Camillo’s record reflects his values

According to his campaign manager, from the very first question, first selectman candidate Fred Camillo, “knew” the local press would be biased and mean toward him. All because Mr. Camillo was asked if he still supported a president he’d previously endorsed. “Nobody’s interested,” and “just local issues,” the campaign and candidate regularly plead.

But here’s the thing. While all politics is local, issues themselves are broader and interconnected. You cannot isolate say, tax policy in Greenwich and then try to navigate away from thinking national or state policies don’t have bearing on local policy. They do, and luckily we have the candidate’s history to help inform us.

How Mr. Camillo acts as a state representative in Hartford is tremendously important in helping Greenwich voters understand how he’s likely to behave as first selectman. The values he espouses and his legislative voting record are either A) clearly indicative of the ultraconservative beliefs and mindset he’ll bring to the job as first selectman, or B) not who he actually is, and it’s all been posturing and triangulating to win votes and maintain status in the party. And if the reality is B, that what Mr. Camillo supports is not reflective of his core beliefs, well then shame on us for regularly sending him back to the legislature. Let’s assume however the answer is A, and that Mr. Camillo is the person his record reflects.

So let’s look at that legislative record and how that may have analogues in Greenwich. For example, there are many working families in Greenwich struggling at or below the economic line which defines them as “poor.” Mr. Camillo voted to eliminate the state earnedincome tax credit, which would have been a huge blow to those families, had it passed. Our local education budget is a significant part of the town budget. Mr. Camillo voted to slash funding to the state university system. Would he do the same to our schools? Mr. Camillo has voted against the minimum wage, paid sick leave, and implementing Connecticut’s health exchange insurance system. How might this affect his dealings with town employees and unions come contract negotiation time?

Mr. Camillo championed legislation directly exempting car washes from paying sales taxes, and ended up facing accusations of cronyism and playing favorites. In Greenwich, the town has been bleeding potential revenue for decades by not requiring private trash haulers to pay a fee to dump garbage at the transfer station. This policy not only costs local taxpayers, it helps line the pockets of private trash haulers. As the former boss of a family trash business, would Mr. Camillo ever play favorites and ignore the calls of local politicians and community leaders to start collecting those fees?

See, it’s hard to separate what’s local and what isn’t. Is gun control a local issue? Yes it is, even more so when you factor in domestic violence and public health concerns. How about women’s reproductive rights, or gay rights? When your candidate is lovingly endorsed by a hateful group like the Family Institute of Connecticut for your attempts to punish women, circumvent Roe v Wade and ostracize gay Americans then yes, your record on national issues has local resonance. And right up until he miraculously discovered a scheduling conflict, Mr. Camillo had his own “there were fine people on both sides” moment when he said he would be the opening act for a local rightwing provocateur’s “live from Town Hall” national broadcast.

Meanwhile, it comes back to Trump, and Mr. Camillo’s tacit approval of the president. While an early Trumpagnostic, Mr. Camillo swooned over Mr. Trump’s phony business record at the time of his election, yet in three years he hasn’t found anything disturbing enough about the president’s policies, tweets, actions and inactions to warrant taking a principled stand.

How is that “local,” you still may ask? Well first, we don’t need a first selectman so easily bamboozled by charlatans and phonies masquerading as patriots and honest businessmen. But also, if Mr. Camillo has the stomach for the kind of indecency Trump revels in, combined with a zealots adherence to the rightwing, uncompassionate conservative dogma currently in vogue, should he, does he, really represent the majority of Greenwichites?