The special election February 26, 2019 for State Senate features a choice for voters between a Democratic State Legislator and a loyalist in the Stewart City Hall.
Voters will choose between Rick Lopes, a veteran Democratic state legislator, and Gennaro Bizzarro, the longtime influential lawyer and insider in the powerful Republican City Hall political machine of former Republican Mayor Timothy Stewart and his daughter, current Republican Mayor Erin Stewart.
The candidate elected will succeed former Sen. Terry Gerratana (D-6) in the State Senate. Gerratana was appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT) as a senior advisor in the state Office of Health Strategy.
Both candidates have long resumes of government experience.
Lopes was a legislative aide at the State Capitol for ten years, served on the City Council and then went on to serve as a State Representative, himself, for more than seven years.
Bizzarro has served as Corporation Counsel, the top lawyer for the city, in the administration of both Stewart mayors. He has also served as Chair of the board of directors of the Greater New Britain Chamber of Commerce.
But Bizzarro’s resume as a Stewart loyalist has proven a liability in his campaign for the Senate seat. The recent scandal involving bigoted online comments by Timothy Stewart has shed an unflattering light on Bizzarro’s past defense of Stewart. It also shed an unflattering light on Bizzarro’s role as both an employee of Erin Stewart and, at the same time, the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce that has, until recently, employed Timothy Stewart.
Both candidates have sought to make their case to voters about issues in the state.
Lopes is running on a platform of “tax relief,” “jobs and economic growth,” “common sense budgeting,” and “affordable health care.”
Former State Senator and Mayor of New Britain, Donald DeFronzo has said that Lopes, “has dedicated much of his life and career to bettering our communities and being elected state senator will be another opportunity for him to do what he loves, which is serving the people. Rick is a roll your sleeves up and get stuff done kind of guy so I look forward to seeing what he can accomplish in the senate.”
Bizzarro says, “Say no to tolls and taxes,” in his campaign. He has said, “We are facing a budget deficit of more than a billion dollars, we are in the midst of an opioid crisis that is shattering families, we have inequities in how we fund our schools and municipalities, and the list goes on.”
“We cannot afford to continue down the road we have been on for the past eight years,” Bizzarro said, “and that means we cannot keep sending the same people to Hartford and expect a different result. We desperately need an infusion of common sense at the Capitol, and that is exactly what I intend to bring.”
But the biggest news about the special election has been Bizzarro’s 2017 defense of Timothy Stewart retaining the influential position of president of the Chamber of Commerce in light of Stewart’s 2019 misogynistic comment about female members of Congress.
While Bizzarro has sought to distance himself from the 2019 scandal, the fact that, a little more than a year before, Bizzarro had defended Stewart after a similar online comment, also widely criticized as bigoted, raised questions about Bizzarro.
In that 2017 scandal, Stewart had said, “Unfortunately the inmates continue to run the neighborhood,” in an online discussion regarding the city’s North-Oak neighborhood, a neighborhood that has a large Latino and African American population.
Many people, including the New Britain Branch of the NAACP, called on Stewart to resign or be removed from his influential position as Chamber President, and from the Mattabassett District Commission and the city School Building Committee, two influential positions in the administration of Erin Stewart.
The scandal shed an unflattering light on the close relationship between Erin Stewart’s City Hall, employing Bizzarro, and the Chamber of Commerce, with Bizzarro as its board chair, employing Timothy Stewart.
Shortly after Erin Stewart was elected, her father, Timothy Stewart, was named to the influential position of Chamber of Commerce president, from where he is reputed to have exercised great influence in the affairs of the city.
As Erin Stewart sought to distance herself from the scandal roiling the city in 2017 by saying that the Chamber, “is not an entity of the city,” it was Bizzarro who announced that the elder Stewart would remain as Chamber President, despite the public outrage.
The Hartford Courant quoted Bizzarro at that time, defending Stewart from calls for his removal from the Chamber Presidency, saying, “Tim Stewart has been a tremendous advocate for the entire city of New Britain during his tenure as president of the Greater New Britain Chamber.”
Now Bizzarro’s past defense of Stewart in that position is coming back to haunt him.
“Tim Stewart’s comments last night are beyond outrageous,” said Lindsay Farrell, state director of the Working Families Party. “But while the Chamber’s President’s attack on women is shocking, it is not at all surprising. Men like him are all too often protected by other men in positions of power and decision-making roles.
Farrell continued, “Chamber of Commerce Chairman Bizzarro paved the way for this behavior when he defended Mr. Stewart just over a year ago after his racist ‘inmates’ comment, also on social media. These guys look out for each other; Mr. Bizzarro got his job with the city of New Britain from Mr. Stewart, after all.”
The voters will now choose between the two candidates in an election that will be in every polling place in the city until 8:00pm.
