State Rep Candidate Barbara Breor

BARBARA BREOR

Barbara has lived in Connecticut since birth. She started assisting in the Town Hall while she was in high school. She worked in Town Clerk’s office, Tax Collector, Assessor’s office, Assistant Registrar of Voter’s, was a certified moderator, and voting machine mechanic. She has been Town Clerk for 28 years and obtained her certification as a town clerk.

She is involved in her community. She is currently Vice President of the Goshen Agricultural Society, secretary of the Litchfield County Fair Association, First Vice-President is Association of Connecticut Fairs, an associate member of Goshen Fire. She has also been Secretary and later President of Goshen Fire, past secretary and assistant coach of Tri-Town Little League, past secretary of Goshen Historical Society, past secretary of Goshen Land Trust, past Treasurer of Litchfield County Town Clerk’s association, Past Vice President for Litchfield County of the Connecticut Town Clerk’s Association, past member of the Goshen Lion’s and past member of the Historic Preservation Fund. Her proudest achievement has been being named recipient of the Goshen Citizenship Award in 2019.

Barbara stands for freedom of vehicle choice. Protecting those that protect us. As a working individual she understands the struggles with electric rates and cows to help fight to lower them. Living in the country she understands the importance of protecting and preserving the environment.

State tax revenues are exceeding expenditures. What policies led to the strengthening of the state's fiscal position and do you support those policies?

I believe the state is headed in the proper direction, which hopefully in the long run will help lower our taxes or do things that will be beneficial to the elderly and our military personnel. Perhaps we can even look at lowering the sales tax at some point.

What is the right balance between debt reduction, tax relief, and social spending?

One of the major issues that I find is we're not doing enough for [is] mental health. Being an EMT over the years, I've seen a lot of mental health issues and drug abuse issues. We definitely need to focus on debt relief as well. Debt relief is going to save everybody money in the long run, because if we're borrowing money, we're paying interest.

What is your understanding of the housing shortage in this district and the conflict between proponents and opponents of affordable housing mandates?

You have different things that you have to focus on in different areas. You have to base everything on the soil types and things like that. In Goshen, maybe the option would be to build accessory apartments over garages. We would need to implement a tax perhaps on the second homes because if you have the luxury to afford a vacation home maybe then you should have an additional tax to help fund a study to see what each of the towns are able to support with the soil and the water.

Should “affordable housing” be redefined to include “naturally affordable” housing? (Naturally affordable means market price is affordable to people making eighty percent of the mean wage in a community, but price is not deed-restricted for 40 years.)

This is kind of a hard subject because somebody buys their house and they put a lot of love and everything else into [it] and the market goes up and up and [they] are going to sell for top dollar. I don't blame them one bit for doing that, but at some point everything in this area is going to be well out of reach for everybody.

It's something that I understand both sides of, because working the way that a lot of us work around here and not being able to afford to stay here, it's just not right. And not everybody [with] a million-dollar house wants to volunteer on a fire [department] or [as] an EMT.

Should the legislature more vigorously address housing availability in the Northwest corner?

I have a hard time with the state legislature dictating too many things because they're taking away too many private rights. Zoning for the whole state of Connecticut [is] not going to work because what happens down in Westport is not going to happen in Cornwall. We are such a diverse state.

Electricity bills in Connecticut have skyrocketed. Notably, we've seen charges for “public benefits” added to our bills. Why has that happened and what actions should the legislature take?

During COVID a lot of people were not paying their electric bills. So part of those fees are for the people that were not able to pay. Now they're also adding an EV charging station fee. And then, so much of our [electricity] has to come from renewable sources, which I agree with, but if the bills go up this much, perhaps we should revisit how much we are allocating to [renewable] sources and perhaps not repay bad investments… in renewable sources that have failed. I don't understand how the leftover ARPA funds have not been applied to paying the bad debt from the people that could not afford to pay during COVID. Why are we all paying for things that are not our causes?

The closing of the Torrington MIRA trash facility will significantly impact disposal costs. Also, a lot of waste is being trucked to Pennsylvania and Ohio landfills, an expensive and unsustainable system. What should Connecticut do to address the trash and recycling problem?

What Connecticut should do is look for another source for the [trash to energy] again. We had a wonderful source that they closed down. Perhaps we need to revamp that facility, rebuild it, and that will also help with the electric rates in the long run. But, yes, I agree wholeheartedly our trash should not be shipped out to Pennsylvania and Ohio. What happens when they don't want it anymore? Where do we go next?

Some things that get cross-contaminated in single stream recycling could have been saleable if kept separate. Should we end single stream recycling?

Yes, perhaps we should get away from single stream recycling and go back to the way it was, even though I may have three bins in my yard because I might have to have one for paper and one for glass and one for tin. But that's okay.

Thousands of human-black bear conflicts are reported each year. State resources are focused on public education regarding human-bear interactions. Is education alone adequate for maintaining public safety?

Unfortunately, education alone is not enough. Some of these bears are just getting way too comfortable. They're endangering our animals, our domesticated animals. I know that I just spent two and a half hours out in the woods not too long ago because the bear chased the cows out of the pasture. Troublesome bears may just have to be put down.

We are invading their territory, but the state has also dumped a lot of bears in our neck of the woods. Unfortunately, [we] may have to visit a bear hunting season.

Was the last bear bill passed by the legislature adequate?

I honestly have not had time to look at that legislation.

The strongest guidance we get from DEEP is to take down bird feeders in season and to use bear proof trash containers. If everone followed that guidance, wouldn't bears just become more desperate and aggressive?

Bears are going to find a way to get to whatever they want to get to, so [bear] proof containers are not going to do it. My mother had a bear trying to get into her kitchen window because she [had] made a sandwich and the bear must have smelled it still, even though it wasn't there. The bear was crawling up the side of her house.

How can we address the lack of primary care doctors for adults and children in the Northwest corner?

It's pitiful when you call the doctor and get told to go to the walk-in clinic because they have no appointments available. I'm not sure if the doctors are just retiring or what's going on, but I know even for specialists, you have to drive over to Hartford County because I can't find anything in this area where it's not six months out. I don't know what the answer to that is, but yes, we have to do something to get and maintain good doctors up here, especially geriatrics. We have a lot of elderly people.

In 2024, the Senate blocked a bill to support local news outlets by directing a portion of state advertising to locally-owned media. Is a decline in local news outlets a problem?

As a person who grew up reading Sunday comics and everything else, the newspaper is a very important thing. But if you look at somebody who just graduated high school, they don't read a newspaper at all. They're always on their phone looking at social media. We need to do something to protect our local newspapers, yes, because the New York Times does not apply to what I do up here, and I do not know what's going on perhaps even in Goshen without reading the local newspapers.