Rep. Chuck Brannan is wrapping eight years in Tallahassee representing Home District 10, which incorporates Baker, Columbia, Hamilton, Suwannee and a part of Alachua County.
Tuesday’s Home Session discovered the “son of a state trooper,” who himself grew to become a member of regulation enforcement, telling tales of his time earlier than the Legislature and in Tallahassee in his acquainted cadence.
“I’m the primary legislator for my county in over half a century. And also you consider that. In over 50 years, there had been nobody from Baker County. However right here I’m, and the way did I get right here?” Brannan requested rhetorically.
He went on to elucidate simply that.
Brannan described his humble roots, from working for the Florida Farm Bureau to attending Lake Metropolis Neighborhood Faculty earlier than transferring to the College of Florida earlier than shifting into police work.
“I went to work for the U.S. Marshal Service in Jacksonville, labored on the large first Colombian drug kingpin that was ever extradited in the USA, Carlos Lehder,” Brannan stated.
“In case you’ve ever seen the film “Blow” with Johnny Depp, that’s the story of the group that we extradited from after they introduced them into MacDill Air Pressure Base and prosecuted them and had that case in Jacksonville a few years in the past. However I used to be bored stiff. The marshal service was nothing just like the Tommy Lee Jones motion pictures.”
He ended up within the Baker County Sheriff’s Workplace for 3 many years, “more often than not because the chief investigator,” earlier than retiring in 2014.
Then politics known as.
“I all the time had at the back of my thoughts that I wished to be within the Legislature. So the celebrities kind of lined up. My predecessor was terming out, as I’m now, and I began knocking doorways in 2017 for an open seat. I fed my cows within the morning, I knocked on doorways,” Brannan defined.
“Now, knocking on doorways, in my district — which is Baker, Columbia, at the moment, Suwanee, Hamilton, and a part of Alachua County, the agricultural half, and finally Bradford, Union County — it’s a little completely different than Miami. In Miami, you knock on a door, you knock on a door. And Baker County and Union, you knock on our door, you get in your truck, you drive 2 miles. And also you knock on one other door. You may get within the gate, and the canine don’t chunk you.”
He additionally thanked Home Speaker Daniel Perez for entrusting him, a non-lawyer, to chair the Judiciary Committee.
“We’ve all the time acquired alongside so effectively. However I by no means may work out why, and I lastly figured it out yesterday. I can’t perceive a rattling factor he says, and he can’t perceive nothing I say. A Cuban from Miami, and a rustic boy from North Florida. It really works out good,” Brannan stated.
