DeLauro our champion for Connecticut

The first time I cast my vote for Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, I was a young woman struggling to find my place in a city and an economy that seemed increasingly hostile to working people. Even back then, voting for DeLauro was an obvious choice. Growing up, she was my idol: this tough ItalianAmerican woman who spent decades fighting for working people, who commanded respect across New Haven, and whose style, even then, was unmatched. She reminded me so much of the women who raised me. I wanted to find a way to follow in her footsteps by fighting for my community.

Every choice I’ve made in local politics and labor organizing since has given me more and more respect for the work DeLauro does. Last November, I was elected to the Board of Alders to represent my friends and neighbors in Ward 8. Together we’ve faced an incredibly difficult year. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit our most vulnerable populations the hardest, sending thousands of Connecticut residents to unemployment, and taking many of our dear friends and neighbors from us.

Throughout this crisis, DeLauro has been fighting on our side. She was a champion of the CARES Act, which provided a stimulus payment to working people and increased unemployment benefits to support the thousands of Connecticut families who were suddenly left without breadwinners. Through these efforts she has been at the center of securing $280 billion for education, health care and working people. She pushed for the Heroes Act, which has passed Congress but is awaiting a vote in the Senate. In this legislation, DeLauro fought to reinstate the enhanced $600 per week Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, an expansion of paid sick leave and better protections for health care workers and vulnerable front-line workers who are at greatest risk of contracting COVID-19.

DeLauro has been Washington’s fiercest advocate for working people. Her opponent, in contrast, is a major landlord in New York and New Haven whose real estate development firm has been accused of violating rent regulations to squeeze out tenants. She’s cut from the same cloth as Donald Trump and was even listed as one of the 10 worst landlords in New York City by The Village Voice.

As an advocate of affordable housing, the idea of a profiteering landlord representing me and my neighborhood is chilling. My husband and I both have good union jobs that support us and our infant son. But with the price of rent rising in Wooster Square and luxury developments going up all around us, our family, like so many others, fears being priced out of our home.

I ran for alder in Ward 8 in part so that our community could have a voice in development. Margaret Streicker represents the worst kind of developer, the kind who sues tenants to evict them from affordable housing units. Becoming an alder has taught me that each victory in our uphill fight for working people takes cooperation from all parts of our community, from our constituents, to our alders, to our representatives in Washington, D.C.

As I look around my changing neighborhood, city and country, I know that we are in a fight to preserve a middle-class way of life. We here in New Haven must do everything we can to fight for affordable housing, access to good jobs, better-funded city services and schools, racial and economic justice and so much more, but we need leaders who will advocate for us in Washington. We live in a time when too many politicians have betrayed us by fighting for corporate interests, rather than for the people they were elected to serve. In the face of so much opposition, DeLauro has been the example of courage, conviction and the relentless fight for justice. She represents our community, in every sense of the word.

This election might be the most important of my lifetime. When I cast my next vote for Rosa DeLauro, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, I will be doing it as an elected official, a union member, a working mom, and as a woman with experience taking on major political fights. Most importantly, I’ll be doing it as someone who has learned that it doesn’t take just one person, or one vote, to change an unjust system. We must work together on Nov. 3 to re-elect Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and the values she stands for, but we must also work together here in New Haven to fight those same battles.