Emily HauEmily Hau

Emily Hau is a candidate for State Representative in Connecticut's 132nd District, which covers Fairfield and Southport. She is running as a community organizer and self-described problem-solver on a results-first platform: read the bills, do the research, listen to constituents, and vote for what's good for the people who live in the district today.

Emily is the founder of the Nutmegger Oil Group, a neighbor-run heating-oil buying collective she started after realizing her neighbors were overpaying. She organized them, ran the numbers, and negotiated a better deal. The group has grown from 117 households to more than 900, saving members an estimated $1.6 million over four winters. She rebids the contract every year, and the supplier she selects compensates her for organizing the group — a disclosed arrangement paid from the company's margin, not added to members' per-gallon price. As she puts it, trust is renewed every year and has to be earned.

She has spent two decades at Yale University, where she serves as associate director of the Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science. Her career has centered on convening people from very different worlds — researchers, business leaders, and government partners — and getting them to solve hard problems together, an approach she pledges to bring across the aisle in Hartford.

Emily's platform centers on three priorities. On affordability, she wants to apply the same organize-and-negotiate approach that lowered heating-oil costs to electricity bills, which are among the highest in the nation. On accountability, she wants to bring public-records discipline into the building, writing the rules instead of enforcing them from the outside. On local control, she supports housing solutions built for Fairfield rather than one-size-fits-all state mandates with deadlines she calls mathematically impossible to meet.

She has already built civic tools her neighbors are using, including one that helps Fairfield residents weigh in on protecting local-business parking under the new housing law, and another that publicly tracks the town's speed-camera process and helps residents petition the RTM.

A Fairfield resident since 2015, Emily lives in the district with her husband, William, and their two daughters. She is running because she believes the work of good government is straightforward: ask the hard questions, do the research, and show up for the people you serve.