Republican Pankaj Prakash is running against Democratic incumbent Kerry Wood to represent the 29th state House district of Newington, Rocky Hill and Wethersfield.
Prakash came to the U.S. from India to study for a graduate degree at the University of Connecticut. He works as a data scientist at Raytheon and teaches data science and analytics courses at UConn’s School of Business. He has served on Rocky Hill’s Town Council since 2019.
“I’m proud of my heritage as somebody from India, as an Indian. I have my roots in India. My parents are Indian. I’m proud of that, but I’m even a prouder American at this point, because I think this country has been really good to me. And one of the reasons I’m running [is that], as an immigrant, I want to continue to give back to the community.”
Prakash shared how his work as a data scientist would affect his approach to developing and measuring programs and their outcomes. He emphasized tax relief through a series of mechanisms including changing tax brackets, occupancy taxes on hotel guests and eliminating the sales and meals taxes. He also talked about his desire to modify the Paid Family Leave program so that it would be less of a burden for small businesses, and his belief in school choice.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
CTEx: What are your priorities if elected to the Connecticut state legislature?
PRAKASH: My vision, if I want to summarize it, is about affordability, tax relief, quality of life and investing in our communities. Those are the four pillars of what I want to do in the legislature. From the affordability and tax relief point of view, those two go together.
Tax relief in my view is about immediate relief as well as the long-term structural events. If you think about immediate stuff — expanding the gas tax holiday, [reducing or eliminating the diesel fuel tax], that’s one, for sure, we can do immediately. We can reduce the sales tax from 6.35 to 5.99 and eliminate the meals tax. I think it’s at 1%.
We can also, as the winter arrives, expand the eligibility to the energy assistance program for families. We need to help people pay for home heating because that can be a real crisis. I don’t think anybody should not agree with it. I just feel like it’s a no-brainer. People will need it.
Hope is not a strategy. Gas prices are what they are. They are not going to go down from $6 to $2 like they were last year. So I just think we should plan for this and as the winter arrives, people should have coverage. Nobody should be freezing in their homes.
Then if you talk about the long-term stuff: we have to think about, how did we get here? We had three big tax increases in 2011, 2015 and 2019. It all adds up to probably $5 billion. Close to it.
We had all these increases and then we had a tax cut this year, which is kind of small compared to the tax increases we have had over the years, so you have to think about it in the bigger context. It’s great we were able to do something this year because we had a surplus and I welcomed that, but I think we could have done more.
What I’m …….