WILBRAHAM –  Local Realtor, Wilbraham resident and Springfield native Donald Flannery has announced that he will be running for current State Rep. Angelo Puppolo Jr.’s seat in the House of Representatives.

Flannery grew up in the Hungry Hill section of Springfield with his family.  He recalled stories of swimming in a nearby pond with his friends, walking to his elementary school, working a paper route and being employed at an A&P store.  He attended Springfield’s Technical High School, and briefly attended Western New England University when it was Western New England College located at the local YMCA on Chestnut St.

“I didn’t graduate because I felt that it didn’t leave me enough time for socializing, I was more interested in finding a girlfriend and someone I could settle down with,” he chuckled.

For the last 56 years Flannery has owned and operated Flannery & Company, Realtors in Wilbraham.

Flannery is no stranger to running for state representative, as he ran for the first time 30 years ago. Flannery ran as an independent and based his campaign on a series of ideas that he had, one being replacing welfare checks with debit cards.  

“The effort was to cut down on fraud and abuse. Part of my proposal was there would be a lot of restrictions on how to use the card.  That’s what the EBT card is today. They passed the EBT card, but they never passed restrictions on it until about 20 years later. Finally they said, ‘Oh, you can’t use it for alcohol or tobacco but you can use it for everything else.’ You can take money out of the ATM with an EBT card and spend it on anything,” Flannery shared.

Also during his first run for state representative, Flannery had noticed congestion of emergency rooms and hospitals with non-threatening concerns was becoming more and more apparent.  He proposed adding health centers in cities and towns where people could go for non-life-threatening issues.  Flannery noted that today, we have the buildings he proposed, for example, Urgent Care and MedExpress.

Though he didn’t become state representative on his first attempt, Flannery is hopeful that residents of Wilbraham, East Longmeadow and parts of Springfield will vote for him to represent them in Boston.  

Flannery was compelled to run for office again for two reasons: the way that he has witnessed other representative’s voting, and because of a flyer he received from Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance which alleged state representatives voted for their own pay raises.

“The Springfield newspaper used to have a column about how they [representatives] voted, it used to tell you how they voted.  When I saw in the paper how Angelo [Puppolo] was voting, I went up to his office and I complained how he was voting. He would say, ‘It’s not me, it’s those liberals down in the Eastern part of the state.’  I said, it’s not them, it’s how you voted,” Flannery said. “I said that’s enough, I’m going to run against Angelo because I just can’t stand the way he’s voting, even though I was on a friendly basis with him.”

He added, “When I saw that they voted themselves a pay raise, I said to myself, they’re our employees, no other employee can vote themselves a pay raise and they shouldn’t be able to do that.  The voter should, not them.”

Flannery is running as an independent, but described himself as a lifelong Democrat.  He said he was a Democrat due to what Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy had done for the country, but he had shifted to being an independent when he saw how the Democratic Party was changing.

“It used to be for the working man, and it’s now more interested in welfare recipients and undocumented immigrants.  Nobody seems to be representing the working man,” Flannery said.

During the 2016 Presidential election Flannery noted he was in favor of what Bernie Sanders stood for, and when Sanders was taken out of the Presidential race he favored President Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton because of the way the 2012 Benghazi attack was handled.  Additionally, Flannery criticized Clinton’s speeches for their fees, which he said took her from “dead broke” to being “a millionaire again.”

“What I’m proposing is to give the people another option to have someone that’s going to be representing them. I want people to remember when election time comes that their present representative, Angelo Puppolo, voted for his own pay raise, there were nine Democrats that didn’t vote for the pay raise, but he wasn’t one of those nine,” Flannery commented. “I want to keep the taxpayers money working for the taxpayers rather than non-citizens or illegal immigrants or what is known as undocumented immigrants.”

He continued, “I think the government should be run like a business, they shouldn’t waste the taxpayers money.  I’m for a strong economy, less waste, and definitely not having employees vote for their own pay raise.”