Assemblyman Brian Kolb is speaking out after his decision last week to not seek re-election was announced.
He talked with RochesterFirst.com about his time in office, the DWI that unravelled his leadership, and now the most-recent decision to join other Republicans in state legislature to retire.
Kolb served as Assembly Minority Leader for 11 years, and represented the 131st for 20 years.
“It had absolutely nothing to do with the decision not to run again,” he added to RochesterFirst.com speaking to the DWI that started a sequence of events, and added media scrutiny. “You know, life throws some interesting twists and turns at you, and I’m not the only one. There’s people, families, that have it far worse than I ever thought of having it.”
He and his wife recently lost two friends, and her mother in the month of January. Kolb described an accumulation of those events that ultimately led to his decision to not seek re-election.
Kolb isn’t the first Republican to announce retirement. “I think it’s mostly coincidence,” he told RochesterFirst.com. “I know it’s coincidence for me, certainly I can’t speak for Pete Lawrence or Rich Funke or Joe Robach — they all had their own individual reasons. I don’t think it has anything to do with a pattern of us being Republican, I think that’s purely coincidental.”
He called Albany a tough place to work. Especially with one party control.
“My fellow Assembly Republicans, we take great pride in speaking out and stepping up,” he added in that conversation. “There’s a lot of satisfaction in that, and that’s in Albany, but the most important thing that we really do is back home helping our constituents. Certainly my office, my staff, myself, we’ve helped countless residents and businesses navigate, whether it’s an Albany bureaucracy or trying to get them funding for a particular project, you know there’s all sorts of things that go into it.”
Check out the full-conversation from RochesterFirst.com.
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