ISSUES

Supporting Working Families

As both a labor organizer and State Representative, Nick has spent his career fighting for working people. He supports Connecticut Paid Leave, Paid Sick Days, One Fair Wage and will always stand with unions in their right to collectively bargain for fair pay, strong benefits, and safe working conditions.

Education

Investing in our students is imperative. Nick introduced legislation to restore Connecticut’s universal school meals program, ensuring every student, regardless of means, has access to nutritious meals. Families benefit too, saving both money and the daily burden of shopping, meal prepping and packing lunches. And while that work continues, Nick has already delivered results closer to home, securing $132,000 in the biennium budget to eliminate school meal debt for students in Waterford and Montville.

Housing

Connecticut is one of the most expensive states to buy or rent a home. A severe housing shortage, rising homelessness, and increasing corporate ownership of housing are all driving this crisis. In his first term in the General Assembly, Nick supported major housing legislation to expand opportunities for first-time homebuyers, invest in converting vacant office space into housing, and strengthen protections for renters.

ICE Out

Connecticut communities have not been immune to the brutal and unchecked actions of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nick co-sponsored legislation to prohibit law enforcement officers from detaining individuals for civil offenses at places like schools, hospitals, houses of worship, playgrounds, and shelters. The bill establishes clear documentation requirements for any arrest made by agencies like ICE at these sensitive locations. Federal agents who violate the law must face legal consequences — no one is above it, and enforcing the law should never come at the expense of basic human rights.

Download PDF of Nick’s Platform

Budgeting & Revenue Generation

Budgets are moral documents.
-Summary of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We must pass Moral, responsible, and economically sound budgets which are not balanced on the backs of our working families and are not balanced by shifting burdens onto our towns.

The principle of austerity and the push for evermore austerity budgeting are some of the most dangerous, destabilizing, and destructive forces in our body politic today. From an economic perspective, across the board cuts for everyone but those at the very top of the wealth and income ladder during a time of economic strife only further constricts economic growth and halts investment precisely at a time when increased investment is desperately needed. From a political perspective, austerity for the 99% of us deepens the pain and suffering on our middle class and working families so significantly that it gives rise to destructive extremists on the fringes of politics and society.

  • Eliminate corporate welfare and loopholes by putting an immediate halt to the giveaway of hundreds of millions of our tax dollars every year which are thrown into the black hole of corporate welfare and subsidies to multibillion dollar corporations, like GE and Aetna, who take our tax dollars not for job creation, but instead to pay their moving costs as they leave our state for neighboring states – states which impose a much higher tax burden on their corporations and wealthiest residents. We must establish a data collection and a rigorous review process to ensure that if in the future we do provide our tax dollars to corporations for job creation we can actually confirm that those promised jobs are created. A rigorous demand for results will also provide us guidance on which, if any, corporate taxpayer subsidies give us a worthwhile return on our investment.
  • In conjunction with the proposal from neighboring New York State, we will close the carried interest loophole which allows for income earned via capital gains to be taxed at about half the rate as income when earned via working an hourly or salaried job. Making this change, closing the carried interest loophole would generate an estimated $500 million per year for the state of Connecticut.
  • Progressively increase our state’s top marginal income tax rates, including our top rate of 6.99%, to be commensurate with neighboring New York’s top rate of 8.82% and the rate of 9.85% in the state of Minnesota, which recently faced a multibillion dollar yearly budget deficit and due to increasing their state’s top marginal tax rates successfully closed their budget shortfall and brought their state’s budget back into balance.
  • As of 2015 (prior to the massive Republican Trump tax cuts, over 80% of which benefit the wealthiest), the wealthiest in Connecticut pay 5.3% of their income in taxes compared to an average of 10.2% paid by most Connecticut residents, with the heaviest tax burden falling on the shoulders of our middle class, working class, and working poor families. This unfair tax structure cripples working families in our state. The wealthiest one percent currently do not contribute an equitable amount and need to pay their fair share, like the rest of us.

Fair Economic Principles & Policies

“No business which depends for its existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level–I mean the wages of decent living.”
–President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  • Strengthen paid family, medical, and parental leave which is a basic right of all working people. No new parent should be forced to leave their newborn’s side in the first critical months of life and before new mothers have had the proper time to recover from delivery and before new families have had time to bond and take care of their unique needs. No expectant family should be forced into work when not ready due to an impending birth, potentially putting the health of new mothers and the health of her baby at risk. No family should have to be torn away from taking care of a suffering family member in need.
  • Ensure just pandemic pay compensation and increase pay for nurses, home health aide workers, and those deemed ‘essential employees’ who bore and still bear the harshest burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Index future increases of our state’s $15/hr minimum wage to inflation and growth in productivity to ensure all share equitably in the immense wealth our state creates.
  • Strengthen pay equity laws for women workers.
  • Pass pay equity laws for disabled workers.
  • Ensure high quality affordable or free public childcare services with dramatically increased pay and benefits for childcare workers.
  • Create equity in taxation via progressive tax reform which relies less on local property taxes for balancing budgets and paying for necessary services, especially our public schools. Property tax rates which are levied based on flat mill rates are inherently regressive, asking those who can least afford to do so to contribute the most and those who can most afford to do so to contribute the least.
  • Make permanent Connecticut’s temporarily higher Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which is aimed at serving poor and working families.
  • Reduce Connecticut’s sales tax rate.
  • Modernize our sales tax laws in order to include currently exempt luxury services, such as telemarketing services, escrow agent services, jewelry design services, interior design services, closet design consulting services, fur and clothing storage services, aircraft hangaring services, and limousine services. In addition, exclude services from our sales tax laws which have been specifically identified as taxable in statute and which are far more likely to be needed by and used by those who are in the middle class, working class, and by those who are poor, such as (coin operated) blood pressure testing, hair weaving or replacement services, buyers’ clubs services (buyers’ clubs allow for people to organize to pool members’ collective buying power, enabling them to make purchases at lower prices than are generally available, or to purchase goods that might be difficult to obtain independently. Some key examples of buyers’ clubs include medical purchases of rare and expensive medications for treating HIV or hepatitis C at a reduced cost for patients.), and debt counseling services to individuals.
  • Implement a workforce development strategy which dramatically improves pathways to higher paying jobs for Connecticut residents through job training programs, school to career programs, expansion of paid internship and apprenticeship programs, and direct assistance to our small businesses in overcoming some of the upfront costs associated with hiring new employees from their local communities.

Labor and Working & Retired People’s Rights

  • Defend and expand the right of working people to collectively bargain for our rights.
  • Pass a legislative fix to the legally unsound decision of the Connecticut State Board of Labor Relations, a decision which strips guaranteed collective bargaining rights of employees by misclassifying them as independent contractors, especially those who work in the fields of construction, musical performance, and other fields with similar work schedules and wherein individual employees work for multiple employers.
  • End the power of the Governor to unilaterally appoint members of the Connecticut State Board of Labor Relations by adding legislative oversight and confirmation authority over gubernatorial nominees to the board, as well as by adding greater public say and influence on the nomination and confirmation of those chosen to serve on the CSBLR.
  • Expand prevailing wage laws and eliminate Connecticut’s prevailing wage threshold to ensure that Connecticut workers are paid higher wages when working on public projects.
  • Protect and defend the use of Project Labor Agreements across Connecticut.
  • Pass worker protections against the employer practice of “Captive Audience” meetings, which some employers use to force their political and social agendas onto workers.
  • Implement a Low Wage Worker Fee on employers to hold large employers accountable for paying workers poverty level wages, which unfairly enriches corporate profits without paying their workers a fair living wage. This low wage practice also creates a competitive disadvantage for our small businesses and for employers who do pay their employees a fair living wage. This practice by some large employers of paying workers poverty level wages for full-time work in effect forces taxpayers to subsidize corporate profits by having to cover the living, food, and healthcare expenses of working families who are unable to afford those necessities, even while working full-time.
  • Eliminate abusive, arbitrary on-call work scheduling practices, by passing ‘Fair Work Week’ legislation especially in retail industry, service industry, and low-wage jobs to ensure consistent and regular work schedules with consistent pay periods for workers.

Public Education

“There shall always be free public elementary and secondary schools in the state. The general assembly shall implement this principle by appropriate legislation.” Conn. Const. art. VIII, § 1.

“No person shall be denied the equal protection of the law nor be subjected to segregation or discrimination in the exercise or enjoyment of his or her civil or political rights because of religion, race, color, ancestry, national origin, sex or physical or mental disability.” Conn. Const. art. I, § 20, as amended.

“The fund, called the SCHOOL FUND, shall remain a perpetual fund, the interest of which shall be inviolably appropriated to the support and encouragement of the public schools throughout the state, and for the equal benefit of all the people thereof. The value and amount of said fund shall be ascertained in such manner as the general assembly may prescribe, published, and recorded in the comptroller’s office; and no law shall ever be made, authorizing such fund to be diverted to any other use than the encouragement and support of public schools, among the several school societies, as justice and equity shall require.” Conn. Const. art. VIII, § 4.

  • Pay public school teachers, in accordance with the weight of their solemn responsibility, their value, and fundamental importance to the lives of our children, young people, and to the functioning of democratic society!
  • Fully fund high quality Pre-K to ensure high quality public education for every child across our state, regardless of family income or ability to pay.
  • End the destructive Republican attacks on our public school teachers’ rights and end Republican attempts to carve out legislation which amounts to special and specific taxes targeting our public school teachers.
  • Fully fund, defend, and expand Connecticut’s Care 4 Kids program to ensure equity and access to child care and early education services for all Connecticut children, parents, and families.
  • Fully fund Educational Cost Sharing (ECS) grants to our municipalities.
  • Dramatically progressively reform our state’s public education funding formula with the aim of bolstering parity and equity across our public school districts that takes student need into account and progressively directs dollars to students. In addition, progressively reform how we fund public education away from the regressive system of a vast overreliance on local property taxes.
  • Fund, identify, and provide special education services so that students who need high quality special education services receive them equitably.
  • Support and provide funding needed to ensure full implementation of Connecticut’s Menstrual Equity Act at schools across our state to guarantee equal educational opportunity to women, girls, non-binary, and transgender people.
  • Strengthen the CT DREAM Act which provides institutional aid to all Connecticut resident students. These are funds to which all Connecticut residents contribute, but from which some are barred from being able to take advantage.
  • Catch up to our fellow neighboring states and western democracies and invest in our people by instituting a system of statewide tuition-free and debt-free public colleges and universities. We must invest in our people in order to grow our state economy by alleviating the burden of Connecticut residents, who graduate and begin their careers with an average debt of $32,326.

Healthcare

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman.”
–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  • Increase pay and ensure safe staffing ratios and fair scheduling for nurses, home health aide workers, and those deemed ‘essential employees’ who bore and still bear the harshest brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Build on the SustiNet health care reform legislation to achieve high quality public universal health care in Connecticut.
  • Ensure equal treatment under the law for LGBTQ+ people and adopt non-discriminatory, and all-gender inclusive language in all relevant aspects of health care regulation. Ensure that health care services needed by Queer, non-binary, and transgender people are required to be covered by health plans. Expanding the coverage of such health care needs will reduce the costs to LGBTQ+ patients seeking treatment.
  • Support and provide funding needed to ensure full implementation of Connecticut’s Menstrual Equity Act at required sites across our state.
  • Strengthen paid family, medical, and parental leave which is a basic right of all working people. No new parent should be forced to leave their newborn’s side in the first critical months of life and before new mothers have had the proper time to recover from delivery and before new families have had time to bond and take care of their unique needs. No expectant family should be forced into work when not ready due to an impending birth, potentially putting the health of the mother and the health of her baby at risk. No family should have to be torn away from taking care of a suffering family member in need.
  • Strengthen health care protections for Connecticut residents upholding the basic guarantees and basic health insurance rights as established by the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act.
  • Fully fund, guarantee, and make no change reducing the number of Connecticut residents who are eligible for Medicaid payments, including those to their Medicare Savings Program. Ensure that these payments continue for all of our elderly and disabled residents who are in need. We will protect our seniors and disabled neighbors by not allowing for the trick of backdoor cuts via draconian changes in program eligibility to continue unabated.
  • Lower outrageously high prescription drug prices via legislation which enacts price maximums, price controls, and price transparency to address price gouging of medications.