COVID recovery focus for Terrie Wood in next term
As Terrie Wood prepares to face an uncontested election for the state House 141st district, her focus is on helping the communities she has served for 11 years to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We need to meet our health challenges head-on and figure out how to keep people who are vulnerable safe and how to get kids back to school,” said Wood, whose district includes parts of Norwalk and Darien. “And small businesses, we need them to be sustainable and thrive. A number of them are still struggling, a number have closed, and for many of these small-business owners, they’ve pumped their life savings into their businesses and we need to make sure they can be viable, but safe at the same time.”
As a state representative, the Republican is tunneling her energy toward bringing fiscal stability and economic growth back to the state. She wants to make the quality of education better in urban school districts, implement school choice and allow for money to follow students who change schools.
Wood finds affordability to be a challenge in her district’s communities.
“It’s a very expensive state to live in, even some basic things, it’s hard for people to afford,” Wood said. “Property taxes are high in Norwalk and Darien, cost of living is high, cost of health care is high… it’s not good, Connecticut deserves better, people of Connecticut deserve better.”
Before her political career, Wood worked on several non-profit boards, community panels and committees and co-founded the Darien Environmental Group in 1990. During her time as a state representative, Wood has co-sponsored resolutions to establish additional requirements for teachers to educate students with dyslexia, proposed an amendment to preserve open, public spaces and pushed opioid legislation that sets limits for prescription painkillers.
“I’m proud of my reputation for working in a bipartisan way. I’m very good and proud of the work I do reaching out to constituents and listening to what they have to say, it’s important to me,” Wood said. “I don’t represent me, I’m not there for me. It’s really what the people think and that’s why it’s a representative government.”