In some ways, the race for the 31st Senate district that includes Bristol, Plainville, Harwinton, Plymouth and Thomaston, includes a pair of relative newcomers.
The incumbent in the race, Republican Henri Martin, is finishing his first term in the Senate, while Mike Nicastro, the Democrat in the race, is running for his first try at a Senate seat.
"I think I've been very available to my constituents," Martin said of his brief time in the State Capitol. "There are some things I wish I could be more involved in, but I'm happy with my first term."
Martin, a real estate broker and owner of a storage facility in Bristol, is the ranking Republican on the children, veterans and banking committees and he's a member of the transportation committee.
Nicastro is an entrepreneur who's had a hand in numerous business ventures and teaches entrepreneurship at Central Connecticut State University.
Nicastro said he's running because Martin has been "invisible" as a member of the State Senate.
He said there has been no difference in the progress of Bristol and the district since the day Martin took office.
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"He likes to point to the different bills he’s cosponsored, but anyone who knows the inside baseball understands that cosponsoring bills is like hitting the 'like' button on Facebook,” he said.
Nicastro said his business background is what makes him qualified to craft policies to make Connecticut more business friendly.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur, I’ve built companies. I started a company with six people that we grew to 2,200,” he said.
Martin said he's been focused on issues relating to children in the General Assembly and that fiscal issues have also taken up a lot of his time.
If reelected, he said he would fight to enforce the state's constitutional spending cap, which was enacted after the income tax was enacted more than 20 years ago.
He said many of the state's severe spending problems, like the current $1.5 projected shortfall, could be traced to not following the spending cap.
“Had we not done that today our budget would be $5.5 billion less, thus, not having to raise taxes so tell me, doesn’t that make sense that we should be addressing that first?,” he said.
Martin also said, as a former member of the Bristol City Council, and as a small business owner, he knows the burden of mandates from the state level, whether they're for local spending, or a regulation for businesses and he's the one who could remove the ones that are most onerous.
“Part of the equation here is that you’ve got address mandates that have become policy for the last 20-30 years,” he said.
There was a recent spat in the race involving a mailer paid for by the political arm of the Senate Republican Caucus that linked Nicastro to Gov. Dannel Malloy, even putting a photo of the two of them on one side, and a list of what looked like joint initiatives on the back.
The photo, however, was photo shopped and Nicastro even said he doesn't have any photos with Malloy.
"Honestly, when I was president of the Central Connecticut Chamber, we had our issues with the governor," Nicastro quipped.
He called the political move, "identity theft" meant to link him to the unpopular governor in the middle of a tight election.
Martin claimed no knowledge of the mailer, saying, "I had nothing to do with that."
But when asked whether it was fair to link any Democrats to Malloy, he didn't hold back.v
“They're part of the same team that has been controlling policies that have been coming out of Hartford for 38 out of the last 40 years. So we have to address changing those policies,” he said.
