{news} (New London, CT "The Day")Green Party Member Wants to Wake Up the Electorate

[Tim McKee]

http://www.theday.com/eng/web/news/re.aspx?re=6b2bc755-49cd-4612-b43d-c7ae1d735a7a
 
Green Party Member Wants To Wake Up The Electorate 

 Buy this PhotoTim CookKenric HansonBy KATE MORAN
Day Staff Writer, New London
Published on 1/16/2005 
Kenric Hanson has no major gripes with the city about the services it provides. His trash gets picked up, his snow gets plowed, and he has confidence in the police and fire departments. 
But as a Green Party member in a city awash with Democrats, he thinks politics could benefit from a little more pluralism. 
In the 2003 local election, when Hanson ran for the school board and lost, he says he observed a great many voters who were isolated from the political process. While candidates knocked on doors in the southern and more affluent end of town, which has the heaviest voter turnout, they paid fewer visits to the first and second voting districts, he says. 
Hanson, 46 years old and a city resident for 15 years, says voters begin to feel indifferent to the small band of politicians whose names are recycled on the ballot year after year. This syndrome, he says, is reflected by the oddity of voters rejecting the city budget at the referendum in 2003 but then re-electing the very politicians who put it together. 
“A big problem is the poor participation of the electorate, which I think nurtures a poor political environment where accountability isn't something that's maintained between voters and their representatives,” he said. 
Roughly 40 percent of registered voters participated in the last local election in November 2003. 
To shorten the distance between politicians and their constituents, he proposes a system of district representation in which voters would choose one person from their greater neighborhood to speak for them in City Hall rather than elect seven council members at-large. 
“It seems the council and the city manager together represent a narrow viewpoint,” Hanson said. “There's a minority population and a northern section of town with different views than those in city government.” 
Hanson, who is married and has children in the magnet elementary school in the city, counts himself among the 56 percent of residents polled who favor electing a strong mayor as the city's chief executive. 
A strong mayoral system, he says, would allow one person to assert a strong platform, awake voters out of political torpor and prevent the march of initiatives, such as eminent domain, that have, at best, ambivalent public support. 
“If I were a strong mayor, I wouldn't be afraid of asserting myself in the direction that got me elected,” said Hanson, who is a self-employed Ocean Avenue resident. 
While generally satisfied with city services, Hanson thinks local government has gone about economic development in the wrong way. Instead of courting large corporations or national chains, such as CVS or Brooks pharmacies, he says, the city should boost homegrown businesses and help to renovate a few houses to stimulate a domino effect in neighborhoods teetering on blight. 




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