Waterford Greens Champion Community Service, Win Major Endorsements

WATERFORD, CT - On Sunday, October 22, members of the Waterford Green Party (WGP) and the community-at-large took to the fields at Leary Park to remove litter from the area. Over a dozen individuals came out for the event, according to a release.

Those in attendance included candidates Joshua Steele Kelly, Baird Welch-Collins, Deb Roselli Kelly, Billy G. Collins, Carl D’Amato and Mark Olynciw. Together, they helped clear several 20-gallon trash bags worth of litter from the park.

The Waterford Green Party has long championed community service. Their first public event, held a mere month after the party’s founding, was a benefit concert for UNICEF’s Syrian Refugee Fund, which helped raise hundreds of dollars for children affected by the violence of that civil war.

Since then, the party has raised hundreds more for charities around the world and held numerous clean-ups around town, in places like Waterford Beach, the Civic Triangle, Gardiners Wood Road, Stenger Farm and more.

Their clean-ups have helped remove hundreds of pounds of garbage from local ecosystems, and in turn have presumably helped to preserve natural systems, the lives of local wildlife, and the beauty of the town.

Additionally, the WGP has officially confirmed, thanks to the help of a database kept-up by the national Green Party, that the Waterford Green campaign in 2017 is the largest Green municipal campaign ever run in a Connecticut town.

The WGP is represented by nine candidates on the ballot this year; seven of them are running as registered Greens, and two as cross-endorsed candidates. The only larger Green municipal campaign to run in the state was in the city of Stamford in 2011.

“The many, wonderful responses I have gotten from Quaker Hill voters shows that the people of Waterford are ready for new, honest, effective leadership,” party founder and Co-Chair Baird Welch-Collins said in a release.

"We’re proud to have garnered so much community support for our ideas and our movement, and that support is clearly demonstrated by the number of candidates and endorsements we’ve managed to attract,” Josh Kelly, the WGP’s other founder and Co-Chair, said in a release.

The WGP’s candidates have attracted every single one of the official endorsements given out by local and state organizations in Waterford’s elections this year.

Four candidates were endorsed by NARAL CT, Deb Roselli Kelly (Board of Ed) and Josh Kelly (RTM D3) were the only two in town to be endorsed by AFT Connecticut and Josh Kelly also received the endorsement of the United Auto Workers Region 9A Cap Council.

The WGP’s status as a minor party only makes this feat all the more impressive.

"We are proud to endorse Josh," UAW Region 9A's Director Julie Kushner said in a release. "He is not only a smart and articulate candidate, but as a member of our union, we are confident he will be a principled and progressive member of Waterford's Town Meeting."

The WGP has been more active in its discussion of the issues and with public events in the weeks leading up to the election. It is the only party in town to have published an official platform to date, which outlines 39 different ways in which its candidates wish to improve Waterford.

It is published publicly on their website, waterfordgreenparty.org, for all to be able to read and evaluate.

The WGP will also be hosting two more events before Election Day: the Greens Music Night fundraiser with the New London Greens on Saturday, October 28, and a “Meet the Candidates” social at Filomena’s Restaurant from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 4.

Waterford voters head to the polls on November 7 to decide the composition of Waterford’s government.

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