Phil DeCologero: Rep. Dizoglio Betrayed our Trust on Transparency

DecologeroTwenty-seven year old North Andover resident Phil DeCologero is running for the Democrat nomination for the 14th Essex District State Representative’s race. In September, DeCologero will face off against incumbent State Rep. Diana DiZoglio, and North Andover veteran, Oscar Camargo. DeCologero appeared on the Paying Attention radio program with Tom Duggan last month.

Duggan asked DeCologero why he was running against incumbent Diana DiZoglio, if their differences were ideological or based on actual votes. Here is part of his answer.

“For me it wasn’t an ideological position, you’re right, I wasn’t a supporter of Diana Dizoglio’s when she ran in 2012.

But I thought she deserved a chance. I really do think that she worked really hard when she got elected in the primary, and she worked hard on delivering a message of transparency and wanting to promote transparency when she got elected. I think she deserved that chance …

In the case of Rep. DiZoglio, she got elected and her platform was very much centered around transparency. But, the fact that from her very first vote, she voted against the very types of issues she promised she would champion, and that was votes like: getting committee votes posted on line.

Right now if you want to know how any of the representatives in the Merrimack Valley or beyond, how they vote in committee, you can’t actually get that information by going on any of the legislators’ webpages. I feel like that’s a really basic piece of government, it’s a representative democracy and that’s something that people like to trump. They like to talk about what they are doing on committees. And if you don’t know how they are voting on committees or you have to bend over backwards to get that information, well that’s not really much to be impressed about.

The representative really pushed that issue. I mean not that specific issue, but the general tone of transparency, accountability, accessibility. So, I was disappointed when that was proposed, she and other democrats, I was disappointed when other democrats did this. They actually voted against it. It’s not inaction that I’m upset about, it’s the very action of going against what was promised. So I think that really betrayed our trust.

And it wasn’t just that vote, but it was the vote to prevent bills being on-line at least 24 hours before they are voted on. We can have a debate on whether 24 hours is long enough, but they should at least be up.

I think that if you don’t know what’s happening in the legislature before it happens, how can you as a representative effectively represent the people.

With representative DiZoglio, that’s something she had pushed. And she had actually said at a debate at Mann’s Orchard was that one of the first bills she would file is that she would, literally this is verbatim ‘challenge house rules.’ This was an opportunity right there to challenge house rules and she went along with everybody else. I was very disappointed about that.

If you are going to run for office and you are going to run on a platform, you should follow through on that platform no matter how narrow that it may be.

On this very show, you had a very lively debate between the representative and Representative Lyons, about who was the real conservative when it came to the gas tax vote.

I would agree with Rep. Lyons that that was a flip flop on representative DiZoglio’s part when she said that she was not in favor of the gas tax.”