Prior to being elected to his first term as a Democrat serving the 19th CT House District, Derek has experience with the legislature. As Chief of Staff for the Senate Democratic Caucus, he managed a 70-person staff, helped achieve significant budget savings and worked with citizen activists to address issues such as gun safety, school security and mental health reforms; GMO labeling; and access to high quality pre-k. Before his tenure as Chief of Staff, he was Director of Communications for the Senate Democrats for four years. Derek has also been Deputy Chief of Staff/Communications Director for the Secretary of the State, Communications Director for the DeStefano for Governor campaign, and Director of Public Information for the City of New Haven. He was a news anchor and reporter at NBC Connecticut from 1999 – 2004, and before that worked at TV stations in Florida and CNN Headline News in Atlanta.
Derek earned his MBA from the UConn School of Business and bachelor's degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations from Syracuse University where he graduated Magna cum Laude.
When not at the legislature, he is associate vice president of Marketing and Communications with the UConn Foundation.
He is married to his childhood sweetheart, has 3 kids and lives in West Hartford.
Derek is Vice-Chair of the Energy and Technology Committee and also serves on the Environment Committee and the Planning and Development Committee. As part of his legislative work he helped defeat the bill concerning the Millstone Power Plant, which he felt would raise consumer costs. He also worked on a bill to make the MDC more transparent.
The budget impasse was a major part of his talk with the club. According to Derek the problem has been developing for 60 years through Democratic and Republican Administrations. They failed to make investments in pension and retiree healthcare. Of the current budget deficit of 2.2 Billion Dollars, 1.7 Billion is sins of the past. Most of the rest of the deficit is from revenue decline. 30% of the states revenue goes to these past promises, which are now our fixed costs. This is the 2nd highest in the nation. In order to pay for these costs, we are cutting education, aid to city and towns, healthcare, etc. All of the things that we need to make CT a place where our kids will want to live and not move out of state. Currently there are at least 3 budget proposals out there. All of them have problems and none of them can pass.
The solution starts with the need to be honest with the public, that it will be painful, and that it can't be solved in 1 year. For example, the governor has stated that he is proposing no new taxes. This is not true since his reduction in aid to municipalities will increase your property tax bills by $400,000,000. We also need to be bold because we can't get out of the problem by either raising taxes or cutting expenses but need growth. One proposal is to Zero out corporate income taxes for new companies coming into distressed areas.
