By James Rincon

Pflag Reporter

The Republican Party of Texas selected a Pflugerville resident for its Volunteer of the Year Award.

Timothy Bradberry of Pflugerville received a VOY award for his work as the Central Texas president of the Texas Republican Assembly during a ceremony hosted by Gov. Rick Perry at the InterContinental Stephen F. Austin Hotel in Austin.

“A local Republican Party chair once said about Tim, ‘I see you everywhere,’” said Mike McNamara, president of the Texas Republican Assembly. “He never hesitates to step in when something needs to be done. He’s one of those guys who doesn’t brag about what he does, he just goes and does it. That’s the kind of guy that you like to have on your team.”

The Texas Republican Assembly is an auxiliary organization of the RPT, which also honors one volunteer from each senatorial district at the biennial event.

Bradberry is a structural engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation’s bridge division.

As a Republican Assembly volunteer he has helped organize and run local meetings, participate in state meetings, work on committees, provide research for candidate forums and put forth resolutions that have been adopted on both the state and national level.

This is the first year that the Texas Republican Assembly has had the opportunity to nominate a member of their organization.

“I’m a Republican – a conservative Republican – and I’m very concerned about what’s going on in our country and our state. And so my way of having an impact on what’s going on is through my volunteer work with the republican assembly, and also just republican activism in general,” Bradberry said.

Bradberry said he’s been active in the Republican Party since the early ‘90s, going to precinct meetings and being elected as a delegate to the senatorial district and state conventions.

He began working with the Republican assembly organization in 2005.

“I started helping out in the membership area, organization and telling people about our meetings,” he noted.

In 2008 he became local president for the assembly that endorsed candidates in Williamson, Travis, Hayes and Bastrop counties. If two-thirds of the members elect to endorse a candidate at an endorsement meeting, then the assembly endorses that candidate in those counties.

“The primary purpose of the republican assembly at this level is to make the distinction between true Republicans and Republicans in name only, or ‘RINOS,’” Bradberry said. “It stands for the ideals of Ronald Reagan. I’m a Ronald Reagan Republican. That’s the first president I ever voted for, and I really loved Reagan. I think he was pretty much the greatest president we’ve had in the last century. And he actually started the assemblies in California.”

Bradberry said the assembly looks for candidates who have conservative principals that they are willing to stand for, but who are also viable election candidates.

He is not just a volunteer for Republican organizations. His wife is from Taiwan, and he is an advocate for Tiawan’s independence from China.

“I’ve been involved with that as long as or longer than I’ve been involved with the Republican Party. In fact that was part of my motivation to be involved early on. To testify at the resolution committee and then the platform committee at the state level.”

Bradberry has five children. His youngest son, who would have been 7 years old today, died in 2005 when he slipped from the top bunk of a bunk bed.

“That was right after I had gotten involved with the assembly. It was really difficult for us and his death kind of inspired me in the area of the Taiwanese, because his grandparents were Taiwanese.”

Along with speaking about Taiwan at Republican platform meetings, Bradberry has invested in “Formosa Betrayed,” a film base on actual events about an FBI agent’s investigation of the murder of a Taiwanese-American professor.

“It was an honor to nominate Tim. He works full time and he also spends a lot of time volunteering,” McNamara said. “I know one of his main projects is free Taiwan.”

Bradberry said he is honored to receive the Volunteer of the Year Award.

“It was just a surreal experience for me. There are plenty of people in my organization that I might say deserve such an award, and I was just honored to get it,” He said. “I was just tickled to spend time with the governor and the other people at the banquet that we had. I was just honored.”