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CTppBblock210_2024-02-10-19-45-59

And welcome back to Connecticut Power and Politics. I'm Mark Soo. We're sitting down with Governor Lamont this week to talk about uh various issues. Uh He's brought up of course, in his state of the state address this past week. One of the things that you have been uh preaching, I think for the last several years has been transportation, especially uh I think talking about our roads and the rails. You, you recently uh talked about the, the walk bridge in Norwalk. Uh the renovations that are gonna be done there. How important is transportation gonna be to us? Uh especially as we look ahead of the future. Take the walk bridge, for example, 100 years old. Every time trains approach it, they've got to slow down because they can't support it the way as well as they could before speed up afterwards. Each and every one of these old bridges costs us maybe 2 to 3 minutes in time. You know, we're gonna get 20 of these bridges all repaired thanks to the infrastructure bill over the next 10 years or so and that's gonna save you 1020 30 minutes on your commute times. Do the math is it concerning that, with, with transportation, we're seeing fewer riders now on a metro north, I guess, is more, people are probably working from home. Yes and no, I mean, we've come back big time, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Mondays are coming back so people getting out of their cars are more likely to go to the office. But thank God it's Friday has a whole new meaning those trains are empty. You and I are working everybody else's hack and all. Yeah. Well, definitely 95 is a little bit different on Fridays too, that's for sure. Uh, electricity, uh, has been an issue. Uh, I know with, uh, with some storms that we've had, uh, eversource across New England, uh, you put some pressure on them a little bit. Um, where are we at now? Uh, in terms of our demand for electricity. Uh, well, the good news is our demand for electricity has been pretty flat for the last 2025 years. Our energy efficiency efforts have made a big difference. Uh, commercial came first and then a lot of middle class homeowners are retrofitting their homes, saving themselves a few 100 bucks a year. My instinct is it'll start ramping up a little bit, a lot of data centers, a lot more electronics in the home as you move our transportation sector from gas power to evs and hybrids. Probably over the next 1015 years, we're gonna have to find new sources. Of renewable energy uh working families here in Connecticut with, with young families. Uh you, you'd address child care a little bit and how important that is obviously to help these families, you know, put food on the table too. Right? Look, we're an expensive state housing is a big reason for that day care, child care. As you point out is a piece of that. We greatly expanded uh early daycare for folks making it a lot more affordable, a lot more accessible. And the big tax cut we put in place, it was a big a 10% tax cut for middle class people. But for working families, those essential workers, they're getting a refundable tax credit. I wanted to give everybody a real incentive to get back to work and keep more of what they're earning. You brought up housing now a couple of times, let's, let's let's go there right now. Uh Certainly you're seeing uh some construction and developments in Norwalk and Stanford and, and around the state. Certainly. Um but again, uh are we still finding situations where people are having a hard time finding a place to live? Yep. You sure are. Um we need more housing, we need more downtown housing. We need more housing for single folks. You know, when I was growing up, maybe 10% of people lived in housing were living alone today. It's about 30% a little um eye opening that fact. So our housing has gotta meet what the demand is right now. Every business that says I'm thinking about Connecticut. The next question is will there be housing for young people? Because I need to, I need to know that they have a place to live? I think this is interesting and a lot, it definitely was a talker. I think for a lot of people is is uh your proposal here on medical debt relief. A lot of people, I mean, let's face it, you know, uh with the high premiums of of insurance companies and uh these bills that people are are accumulating for medical debt. This is definitely catching people's attention you due to no fault of your own. You end up in a hospital, there's some surprise billing a big copay deductible, whatever it might be all of a sudden you get out and not only were you sick now, you have this medical debt hanging over, it really hurts your credit rating. So we're gonna be able to pay down a uh medical debt for about 250,000 of our citizens working with uh the hospitals. Get that uh dark cloud from um hanging over them right now. I think it's gonna make a big difference. Uh early uh education. Uh You talk about investing more and how important that is to our future. Look. Uh First of all, um daycare is so important. If I wanna get mom and dad back to work or retain them in the workforce. They, they need to know that their little one has a safe place to go. And every teacher I talk to tells me I can tell that little one before he got to my kindergarten class was in a pretty good smart daycare facility. It makes a difference. Um, and this is certainly a big one too and I feel like we've done a lot of stories on these, you know, attacking the chronic homelessness uh crisis here and especially for the mentally ill. How do we turn this thing around? High cost of housing rents have gone up. More people were facing eviction. But your point mark a lot of it's related to uh mental health and addiction. So we're building more supportive housing. So homelessness is more than just a roof over your head. It's also having those supportive services, those anti addiction services that mental health treatment allows you to get back on your feet. Then we introduce you to a workforce training program. Uh Electric cars is something that you've certainly been talking a lot about lately. Uh by 2035 right? You, we wanna have this mandate. But what about people who can't afford it? What about people in Bridgeport who, who aren't gonna be able to get an electric car? I'd say a couple things. A 11 years is a long way away. B if you're a nervous or range anxiety or you think it's too expensive, you can get a hybrid hybrids available right now for 20 25,000, probably less with the credits. Drives a lot further at a lot less cost. Um, I think we're gonna get there. The biggest cause of asthma. The biggest cause of air pollution is our transportation system and legislatures saying let's deal with it, but deal with it later. I'd like to deal with it now. I think it's, uh, 11 year commitment. Uh, New Jersey and New York and Virginia and, um, North Carolina, they've all joined us in this. I don't want to be the first one to back away. All right, we, uh, have more questions we're gonna hear from some viewers as well. Their questions from the governor when we come back.

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CTPPCblock210_2024-02-10-19-13-45

And welcome back to our conversation with Governor Ned Lamott. We have some viewer questions we wanna share. Uh And first of all, we're gonna hear from Rena who says it's great to expand the sick time off policy, but most Connecticut employers have eliminated their own sick time off. So why not enforce them to provide at least three days in addition to state benefit as five days is nothing with COVID and all types of viruses that are here to stay Reno I've proposed that um, all of our companies provide you uh a minimum of five days of paid sick time off. I don't want people um having to go to work sick, especially coming out of COVID. I realize what a risk that is. I make it a little easier for you to make sure that you don't have to go in sick and know that you can keep your job. All right, Maria wants to know what are you doing to help battle the uh fentaNYL crisis here in the state fentaNYL crisis is really severe. Um You know what we're doing right now is we have a lot of uh mental health crisis centers sometimes that's brought on by mental health. We're coming down like a ton of bricks on anybody we see pushing that fentaNYL. We're treating that as the most serious felony. It's almost like murder in my books, Keith has a question he asked, take uh uh taking into account progress made in the last two legislative sessions. Do you believe there is still room for improvement to safeguard and expand access to abortion care? I do, I see um a lot of states that are outlawing uh reproductive rights and abortion care. We're saying you can come to the state of Connecticut. We're gonna make sure you can't be prosecuted by out of staters coming here and I wanna do everything I can to give people confidence here in the state of Connecticut. Nobody's gonna take away your right to choose. Uh Elliott has a question. He says, when will you address the stagnant and deplorable condition of Bridgeport and its historical record of corruption? Boy, that's a cheerful question, Elliott, thank you for that. I think uh Bridgeport is coming back. Um You know, we just announced a hundreds of units of new housing uh going in next to Steel Point. This is a lot of this is market rate housing will be taken down that old power plant. The one with the candy cane smoke stack. I think you can see transport uh transformation. The University of Bridgeport is really booming. It was almost bankrupt five years ago. So Elliot hang in there. It's coming back and the amphitheater I think certainly is, has added something. Have you ever been there? That is fun. It is really time. Good time. Uh Daniel says a lot of secondary roads in the city of Bridgeport, we're back at Bridgeport are in bad shape and in need of repaving. What is the state doing to help provide the city of Bridgeport the funding it needs to fix the roads. Well, as we talked about before, we have more money for transportation than ever before. Thanks to the infrastructure bill. A lot of these smaller roads are uh a joint responsibility between the city and the state. We're putting those grants out there to make sure we can do this. We're, we're making real progress. Thanks to Garrett. Yo, our roads. I think it's really transformative. I love the Merritt Parkway. You're not gonna recognize how beautiful it is in the next couple of years. One more quick question from Cheryl with a growing anxiety all over the country. How will Connecticut handle unrest be it? With tension due to race, religion, culture and citizenship. 30 seconds, there's a lot of tension out there. A lot of hate speech out there. A lot of mental stress out there, we see it uh wherever we go. That's one of the reasons I was concerned about those uh smartphones and all that social media, which is impacting people so severely. I think we've got a look out for each other. I think we've got to respect each other. We think we've got to listen to each other. We got to lower the temperature. I like where Connecticut is, but we can do better too and be an example for the rest of the country, especially Washington DC. Governor. Thank you. That's all our time. I'm Mark Suo. Thanks for watching.

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Gov. Ned Lamont delivered a hopeful State of the State address this week. It comes as lawmakers head back to Hartford for the next three months.

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