Politics & Government

Sharkey: It Was a 'Tough Year'

State Speaker and Hamden Rep. Brendan Sharkey reflects on his first year as the leader of the state House of Representatives.

This article was written by Kathleen Ramunni

After almost a year serving as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hamden Rep. Brendan Sharkey admits it was a "tough year."

Sharkey spoke Monday night to the Dunbar Hill Civic Association on a variety of topics, including his experience as the second most powerful person in the state of Connecticut.

He replaced former Speaker Chris Donovan, who gave up the seat to run for Congress — a campaign that ended before the nominating convention when several of his aides were arrested on corruption charges related to fundraising. Donovan was never charged.

"It was ironic because Chris was the kind of guy who devoted his entire career to eliminating corruption and the influence of money in government," Sharkey said. "He was the ultimate good government guy but he wound up losing everything he had...he probably would have ended up being one of our congressmen from Connecticut had not a couple of his staff people made bad decisions on how to handle themselves."

Once he assumed the speaker's position, Sharkey said he felt the after effects of that scandal.

"I think that whole experience actually caused a lot of added scrutiny on the speaker's office as a result, and the media was interested in following anything that looked as though it isn't being handled the right way, so I felt that I was a bit under a microscope these last 10 or 11 months," he said. "I think we've gotten through that and folks have felt comfortable with what I've done and what I've brought to the office."

His first year was consumed with dealing with the fallout from the Newtown tragedy and the call for stricter gun control, Sharkey said.

"Most of this year [our work] really was the response to the tragedy in Newtown, and no sooner had I become sworn in as speaker, I was on a national footprint and national spotlight in terms of how Connecticut was going to respond legislatively to what happened in Newtown," he said. "It was a very arduous process and one that I insisted was going to be a bipartisan process."

But not all Democrats agreed with his strategy, Sharkey said.

"There were many folks in my party who were allies and friends for many, many years who I shared a lot of common interests with, who were very angry with me because there were a lot of folks who felt the best way to approach gun safety was to ram through a Democratic bill," he said. "We had the numbers, we had the governor, we could have just pushed it through, but I insisted that that wasn't the right way to do this and fortunately as speaker to do a bill like that you need my signature on it."

"In the end, it was a very delicate, difficult process," he said. "It was very lonely for many weeks when my Democratic friends abandoned me and told me I was crazy and why trust these Republicans to do the right thing, but it's something I insisted on and in the end that bill that we produced was a much, much better bill."

"Many who opposed me while we were going through it afterwards acknowledged that I had done the right thing and that their approach was probably not the right way to go," he said. "To do it on a partisan basis and ram something through is not the way to go on something like this...in the end it was a good thing and one that would put Connecticut in a good place nationally."

In addition, there was the issue of the billion dollar deficit, he said.

"We had to find a way to resolve it without cutting aid to municipalities, and to education in particular, which we managed to do," he said. "But it was another difficult process that we had to go through."

Seemingly smaller battles also took up time and attention, he said, such as the bill eventually passed that calls for labeling of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

"This was a very very controversial issue," he said. "I was not opposed to the issue of labeling GMOs in food products, I just didn't want Connecticut to be the only state in the country that was going to have this particular requirement because what that would have done was cause food prices to rise."

Food manufacturers would have had to make special labels for products shipped to Connecticut and they would pass that cost on to consumers, Sharkey said. So he insisted a trigger requirement be included in the bill that would call for surrounding states to follow the same path before Connecticut's requirement goes into effect.

Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams initially insisted on a bill without the trigger requirement, Sharkey said, but eventually it was passed with the requirement.  

"That was more reasonable to me," he said, but, "I was cast as the bad guy because I wasn't going to run with it. I felt we need to do a more reasonable bill so frankly so I refused to do that."


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