Hrezi Petitions Include Legit Signatures from West Hartford Establishment Democrats. State Party Vice Chair Signed for Primary.

Democrat Muad Hrezi may not have submitted enough verified signatures to force the state’s first primary against an House of Representatives member, but his petitions from West Hartford include a couple of prominent Democrats.

State party vice-chair Adrienne Billings-Smith signed Hrezi’s petition. Billings-Smith is also a member of the West Hartford town council. Billings-Smith was named Nextstar’s 2022 Connecticut Woman of the Year. Her signature on the primary petition shows there are some insiders who want to pull down the state’s high hurdles to ballot access.

So does Tracey Wilson, the wife of former state senator Beth Bye. Wilson is a retired high school history teacher and serves as West Hartford’s town historian. Wilson is probably aware that Connecticut is among the most difficult states in the nation for a candidate to gain access to the party primary ballot. Bye serves in Governor Ned Lamont’s administration as commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood.

Bye served four terms in the Senate for eight years but declined to be sworn into office for the fifth two-year term she had sought with tens of thousands of dollars in public funds. Instead, Bye joined the Lamont administration with a pension boosting commissioner’s job in the office she helped create, causing a special election to be called and more public funds to be spent on campaigns in the winter of 2019.

Lamont provided an early endorsement of incumbent U.S. Representative John Larson’s bid for a 13th term. Al lis long forgiven between Lamont and Larson. Larson supported Joseph Lieberman in his 2006 primary campaign against Lamont. Larson supported Dannel Malloy over Lamont in bitter their 2010 Democratic primary race for governor. Larson, a deft collector of special interest campaign money, cited Malloy’s support for campaign finance reform in the Stamford Democrat’s race against the self-funding Lamont.

Larson supported Lamont in his 2018 campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Lamont, at Larson’s persistent urging, brought the veteran congressman’s brother, Timothy Larson, into his administration as the head of the Office of Higher Education, where he has lately struggled to explain why he authorized expenditures from a restricted fund. Timothy Larson followed the Bye trail and declined to serve the term in the State Senate he’d recently asked voters to honor him with and took a pension boosting job in the administration.

A hearing on Hrezi’s action to be placed on the August 9th primary ballot begins Wednesday morning.

Published June 21, 2022.