Leadership Quote by Sue Kelly

A neat triple-stack of achievements, this line is less a celebration of policy than a campaign-grade argument that government can look both tough and tender at the same time. Sue Kelly’s syntax does the work: “increased,” “enacted,” “implemented.” Three verbs, three lanes of competence. It’s a résumé in sentence form, built to sound inevitable and managerial rather than ideological.

The subtext is triangulation. “Conservation spending” nods to environmental concern without spooking fiscal moderates; it frames protection as an investment, not a sacrifice. “Brownfields” is the shrewd centerpiece: a term that signals wonkiness while quietly promising jobs, redevelopment, and reclaimed tax base. It’s environmentalism sold through the language of economic revival, especially resonant in districts with aging industrial footprints. “Across the country” widens the constituency beyond her own voters, positioning the speaker as part of a governing majority rather than a parochial advocate.

Then comes the closer: “new clean water standards” that “will protect us from arsenic.” That last word is doing heavy emotional lifting. Arsenic is vivid, old-world, almost gothic; it bypasses debates over parts per billion and lands in the gut as a threat to children, kitchens, and daily life. The pronoun “us” completes the move from policy to shared vulnerability.

Context matters: early-2000s environmental politics often required threading the needle between business-friendly redevelopment and public anxiety over contamination. This sentence is engineered to reassure skeptics that environmental regulation isn’t anti-growth, and to reassure worried families that growth won’t poison them.