Connecticut voters will be excited to learn that Ned Lamont isn't the only Greenwich Democrat seeking to make history this year. The intrepid Democrat, Ed Krumeich, is seeking to pull off a feat that has not been achieved for seven decades: win a seat in the Connecticut House of Representatives from the town of Greenwich as a Democrat! And let's all hope that he succeeds. For Ed Krumeich is running against one of the most conservative, out-of-the-mainstream Republicans in the entire Connecticut General Assembly- Dolly Powers.
Year after year, Ed Krumeich's opponent, incumbent Dolly Powers (R- 151st district), has earned the dismal distinction of being named by the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters as having one of the very worst environmental voting records of any representative in the state. Indeed, two out of the last three years the CLCV ranked Powers as the absolute worst in the entire 150-member House of Representatives. Last year, however, she registered tremendous improvement; that is, of course, by Republican standards. She tied for the eighth worst mark in the House. During the Rowland era, she voted three times with John Rowland to block the clean-up of the state's horribly polluting "Sooty Six" coal-fired power plants. Let's remember why that's important: children in Connecticut suffer asthma rates at double the national average; and in Bridgeport, where one of the most polluting of the "Sooty Six" plants is located, it was four times the national average. Dolly Powers' own district lies in Fairfield County, in the area most affected by ozone-polluted air, in the county that ranks as the thirteenth most polluted of the more than two thousand counties in the entire United States. And women in Western Connecticut, which includes Dolly Powers' district, suffer breast cancer rates that are the highest in the nation. So voters need to understand that when a politician votes against environmental legislation that much, she is displaying a shocking disregard for the health of the people who live in her district.
Lamentably, Dolly Powers' lousy legislative record doesn't end with her anti-environment votes. Hard as it is to believe, in her entire fourteen years in Hartford, Dolly Powers has never once got a bill passed into law that she introduced. Indeed, her only legislative contributions in all those years were two resolutions commemorating Republican legislators from Greenwich who had passed away. Yet you may be surprised to learn that Ms. Powers, despite, or, perhaps, because of, her miserable environmental record and virtual absence of any legislative success, serves as the Republicans' deputy minority leader in the House of Representatives!
Should be a heckuva race!! Go Ed!!
Here's his website: edforrep.com