R. Nelson “Oz” Griebel, one of the top business leaders in the Greater Hartford region, will announce Thursday that he is running for governor.<\/p>\n
A Simsbury Republican, Griebel is the latest entry into the wide-open race that now has more than 12 candidates.<\/p>\n
Griebel will be facing off against the two front-running Republican candidates – former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley of Greenwich and Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele of Stamford. Former U.S. Rep. Larry DeNardis of Hamden, who served in the Congress in the early 1980s and later served as president of the University of New Haven, has also thrown his hat into the ring.<\/p>\n
Griebel, 60, is known as the president and CEO of the MetroHartford Alliance, which is the region’s chamber of commerce and leading voice for economic development.<\/p>\n
He is planning to file papers in Hartford before heading to the state Capitol at 12 noon Thursday for his announcement. As part of his across-the-state, full-day tour, Griebel will visit a Torrington restaurant that is owned by a Republican Town Committee member before heading later in the day to the Mystic Seaport and then the Stamford train station at 6:15 p.m. to meet and greet voters.<\/p>\n
A 1971 graduate of Dartmouth College, Griebel is a lawyer and a banker who said in early December that he was thinking about running for governor.<\/p>\n
While the governor’s race would be his first run for public office, Griebel is known at the Capitol as the former chairman of the Transportation Strategy Board, which was highly active during the tenures of then-Gov. John G. Rowland and then-House Speaker Moira Lyons of Stamford.<\/p>\n
Griebel’s wife, Kirsten, was one of the leaders in the long-running battle against the Konover company’s plan for a Target department store and related developments in southern Simsbury. The sophisticated neighbors in the area directly west of the proposed development mobilized as a major force to block the proposals along Route 10 on land that is still undeveloped and is within view of the Heublein tower that oversees the Simsbury landscape. The land is near the Simsbury-Avon border in an area where residents argued that the two-lane road could never handle the increased traffic from the Target store.<\/p>\n
Formerly a registered Democrat, Kirsten Griebel recently arrived at Simsbury Town Hall and switched her registration to Republican.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
R. Nelson “Oz” Griebel, one of the top business leaders in the Greater Hartford region, will announce Thursday that he is running for governor. A Simsbury Republican, Griebel is the latest entry into the wide-open race that now has more than 12 candidates. Griebel will be facing off against the two front-running Republican candidates – former […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}