The Town of Seymour over the past two years has seen some dramatic change, some of it highly visible and some hidden under the surface. Kurt Miller’s Administration has made great progress in many areas, such as cleaning up the Housatonic Wire Factory disaster that was stuck in the mud for several years, restructuring our local town government, and bringing new business into town.
They’ve made Seymour a better place to live and work than it was just two short years ago. However, we still have a great deal left to accomplish, which is why I’m proud to run with Kurt Miller as part of his team for the Board of Selectmen.
I believe that my experience as a State Representative, along with my experience as a member of the Seymour Board of Finance, will help me to serve the people of Seymour effectively.
Since taking office the Miller Administration has begun to implement accountability measures in our town government, beginning with a new employee review process and the creation of a Human Resources Department. If elected to the Board of Selectmen I would like to build upon the progress that Seymour has made with these changes. Unlike most politicians, who like to make rhetorical promises without any kind of substantive strategy, I have a plan that I believe will increase efficiencies and accountability in our town government.
Towns across the country have begun to implement policies designed to measure performance across all departments, from top to bottom. Modeled after the City of Baltimore’s groundbreaking “CitiStat” program, the system measures performance and uses the data to make better decisions. The data helps to identify problem areas, opportunities for efficiency, successes, return on investment, and other important aspects of government that quite often remain nebulous to both policy makers and the public in general.
The Town of Seymour currently measures some services that it offers its citizens, but there is a large amount of data that has never been collected and no system in place to do so. I believe that by implementing a policy that expands our data collection we can reduce the cost of our town government while increasing the effectiveness of our operations. This means quite simply that we will do a better job for less money. The key is finding the right tools to measure our performance, and then actually sticking with the process. That requires leadership and direction from the Board of Selectman and from Kurt Miller’s team.
As a homeowner in Seymour with a newborn daughter who will grow up here in town, I want nothing more than to make our home a better place tomorrow than it is today. Re-electing Kurt Miller and his team will ensure that we’re doing just that.
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