Hard Working Rochelle Says She’s Earned Another Term In Hartford

ANSONIA – While growing up in Seymour, a friend of Kara Rochelle’s family spent years building a house by hand. As the job was wrapping up, the volunteer firefighter’s house was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

Rochelle’s parents, Al and Diane, wondered how best they could help.

They came up with a novel solution – a ​“barn raising,” an organized, town-wide effort that rebuilt the house.

Rochelle said her mother’s work on it was intense – and inspiring.

“I remember coming home from school and my mom would have different colored notebooks spread out across the dining room table. She’d be on the phone and one notebook would be for coordinating donations of materials, one for coordinating skilled labor, and another would be for food donations,” Rochelle said.

Each color of the notebook signified a different aspect of the effort, Rochelle said.

Rochelle, 41, says that she tries to apply that same sort of public service and organizational drive to serving as state representative to the 104th District, which covers Ansonia and a portion of Derby.

The Democrat is running for her fourth term. She faces her toughest Republican challenger yet – Ansonia Mayor David Cassetti.

Rochelle said her track record will get her re-elected.

“No one is going to work harder for them. I have my head in the game, I always put my heart into it and I’ve been incredibly effective at passing bills that help people, like expanding health care, expanding affordable childcare, and cutting taxes on our middle class and working class residents. Kitchen table issues that really affect people’s lives,” Rochelle said. 

Rochelle lives in Ansonia with two cats, Max and Parmigiano, or Gio, and a half shiatsu and Brussels Griffon puppy named Franklin Delano Roosebark.

Her Valley roots run deep.

She comes from a close-knit, Italian family in Seymour.

Her great-grandfather, Paolo Santilli, made cellar wine from grapes he grew on trellises. He was proud of his fruits and vegetable garden, which occupied the entire backyard. He liked to feed the neighborhood with its produce.

“He was the little old Italian man who did that stuff,” Rochelle said.

Rochelle’s late mother ran a home daycare. Her father was a volunteer firefighter who eventually was named a fire chief and commissioner in Seymour while working for Sikorsky Aircraft. He served as a union steward as a Teamster at Sikorsky. He still does volunteer emergency service management for the state and drives a fire truck for Seymour’s Citizens’ Engine Co., Rochelle said.

Her grandmother, Connie Criscuolo, served for 43 years as Seymour’s registrar of voters, Rochelle said.

“My grandmother was a feisty thing. She said if you don’t vote you can’t complain, but my parents were not political. In fact, ​‘politician’ was kind of a dirty word in my house,” Rochelle said. ​“But we were raised to be very involved in our community and to really do public service.”

The family lived in a tiny house on Pearl Street in Seymour before moving to a raised ranch on Highland Avenue. Rochelle has many memories of her father dashing out the door at all hours of the night to help with car crashes. So it was natural for her to do a lot of community work, she said, and it paid off.

“I was the kid in high school who got the most small scholarships from local organizations like the Rotary Club and Lions Club,” Rochelle said.

A graduate of Seymour High School with the Class of 2001, Rochelle attended Fordham University in New York City, where she got a Bachelor’s of Arts degree and a Master’s Certificate in English and Education at age 21.

When she was living in New York City, Rochelle participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement as an organizer with New York mayoral candidate Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate.

In 2015 and 2016 Rochelle traveled to three states as a volunteer for Bernie Sanders’ U.S. Presidential campaign.

Around that time, while living in Derby, Rochelle reached out to Linda Fusco, then the chairwoman of the Derby Town Democratic Committee, saying she wanted to get involved locally.

In 2017, Derby Mayor Anita Dugatto put Rochelle on the Derby Board of Ethics. It was the first time she served on a local board or commission.

A year later – after Democrat Linda Gentile announced she would not run for re-election after 14 years – Rochelle was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, defeating Republican Joseph Jaumann, an Ansonia Alderman.

When asked how she made the leap from an obscure local board to the state House, Rochelle said she benefited from her family’s Valley roots and her long history of volunteering. A long resume in government isn’t a requirement for the job, she said.

“People run for state office who have never been on local boards. People who are local business leaders, people who are involved in nonprofits, that’s actually really common,” Rochelle said.

Friends and supporters said Rochelle has a strong work ethic and takes her role as state representative personally.

“She was always reading important things. She loves to talk about current events, and really cares about people,” said her sister, attorney Gina Calabro, who lives in Massachusetts. ​“She has always had this political activist streak to her. She has been very focused on what’s going on in the world and engaging in it in some way.”

Rochelle can talk a mile a minute about state policies and politics. 

She describes herself as a nerd, a true policy wonk. She is intellectually omnivorous, a constant reader, and an audiophile with a vinyl collection of more than 400 records. She called music and reading her ​“happy place.”

Rochelle has always had a taste for intricate details. 

Growing up, she worked every year with her grandmother making a huge homemade Thanksgiving Day dinner, a longstanding family tradition, her sister said.

“Kara made it her mission to help gram prepare and learn how to do all of it. Every year now, she does the whole routine exactly the way my grandmother did it,” Calabro said. ​“I could handle a pie, but not a whole meal.”

The eye for small details hasn’t left her. She isn’t necessarily a fan of being interviewed by the press, often questioning the fairness of articles and saying she’d rather do legislative work than chase headlines.

After she learned that her sister told a reporter Rochelle was a James Taylor fan, Rochelle reached out to The Valley Indy to clarify.

Rochelle said she has nothing against James Taylor, but that he’s not necessarily an artist she wants to be tied to for eternity on the Internet. She said she likes all types of music, from Otis Redding to Neil Young to a Tribe Called Quest.

Rochelle said getting into nitty-gritty details helps her in Hartford.

“It’s my job to be in tune with what’s going to motivate my colleagues to care about the people of the 104th as much as I care about them,” Rochelle said. 

She used her eye for details to improve train service in the Valley.

“You don’t just go up there ​‘Hey, we need a train line’,” Rochelle said. ​“I dove deep into the data to explain how many hundreds of square feet of developable space we have along the train line, and the ridership data, and details about the economic situation in each town. If you look at the videos of when I testified last year, it wasn’t just ​‘I want this or else’.”

Rochelle has worked for the last year and a half as a field organizer for the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. She helps workers form unions. She previously worked as a waitress, managed a high-end restaurant, and was an administrator at Shabtai, a global Jewish leadership society based at Yale University. She thinks of the union work as her best job yet.

Her work outside the legislature was the subject of controversy in 2021, when news broke that Rochelle was connected to West Haven politico Michael DiMassa after being hired as a consultant to help with the planning of a new fire department building.

The City of West Haven paid Rochelle $5,000 from federal coronavirus relief funds – a move that a state audit deemed an improper use of the funds.

DiMassa was eventually sent to federal prison for stealing COVID-19 money.

Rochelle was not investigated. She said at the time that she reached out to law enforcement, offering to help in the West Haven inquiry.

Local Republicans said there wasn’t sufficient paperwork documenting her work in West Haven, and called on her to resign in November 2022.

Rochelle said at the time she was hired legitimately and called the criticism a political smear campaign while she was running for re-election in 2022.

She often says the job of a state lawmaker isn’t to sling mud.

“It’s about making life better for people. It’s moments when you can hear the relief in somebody’s voice because you’ve fixed a problem for them. With individual constituent cases, you can really make a huge difference for them,” Rochelle said.

Rochelle’s work ethic makes her a natural fit for the state legislature, said one of her best friends, Nancy Spagnulo, an executive research analyst for the state treasurer’s office.

“The nature of the job [as a legislator] says a lot about what she is as a person. You don’t just clock in and clock out,” Spagnulo said. ​“Her dedication to her job, the fact that she will take calls late on the weekend, speaks to her as a person.”

When Rochelle isn’t working as a legislator, she can lower her level of intensity dramatically and just listen to music or hang out with friends, Spagnulo said.

“In the downtime, she knows the value of good company. It doesn’t have to be a big, grand thing. We get together, make something or order food in, and talk, or really listen to each other, and laugh,” Spagnulo said. ​“She values her friends, she values her family. It just comes naturally to her.”

– Valley Indy reporter Eugene Driscoll contributed to this report.