[ the following appeared in the
Windsor Journal on October 24th, 2025 ]

Before the actual piece, I want to provide a brief meta discussion about why I chose to write this at all. Having a shit heel Town Councilor in a small town in Connecticut is pretty insignificant, in the grand scheme of things; so why bother?

Well, we’re in the midst of a fascist take-over in this country, and, contrary to the image they like to project, fascists tend to be small-time shit heels that aren’t worth the bother. That is, until they create a movement that swallows up a whole country. I don’t think Will Pelkey is a fascist. I think he sees the big shit heels and buys into their image of themselves. He’s using local government as a way to play act and to garner attention to himself, to make himself feel important.

And that’s how fascism takes hold, thousands of tiny, pathetic men (mostly men, anyway) donning the aesthetics of a mean, bullying movement to make themselves feel better.

We have to defeat this movement at the national level, but we also have to starve it of recruits from below by mercilessly reinforcing how pathetic these people are. We have to say it out loud, clear as sunshine.

That’s why I wrote this.

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It’s election season, and we’re all exhausted. Politics has become increasingly ugly over the past few decades, prompting sentiments like Councilor Eleveld’s in this paper recently, “That is my biggest fear: that these sorts of situations happen and we don’t get good quality people, citizen legislators, coming forward willing to put their time in, for the simple fear they could end up with the target on their back.” Mr. Eleveld was speaking specifically about political violence, but I think his point can extend more broadly to the trolling, name-calling, bad faith, and meanness that pervades politics today. Good candidates, people who are genuinely interested in public service, don’t get into politics to engage in food fights.

Which is why I want to tell you about Councilor Will Pelkey.  
 
Mr. Pelkey has engaged in a pattern of behavior that is out of step with Windsor’s values, his oath of office, and basic decency. He repeatedly posted repugnant images of Representative Jane Garibay’s face superimposed on Jabba the Hutt, despite protests from both Democrats and Republicans that such behavior is harrassing. In a rather bizarre episode, he posted pictures, taken at a distance, of Black residents at a public swimming pool, asking if one of his colleagues on the Council was in the images (for the record, she was not). He bullied a seriously ill colleague on the Town Council, repeatedly calling for roll call votes to try to catch former Councilor Smith unconscious when he had to call into meetings from a hospital bed due to a quirk in the Council’s quorum rules. These parliamentary shenanigans were cruel and completely unnecessary.
 
Up to this point, everything I’ve described is just the odious behavior of an unserious person.  However, he also lied about police records, which violates his oath of office to “faithfully discharge” his duties as a Town Councilor.  
 
On March 6 of this year, Mr. Pelkey posted the following regarding the upcoming road diet referendum, “According to data received from Windsor PD, these same streets recorded only 4 accidents since 2017, and zero deaths.” In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the Windsor Police Department revealed that there were, in fact, 85 collisions in that area during the specified time period (roughly 1/month), 16 of which resulted in injuries. Furthermore, the Police Department confirmed that it had not provided any data of this kind to any elected official or member of the public in the six months preceding the referendum. 

To be clear, Mr. Pelkey deliberately invoked the authority of the Windsor Police Department to mislead voters about basic facts concerning our physical safety. He did not “receive” data from Windsor PD. He made up safety statistics to make a political point. These are simple counts that Mr. Pelkey could have easily obtained or verified with the police had he bothered to try. This project has been under consideration for over two decades; it’s not like he didn’t have time to check. This was no mistake either. Mr. Pelkey doubled down on this claim in the original social media discussion despite being shown publicly available police data contradicting his assertion. The message was then repeated almost word-for-word, in print, by Concerned Citizens of Windsor, a political action committee that has been fined multiple times for state campaign finance violations and reporting lapses. 

His statements were obviously false to residents of the affected neighborhood, leading some to question the Police Department’s truthfulness on this issue. He eroded trust between the neighborhood and law enforcement, and he erased years of diligent, dangerous work by police and first responders from the public discourse.

Windsor police and first responders deserve better. Their jobs are hard enough without unserious politicians lying about what they’re doing. Our Town Councilors and state elected officials deserve better. Being an elected official is hard, but it shouldn’t come with open harassment from colleagues. Most importantly, Windsor residents deserve better. At a minimum, we deserve to be told the truth about our own safety by the people we elect to represent us.

Yes, politics has gotten uglier. But we, Windsor voters, don’t have to accept this kind of behavior here. Please vote for candidates who reflect Windsor’s values and who take their responsibility to us seriously.