Julie Belaga, a former state legislator from Westport who was the first woman to receive the Republican nomination for governor of Connecticut, died on Nov. 19 at the age of 91.
Born in Boston on July 12, 1930, Belaga earned an education degree from Syracuse University. She taught in second grade in Massachusetts before her marriage to oil industry executive Myron Belaga resulted in her relocation to Westport.
She began her political career in Westport as president of the Westport League of Women Voters and served on the town”™s Planning and Zoning Commission, which she chaired from 1972 to 1976. Belaga was elected to the state”™s House of Representatives in 1976 as the legislator from Westport”™s 136th House District.
Belaga gained statewide attention for her successful advocacy of environmental legislation, particularly coastal management laws. Democrats controlled the House for most of her years in Hartford and she served as assistant minority leader from 1978 to 1983. When the Republicans gained control of the House with the 1984 election, she sought to become speaker of the house but lost to R.E. Van Norstrand, a freshman representative from Darien; instead, she was named deputy majority leader.
In 1986, Belaga opted not to run for re-election to the House but to seek the Republican nomination for governor. While delegates at the party”™s state convention backed State Senator Richard C. Bozzuto for the nomination, Belaga won the spot in a three-person primary, making her the first woman to be presented by the GOP as the gubernatorial election. She lost the election to Democrat incumbent William A. O’Neill.
M. Jodi Rell would become the first female Republican to become governor in 2004, moving up from lieutenant governor after Gov. John Rowland resigned. Rell was elected in her own right in 2006.
Belaga left politics to work as a political commentator on television and was named a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, where she taught a course on grassroots politics. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed her to be the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for New England.
At the end of the Bush administration, Gov. Lowell Weicker appointed her to the Connecticut Development Authority. She left that position in 1994 when President Bill Clinton crossed party lines to nominate her to be a director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank, where she served until her retirement in 1999.
In her later years, Belaga was an active force on the boards of several statewide environmental organizations, including the Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound, the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters and the Audubon Society.
