Caledonia 1 Candidates Preview

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Created on Monday, 05 November 2012 18:41

Written by Alyssa Sylvia

AROUND THE NEK - The race for Caledonia 1 State Representative this election is between Democrat Claudette Sortion and Republican Incumbent Leigh Larocque.

Sortino, a resident of Ryegate for many years has house experience serving in township council for 6 years and being on the school board for 8 years in Pennsylvania. Sortion feels that her past experience in leadership roles will help her to win this election, "Once you've done public service in any area, you have a pretty good knowledge of how things happen and if youre moving to Vermont and decide to run for office in Vermont, I'm in a good position to hit the ground running.".

Sortino's platform centers around healthcare for all Vermonters and improved cellphone and broadband coverage in Barnet, Ryegate and Waterford areas, where she says the lack of service moves people and businesses out of town. "You can't get a business into an area that doesnt have those things, nor can people work at home for larger corporations somewhere else and this is becoming more and more the way in which people find employment and its totally off the page for us becasue we don't have the technology that makes it possible.".

In the last two years Larocque has supported 63 bills, with only 4 of them becoming laws. Over his years dating back to 1993, some of those laws include an act that requires health care services by a chiropractive physican, thanking private landowners for hosting snowmobile trails, 2000 lifetime sex offenders would be eligible to appeal to the court to be removed from notification, but not registration after 10 years and be required to submit testing for sexually transmitted diseases, and established biomass energy development group to enhance biomass energy production designating skiing and snowboarding as the official winter state sport, which passed in March of this year.