SALISBURY, Conn.—State Representative Maria Horn, 62, has championed many causes in her eight years in the state House of Representatives and now wants to continue her work in a fifth term as representative for the 64th District.
The district includes the towns of Canaan, Cornwall, Kent, Norfolk, Falls Village, Sharon, Salisbury, Goshen and Torrington.
In addition to getting the continuing endorsement of the Democratic Party, Horn is backed by the Working Families Party and the Independent Party of Connecticut. She is opposed by political newcomer Katelynn Borraiz of Washington, Conn., a Republican running on a platform of parental rights and medical freedom to abstain from vaccinations.
In the House, she serves on the Energy and Technology and Environment Committee. In 2022, she was named co-chair of the Revenue, Finance and Bonding Committee, a position she shares with state Senator John W. Fonfara. She was previously chair of the House Public Safety Committee.
The Ohio-born and Princeton-educated Horn earned a law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1993. She has worked for J.P. Morgan and Co., the law firm Debevoise and Plimpton, and for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Criminal Division.
Locally, Horn has also served on the Salisbury Board of Finance, as board president of Indian Mountain School and on the board of directors for Women’s Support Services (now called Project SAGE).
She entered politics in 2018, running against Canaanite Brian Ohler. She won the election by only 57 votes after a recount and narrowly defeated him again in a 2020 rematch.
In May, as she accepted the Democratic Party nomination for reelection, Horn said she joined the State General Assembly in 2018 because she wanted Connecticut to stand up to the changes that President Donald Trump ushered in during his first term. She added that now that she is an experienced legislator, she plans to use that experience to ensure that Connecticut stands up to what she sees as even more radical changes.
If re-elected, she said she hopes to continue as finance chair. “My focus has been on the budget and structural parts of it,” she said in an interview. “I’m looking at a number of things to address.”
“One of the issues that I will work on is a bucket of ideas I call ‘tax fairness,’” she continued. “We get good data on who pays taxes and it is no surprise that the upper echelons play less. People feel like some people are just getting away without paying like others. We, as a country, have allowed a certain class of people to employ advisors and get out of paying taxes. I have even heard from some wealthy residents that they believe it’s their civic duty to pay.”
She added that Connecticut has some of the biggest gaps in education funding and high levels of income inequality. “I’m also looking at emergency funds to respond to drastic and cruel federal cuts,” she said. “I’m interested in making sure that Connecticut can have funds to respond to any federal cuts. We can’t fill the holes created by those cuts, but we can set aside some resources.”
Horn, who received the endorsement of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, wants to continue her work on environmental issues, including the knotty issue of preserving open space while assuring that land remains available for affordable housing.
“I’m looking for ways to incentivize that conversation,” she said. “We need to really analyze the conservation value of land and figure out what can be good for housing. Some of the most painful conversations I have are with constituents being priced out of their hometowns.”
She referred to the 2025 legislative session’s tussle with Governor Ned Lamont over House Bill 5002, a sweeping omnibus affordable housing bill that Lamont vetoed, sparking a major clash over local zoning control versus state-mandated housing growth.
Municipal officials, suburban leaders and Republicans argued that the 160-page bill stripped towns and cities of local zoning autonomy. The bill required municipalities to set goals for creating affordable housing units, which opponents labeled as top-down unfunded mandates.
The proposal also eliminated mandatory off-street parking requirements for certain multi-family developments and allowed middle housing such as duplexes and townhomes in commercial zones without local public hearings, which local leaders argued ignored community input.
Governor Lamont vetoed the bill because he asserted it lacked sufficient agreement from small-town mayors and first selectmen. Following the veto, a compromise package was signed into law in late 2025.
“Obviously, these are big and painful conversations,” Horn said. “We came back and passed the bill with much of what we wanted, but one that respects the towns. The original bill had quotas, and a lot of towns felt the numbers were foisted on them.”
The final version allows towns to set goals for themselves.
Horn has long been an advocate for environmental issues and was cited by the League of Conservation Voters for her support in establishing tree-cutting protocols, encouraging food waste diversion, and regulating polluting facilities in vulnerable communities.
In recent years, she has worked to protect residents from harmful toxins by restricting the use of cancer-causing chemicals such as PFAS that contaminate drinking water and helped to ban the widespread use of the chemical Chlorpyrifos on golf courses that kill pollinator species.
She worked to update the state’s bottle bill to reduce waste and increase recycling in Connecticut and will continue to prioritize waste management and food waste diversion as an important part of the solution to Connecticut’s solid municipal waste disposal crisis.
Since the closing of the MIRA burn plant, the state has shipped about half of its municipal solid waste out of state, some 964,691 tons in 2024 that could not be processed within Connecticut’s borders. Efforts are being made to reduce the amount of MSW going into the waste streams by encouraging composting in municipalities.
“I spend more time thinking about garbage than I would have thought possible,” she said. “We have to send our garbage out of state because there is no alternative. It’s a problem.”
She advocated for the transfer of the Torrington Transfer Station to the newly formed Northwest Resource Recovery Authority to take the municipal solid waste from 10 towns. The plant’s operation will be modeled on the successful Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority.
She said that achieving this goal required “a lot of working together” by municipal and state officials, with strong advocacy on her part for the Northwest Corner. “It was an argument that had to be made,” she said.
There was a time when rural Connecticut legislators felt that the needs of constituents in their towns were not heard as much as those living in urban areas. Horn believes that this is less true now. “I am quite confident that I am listened to now,” she said. “I have a band of other legislators that represent small towns. I think we are a group that gets small towns listened to.”
She is happy to work in a legislature that still functions as intended. “When I talk to constituents, I hear a lot of anxiety about what is happening nationally,” she related. “People are worried, anxious and fearful and want to know what responsible governance and bipartisan participation looks like. We do that here. We take care of each other out here and people want to see that. They want to know their community is different than what is being seen nationally.
Horn resides in Salisbury with her husband, Tom Quinn, and their dog, Nelly. They are the parents of Maude, Abby and Max.
