, on Sunday August 30, 2-4 p.m., at the Bishops Corner Starbucks. An official notice will be sent prior to the session.

We believe West Hartford remains an example of true New England democracy, and we welcome your ideas and feedback. If you have questions or concerns, we can always be reached via email, which can be found on the West Hartford Town Council and Board of Education websites. We thank you deeply for the opportunity to serve you.

John Lyons
Gayle Harris
Jason Wang
Ethan Goldman
Miriam Bleich