ALBANY COUNTY — As a newcomer to politics and a native to the Hilltowns, Christopher Smith is proud of spending his life in the rural community of East Berne and Warners Lake.

At 34, he now has a family and three businesses, one of them the large restaurant Maple on the Lake.

The enrolled Conservative has Democratic Party backing and wants to serve as legislator in place of Deborah Busch. He lost a bid for the Conservative Party line in a September primary, 21 to 30.

“I just focused on getting out there and talking to people,” Smith said of the fallout, adding that he won endorsement from a major union, the Civil Service Employees Association.

In speaking with people in the 39th District encompassing Rensselaerville, Westerlo, and parts of Berne and Knox, Smith said he tells them he doesn’t have ready answers to the decisions before the legislature because it hasn’t been his job for the past four years.

“I just became aware of the heroin problem a few weeks ago,” Smith said. When a car parked on the road near his home was towed away, he asked what happened and learned a woman inside had been using heroin.

“I blame it on there's nothing to do in the Hilltowns,” Smith said. “…when I was a kid, we had the Hilltop Hoppers, a kayaking club on Warners Lake. There was always something going on.”

“I think the penalty should be raised,” he added. “I know somebody, within the three weeks I’ve been learning about it, somebody got caught with it, they went to jail, and they came home, and that was it.”

After graduating from Berne-Knox-Westerlo, Smith spent three years in the military, then returned to East Berne to run the Maple Inn with Amanda Schanz, now his wife.

He said veterans would be helped by having jobs and being active in their communities.

“Talk is the best healing, I think,” Smith said. “The ones that come home and they're mopey because of what happened, I think a soldier-to-work program in the community would be a really good thing for them.”

“I had a nice car, my housing was paid for, and my meals were paid for,” Smith said of his time in the military. “So, when you come home, you have to learn to budget for that. It's kind of hard. You have to wean off the system again.”

Smith favors a regional approach to setting minimum wages, though, he said, it could be skewed even on a county level with prosperous businesses and customers in the city and thinner margins for businesses in areas like his own. He said he supports the recommendations made for incrementally higher minimum wage, but he would rather have the ability to increase wages based on performance.

Though he said he wasn’t prepared to speak about the county charter up for referendum in November, Smith said he believes one legislator can represent all four Hilltowns. Regarding questions related to shared services or facilities among highway workers, he deferred again to more research.

On whether the actions taken against oil shipments and boilers at the Port of Albany are appropriate, Smith said he was “on the fence,” seeing a larger role for state and federal agencies to play. He weighed the safety concerns against the fact that the train tracks have been in place for many years, while communities have developed around them.

“There’d be so many regulations set into place by the time you got to the county level, by then it would be safe,” Smith said.

He does see value in the more well-known legislation Albany County has recently passed.

“I like the bills,” he said of laws banning Styrofoam and toxic toys. “Anything to preserve our safety…but yet the city of Albany has different counties dumping in their landfill. I just feel it should be statewide instead of countywide.”

He added, “In Mexico, they're burning tires. We share their air.”

Setting himself apart from the pack of legislative candidates, Smith is highlighting his opposition to the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, gun-control legislation passed quickly in 2013 and upheld last week in federal court, after a shooting in a Connecticut elementary school.

“It’s an old law now, but I'm going to try to get new revisions for us,” Smith said, referring to a resolution that would formally declare the county’s opposition to the state law. “I came from a school where, on opening day of gun season, you had recess all day because school was at half staff.”

On the local concern of town planning boards considering towers in the Hilltowns that would help with emergency communication, Smith said he is in favor of their erection.

“I’m 100 percent for them because, when I’m in the woods and my son falls and breaks his legs or something I want my phone to work,” Smith said. “I'll weigh out the options.”