City
Attorney, Gennaro Bizzarro, has announce he is seeking to run for the state
legislature for the 24th. District hoping to unseat state representative Rick
Lopes.
Gennarro
indicated to me that our state is losing too many jobs to other states and he
will be campaigning for “change.”
fs
This is great to hear !!!!!
ReplyDeleteLopes should just pack it in now !!!
ReplyDeleteNEW BRITAIN — News that legislative aide and former city alderman Rick Lopes was caught on videotape rifling through another staff member's desk spread quickly among local politicians Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteLopes' involvement in last week's incident, which was confirmed by spokesmen for the Senate Democrats and the House Republicans, was posted on a state politics blog, www.ctlocalpolitics.net. Lopes and Stephen Palmer, a clerk at the government administration and elections committee, can be seen on a security video rearranging papers and looking in the file drawers and on a bulletin board of an assistant clerk for the committee.
Lopes was suspended Tuesday without pay for three days, according to an official at the Legislative Office Building. He has been a legislative aide to Sen. Donald DeFronzo, D-New Britain, for about three years. Palmer has not been disciplined.
Capitol police have begun a criminal investigation. They have declined to release the tape to the public pending the investigation's outcome.
Pat O'Neil, a spokesman for the state House Republicans, identified the assistant committee clerk as Juliana Simone, who could not be reached for comment. Attempts to reach Lopes were unsuccessful.
``As you can imagine, it's the talk of the building,'' O'Neil said.
The revelation that Lopes was involved in what DeFronzo described as a ``lapse in judgment'' was the topic of the day among city politicians. Lopes lost the nomination for the vacant Ward 1 seat to Edward Kirejczyk Jr. by a 7-6 vote during last week's council meeting.
Four Democrats voted with the council's three Republicans for Kirejczyk. The Democrats were publicly criticized by Michael Trueworthy, the council's Democratic majority leader, and John McNamara, chairman of the Democratic town committee, for breaking ranks with the party caucus, which supported Lopes.
Tuesday's turn of events seemed for some to vindicate the decision by the four Democrats -- Larry Hermanowski, John Carroll, Paul Catanzaro and James Wyskiewicz. Two of the Democrats said they didn't vote for Lopes because he received the fewest votes during his unsuccessful bid for re-election in 2005.
Lou Salvio, the council's Republican minority leader, said an apology from Trueworthy and McNamara would do little to repair the harm.
``I would not accept an apology from them if my life depended on it,'' Salvio said. ``Let the people respond to this now.''
Trueworthy said the incident hasn't changed his opinion of Lopes, whom he described as a good alderman. He questioned the motives of House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, who has called for Lopes' and Palmer's termination.
``I have never seen a situation where ... you have the politicians and the leader of a political party going after a mid-level staff person,'' he said. ``I feel kind of bad for Rick that he happened to be catching the brunt of whatever politics are going on up there.''