Campaigning for political office is not a new experience for Republican Vincent Pacileo. He is accustomed to laying out his philosophy and platform to voters in Essex, where he served for years on the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance, and districtwide in an earlier state senate race that he lost. Through each campaign he has remained committed to the themes of public service, fiscal responsibility, and local government. His run now for the state representative seat in the 36th District repeats those beliefs.

“I have always enjoyed public service. I have always hoped to make a positive contribution to my community and in small towns I think it is incumbent upon us to get involved,” Pacileo said. So yes, he is answering a call to public service, “but the reason I threw my hat into this state representative race is because I see the state’s economy heading in the wrong direction, with a $1.8 billion tax increase passed last year, but a budget that still runs a deficit.”

He sees the voters in his district being overtaxed.

“I tell them the state has gone through the change in your couch. We have to stop looking at the tax side and start looking at the cost side. We can build a stronger government by encouraging individual investment, by allowing people and smaller towns to keep more of their own money. In this district, for every $1 we send to Hartford, we get between 7 and 10 cents back,” he said.

In addition, Pacileo contends, the legislature last year “raised income taxes for people making as little as $50,000, cut the property tax deduction from $500 to $300, increased sales taxes and added a corporate tax surcharge.” In short, he said, “Government removed close to $2 billion from residents.”

These taxes, and others, need to be rolled back, he said.

“Small business owners in the district are hurting. Uniformly they see Hartford as hurting, not helping, them,” he said. “They believe government and the legislature have turned their backs on small business and small towns.”

Pacileo said state spending has increased by more than $1 billion in the last two years.

“It’s time to reduce our state budget by 1.5 percent per year for the next two years. We need to evaluate and eliminate programs that don’t work or don’t promote pro-grow policies. We should go through program by program, if necessary,” he said.

Two education mandates significantly impact education costs, and therefore taxes, in the district’s four towns. The first is the state’s education cost sharing grant, which it does not fully fund and “does not take into account the rural nature of smaller towns,” Pacileo explained. The second is the minimum budget requirement, which said a town cannot spend less on education than the year before.

“That’s just fundamentally wrong,” he said “It needs to be repealed.”

And Pacileo, who is director of administrative services for the town of Stonington, believes the “Hartford bureaucracy and many regional organizations have to move out of the way” so locally elected officials can do their jobs. “Certainly there should be cooperative efforts among communities, but there should be no usurping of local control.”

Pacileo believes that over these last two years state government “has done more harm than good…Look at the numbers and any reasonable person would say it’s not working. We have to fundamentally change the way we do business in Hartford. I think people want to see that change and I am willing to lead on this.”