State Senate Candidate Justin Potter

Justin grew up on a small dairy farm in Washington, CT, and attended Region 12 schools, which is where he met his wife Claire, who was his prom date at Shepaug. After graduating from college and starting and running a successful e-commerce business for years, he and Claire moved to Kent to raise their two young children, Madeleine and Orlando. He serves as the President of Kent Affordable Housing, and volunteers at the Kent Food Bank. Justin considers himself a practical Democrat, which means: not letting ideological or partisan lines get in the way of solutions; carefully considering the costs and tradeoffs associated with pursuing important goals; and being willing to say no to vocal interest groups if that’s what’s needed for the greater good. 

Justin’s priorities include:

• Addressing our housing situation in ways that respect local control of zoning and open space. 
• Stabilizing, and lowering utility rates so families aren’t hit with outrageously high bills. 
• Making healthcare more affordable and accessible, especially for our seniors and small businesses.
• Supporting the small farms that are an essential part or our region and culture.
• Protecting open space of high conservation value. 
• Maintaining the fiscal discipline that produced sustainable tax cuts and lower borrowing costs.

JUSTIN POTTER

What policies do you believe have led to the strengthening of the state's fiscal position, and do you support those policies?

The fiscal guardrails, which were enacted with bipartisan support back in 2017, were key to righting the fiscal ship in Connecticut. It led to paying down a rather large pension debt. Because we've paid that down, last year, the legislature was able to pass the largest income tax cuts in state history, and I think that is a great thing.

We need to maintain fiscal discipline, absolutely, and I'm very, very focused on that. I don't want to hear about gimmicks about raiding the rainy-day fund to offset some one-time expense. But next year is going to be a challenging budget year because a lot of the budget was balanced using federal funds, post-COVID, and that funding is not going to be available.

There is a call to reduce the allocations for debt pay down and increase spending for social programs. What’s the right balance between debt reduction, tax relief, and social spending?

We have to fund our core services, and it's a balance, it's a trade-off. And just circling back to that pension debt, still $37 billion in debt. Paying that down quickly will have advantages. It raised Connecticut's bond rating and allowed us to pass the tax cut.

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

I serve as the president of Kent Affordable Housing, and so I deal with this issue on a daily basis. Knocking on doors [it’s surprising] the number of young adults, 25 to 35 years old, who come to the door when I'm trying to reach someone older and these are people who would like to be out starting a family, getting a place of their own, but they can't do that. At the other end of the age spectrum, you have retirees in these houses where they raised their families and they're far bigger than they need and they'd love to be able to downsize, but there's no place to downsize to.

I consider myself a housing advocate, but I do think there's been a bit too much focus on zoning reform. Dealing with zoning is important but I strongly believe that we can work with local control of zoning to build the housing that we need. Vermont has a program where they provide homeowners with funding to create accessory apartments in exchange for a 5-to-10-year affordability commitment. That has proven to be very popular there and very successful in terms of actually getting housing built. I think that's a way that we can address our housing needs while respecting local control of zoning and open space here.

Should affordable housing be redefined to include naturally affordable housing as well as deed-restricted affordable housing?

During and post the pandemic, we saw so many long-term owners of naturally occurring affordable housing sell their buildings and the new owners paid a lot for it and they have to invest in it. So, the subsequent rents end up being no longer affordable. A way to stabilize and bring the naturally occurring affordable housing onto the books is a program to provide funding to landlords, small landlords, to renovate those units in exchange for that five to ten year affordability commitment. Government subsidized housing counts towards the exemption, so it's not necessarily a fixed length of time for the affordability commitment, it's more the source of funding. That would bring the naturally occurring affordable housing onto the books and allow it to count towards the exemption.

What about towns that don't have any infrastructure for this type of building?

Yes, so that I see as a tremendous problem. I don't think the interests of small towns in northwestern Connecticut are understood in the legislature. The Department of Housing is very focused on large multifamily buildings because they're more efficient to build.

If you have the infrastructure for that, you have the sewer and water for that, they make sense. But so many of our towns do not have that infrastructure. And so that's why I think it's important to sort of focus on things like accessory apartments and renovating existing multifamily housing.

Let's move on to utility rates. There's a new part of the electric bill called Public Benefits?

I think there is bipartisan agreement that something absolutely needs to be done about utility rates. I will also say that I think there's bipartisan blame to be shared. About 70 or 80 percent of that [public benefits] portion was the Millstone deal, and then 20 to 30 percent of that was due to the shutoff moratorium. I think it would make a lot of sense to pull those public benefits into the budget and have the legislature explicitly deal with those, rather than passing it along to the rate payers. But overall, we need to be able to stabilize utility rates. There is no reason that a regulated utility should have such volatile rates.

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?

How we deal with waste is a tremendous issue, and there's a lot of innovation occurring in terms of towns moving to different models of dealing with their waste. The town of Kent recently went to a pay-as-you-throw model, which has people a lot more cognizant of packaging waste and how that impacts the whole throwing away trash.

We don't want to have a situation where all the towns sign up with one commercial waste disposal outfit and then suddenly, they have no other choice. I think there needs to be a regional approach supported by the state and I think waste reduction has to be a big part of the program, in terms of diverting organics and compostables from the waste stream, and also maybe extended producer responsibility for the packaging we get that constitutes such a big component of our trash.

What do you think about eliminating single stream recycling and dividing our waste so that we have uncontaminated items that can be resold?

I know that HRRA has a program where they separate out certain items from the recyclables so that they can be resold. In Kent it was largely single stream and then things started getting separated out. There's a separate bin just for glass and then those get turned into composite countertops, that sort of thing.

Thousands of black bear-human interactions are reported each year. The greatest numbers of conflicts take place in western Connecticut. How do you address public safety while maintaining decent bear habitats?

I believe that we need to continue to work on non-lethal ways to reduce conflicts with bears. Here in Kent, we had an issue with bears getting into dumpsters, and we finally arrived on a good design to keep bears out and the conflicts were greatly reduced.

Connecticut is the only state with a meaningful bear population that does not manage their bear population. We have three times as many home entries per 100 bears as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, any other state with a meaningful bear population. And the only difference is that we're the only state without a hunting season. It stands to reason that if the bear population were reduced somewhat, we'd see a reduction in conflicts.

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

Health care is a huge issue in northwestern Connecticut. It's a tremendous, tremendous problem. As we move towards a model where you have for-profit hospitals and healthcare systems, I understand these are profit-seeking organizations, and so trying to concentrate everything down in Danbury or wherever is sort of what they're going to try to do. But we need to work on ways to make sure that people here have access to health care and in a reasonable distance.

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?

Instead of conglomerate newspapers. Yeah. That would be a real boon for other people who would like to start newspapers in small towns. It's been a boon for this area to have a small paper.

I'm not sure why that bill failed. I'd be interested in looking into it. This is another area where I think that the government perhaps could take a role in terms of providing support for a fundamental need. Our newspapers and media outlets are a cornerstone of civic life.