Democrat Aili McKeen, challenger for the District 34 State Senate seat, has been a legislative liaison in Hartford, advocating for environmental and labor causes.

“I’ve seen how it works and doesn’t work,” she said. “It’s not always focused on how best to serve the people of Connecticut, it’s often ego-driven. And that’s really frustrating to me.”

In terms of the economy, McKeen wants to reassess the state’s budgetary and tax codes in order to support small businesses.

“Our budget really needs to reflect our values. And our tax code needs to reflect our values,” she said.

Since 30 percent of Connecticut’s traffic is made up of out-of-state drivers, McKeen would support tolls in some form.

“I support tolls with a progressive toll structure just like Massachusetts,” McKeen said, noting that her support isn’t unconditional. “If a toll bill would come to my desk for congestion tolls [that charge rush-hout drivers more], I would vote against it because congestion tolls are unpredictable and unfair.”

She sees cutting down on wasteful spending as one of the best ways for the state to correct its budgetary problems.

“There’s a rule that if [departments] don’t spend their full budget one year, they could cut that the next, and that incentivizes waste,” McKeen said. “I think that we should remove that rule so we can incentivize savings and not incentivize waste.

“We used to have a commission of people that looked for inefficiencies and waste in government. Over the last two budget cycles, they were cut and then eliminated,” she said. “A group of people who more than paid for their own salaries in savings were eliminated from the budget.”

She suggests increasing state revenue with “economic growth, but also restructuring our tax code to up the contributions from the top one percent.”

“I’d like to see small business grow. I think we need to reassess…our income tax codes and our business tax codes so that it becomes more fair depending on the size of your business,” McKeen said. “We need to be able to have access to low-interest small business loans; that program has received heavy cuts over the past couple of years.”

A long-time Girl Scout leader, she also believes that young people and new additions to the work force need access to affordable housing in order to stay and work in the state.

McKeen says that she comes from a family of union workers and is against “right to work” policies that she believes benefit only business owners and not workers. She also supports enforcing existing legislation to regulate exploitative businesses.

“I think that if we put the enforcement personnel into enforcing the laws we have, they’re probably sufficient,” McKeen said. “We have cut enforcement personnel a lot, so a lot of businesses don’t get caught or they don’t get investigated in a timely manner and that needs to change.”

“Protecting the labor laws we have now is a big part of this—holding the line. We don’t want to lose ground,” McKeen said. “I’d like to gain ground with some worker protections, but we absolutely cannot lose ground.”