MDC Chairman William DiBella withstood a challenge in what sounded on an audio link like a raucous meeting Monday. The commission voted 15-13 to table a discussion of a report critical of DiBella for funneling legal work to his friend James Sandler without authorization.

DiBella is in his 22nd year as chairman of the regional agency that provides water and sewer services to greater Hartford communities, eight of which have seats on the commission. DiBella detractors have been gaining gaining supporters since the Sandler invoices became an issue last year. They did not properly reckon with DeBella’s decades of experience thwarting challenges when he looks like the final act has arrived.

Rebels and reformers, remember the saga of East Hartford Republican John Grottole. In 2004, a majority of the members of the commission were Republicans. On paper they had the votes–until they did not. Republicans on the commission claimed that Grottole told them DiBella had been behind a land deal the East Hartford Republican made with Hartford. Grottole voted for DiBella. DiBella denied any role.

Monday’s vote signaled how determined DiBella’s supporters are willing to abandon norms to protect the veteran Democrat. They would not allow a discussion of the critical report. Nothing has changed.

Published April 12, 2023

It may be the beginning, but of what no one can be certain. Mayor Beth A. DelBuono of Newington called for MDC chairman William DiBella to resign in the aftermath of the release of an audit report on DiBella’s role in finding business for a law firm. If DiBella does not resign, DelBuono calls on commission members to use every tool at their disposal to remove him.

DelBuono wrote in her April 6th letter to commissioners, “I continue to have concerns regarding the ability for Chairman DiBella to lead the MDC Commission.  Based upon the Facts of Finding and the violations of the MDC’s Charter and By-Laws that are stated and expanded upon on pages 43-44 of this document, I respectfully request that Chairman DiBella resign effective immediately from any and all positions held within the MDC and Commission.  Should Chairman DiBella refuse to do so, I would ask that the Commission take any and all action possible to remove him from his position as Chair.”

DelBuono, a Republican, is serving her second two-year term as mayor. Her letter notes she is out of town and unable to attend Monday’s meeting but has asked “my Deputy Mayor, Gail Budrejko to read my letter into the record for your consideration.”

DiBella is a master of the dark arts of maintaining control over the MDC board–no matter who is on it. His opponents have an evenhanded report critical of his conduct but the voting commissions include a big block from Hartford–where DiBella maintains his residence by keeping supplies for his ablutions at his son’s condominium near the MDC headquarters.

The commission convenes a special meeting Monday at 5:30 p.m. to review the audit report. The meeting notice contains both a video and telephone link for members of the public.

Published April 10, 2023.

State Senator John Fonfara will today report raising more than $300,000 in his first campaign finance report of the race for the Democratic nomination for mayor of Hartford, Daily Ructions can report. That hefty number will put Fonfara about $100,000 ahead of Arunan Arulampalam, another contestant for the nomination that decides the election.

Fonfara has benefited from tapping into the network of lobbyists that need his help in passing or thwarting legislation during the legislative session that continues until early June. Lobbyist money is easy for the co-chair of the legislature’s finance committee to raise. Fanfara has been able to reach beyond the low-hanging lobbyist fruit (at $1,000 each) and a significant pile of the green stuff that folds.

Arulumpalam reports raising $225,000 in his first bid for public office in Hartford. He is well-connected in the business community and the state’s shrinking universe of Republican donors thought his father-in-law, Greg Butler, a top executive of Eversource, the state’s primary utility. Butler has been working the phones for Arulumpalam. Eversource has many tentacles. Butler is married to Themis Klarides, the former House Minority Leader who suffered a stinging loss to Greenwich Republican Leora Levy in last summer’s U.S. Senate primary.

Retired judge and former state Senator Eric Coleman is also seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor. Arulampalam, Coleman and Fonfara are the three candidates who are expected to advance to a primary after the Hartford Democratic Town Committee endorses a candidate in July.

Published April 10, 2023.

The MDC has released its report on its investigation of legal fees paid to and submitted by the law firm Sandler & Mara. The investigation was commissioned last year when members of the regional water and sewer authority discovered James Sandler had submitted invoices for performing legal work that commission members questioned.

The task of attorneys Patrick McHale and Jennifer Dixon, of Kainen, Escalera & McHale, P.C., appeared straightforward: Determine if the work on Sandler invoices had been authorized and performed. Interviewing witnesses–especially DiBella–proved a challenge.

DiBella, the longtime MDC chair, was interviewed for the first time on November 16, 2022. It lasted three hours. McHale, the report states, “was able to ask only a small portion of his questions because Chairman DiBella’s responses often strayed far afield from the questions asked resulting in lengthy responses consisting of information that was not under investigation. As a result, Attorney McHale needed to urge Chairman DiBella to answer only the questions asked which was something Chairman DiBella found difficult to do.” That is a kind interpretation.

Scheduling a second interview took weeks. DiBella’s attorney, Bart Halloran, wrote to McHale on December 27th of last year, “I believe a further interview, at this time, is not warranted. If you or the committee wishes to submit written questions to Chairman DiBella, we will review them and if appropriate, respond.”

The chair of the MDC was refusing to cooperate with an investigation authorized by its Audit Committee. DiBella agreed to meet with investigators on January 31, 2023. “After one hour and forty minutes, Attorney Halloran ended the second interview, and Chairman DiBella declined to cooperate further despite Attorney McHale’s request that he stay so that Attorney McHale could complete the interview. Consequently, the investigators did not pose all of their questions to Chairman DiBella.”

Without DiBella’s full cooperation, investigators were about to determine that in 2021, District Counsel Chris Stone intended to enter into a $50,000 retainer agreement with Sandler for the year. Stone “subsequently agreed to $70,000 after Attorney Sandler told him that Chairman DiBella had informed him that District Counsel Stone had $70,000 available for legal fees.”

DiBella could not recall all of the meetings listed in Sandler’s bills. He did remember attending breakfast meetings with Sandler, although he did not remember if they were in 2021 or 2022.

The money did not flow so easily to Sandler in 2022. DiBella asked Stone and another MDC official to “find work for Attorney Sandler in 2022, but neither of them had any work for him.” Nevertheless, Stone learned that Sandler had invoices for work purportedly performed in 2022.

Stone, who is becoming a counterforce to scheming at the agency, refused to continue hiring Sandler. DiBella and another board member Pasquale Salemi of East Hartford, found other ways. Growing attention on Sandler invoices last year and the initiation of the investigation preceded Sandler’s withdrawal of his final invoices.

The 46-page report of facts, findings and recommendations provides an opportunity for the agency’s full board to consider the way forward in discharging its duties in the public interest.

Published April 6, 2023.

The beleaguered Public Defender Services Commission is seeking approval for a $152,500 transfer at Thursday’s Financial Advisory Committee meeting. The request seeks to move appropriated funds from the personal services account . The request from Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis seeks the approval of the transfer for “training initiatives proposed by the Agency.” (See the full request at the end of this link.)

Among the asks is $55,000 for DefenderLab, a five-day trial skills training program. The adjustment request submitted to the state budget office states, “This year we have been fortunate enough to obtain approval to provide lodging to all attendees, and found a venue with appropriate facilities that had room for the faculty and attendees that week.” Not all the attendees are delighted with having to stay at the facility for five days. Connecticut, as Governor Lamont memorably once told a group of DC government relations professionals, “is a small landlocked state.”

The request includes an additional $30,000 to retain the services of Larry Pozner, a lecturer in cross-examining witnesses. Pozner will appear at the DefenderLab event and two other training events, one of them remote. This service could be provided from within the agency–it boasts plenty of skilled cross-examiners. Members of the private criminal bar have also volunteered their assistance at past training classes.

The request includes “an additional $24,500 to cover any additional unanticipated expenses that arise for the remainder of this year.” This fiscal year ends on June 30th, so there ought not be many surprise education and training programs that are not known when FAC meets Thursday.

Consideration of each request before FAC usually begins with state Senator Cathy Osten asking how many positions are approved and how many filled at the agency. There are other questions to pose Thursday to acquire a fuller understanding of day-to-day issues frontline public defenders face. One is the average caseload of prosecutors in the state’s largest G.A. courts. Another is the backlog of murder cases and the number of public defenders handling them in each judicial district.

FAC members, who appear to enjoy burrowing into the details of state government, will want to know how many retirees with 120-agreements to serve clients are in the division now–and how many were there in each of the past nine months. Committee members will also perform a service if they are able to determine how many contract/conflict public defenders the agency has working for clients and who determines how much they are paid.

How many offices have requested help due to lawyers on pregnancy leave? How many of those requests have been met with temporary replacements?

Members (or one member who will ask) solve a persistent mystery by asking Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis how much public money was spent on renovations, furniture and furnishings for her office. The five members who resigned en masse at the end of March are said to have tried without success to obtain details of those expenditures. Someone at the Office of the Chief Public Defender ought to be able to email those details to FAC members as they pose questions and listen to answers.

The division’s annual meeting is usually held on a weekday. This year it’s at the Holiday Hill resort in Prospect on a Saturday. The invitation includes public defenders, staff, plus ones and children. The day will include reflections by Bowden-Lewis, a sound healing session with Kelvin Young who will “release your suppressed emotions and nourish your soul” with crystals and Tibetan singing bowls….” Releasing suppressed emotions may not be a prudent goal in the divided division. How much is the event costing?

Dr. Maysa Akbar will deliver an hourlong keynote on urban trauma, which ought to touch on the caseloads public defenders in urban courthouses are carrying as Bowden-Lewis slow-walks new hires while lobbying for a public relations office within the division.

FAC is capable of shining a light on the workings of state government and the treatment of state employees when committee members decide to apply their knowledge to agency heads looking for money. Public defenders and thousands of clients will count on them to use the opportunity Thursday presents.

Published April 5, 2023.

New members of the Public Defender Services Commission will have three weeks to learn details of the fear and loathing that has recently marked the state agency they oversee. The Commission has moved its first meeting with five new members–and one still to be appointed–three weeks from Tuesday to April 24th.

The delay will provide new members with time to review the issues that caused a mass resignation of members two weeks ago. Members may want to conduct a candid canvas of the resigners and send a small delegation to meet with Attorney General William Tong to compare versions of events. The next three weeks will also provide Shipman & Goodwin sufficient time to conduct its investigation of a detailed complaint from an employee to the Commission about her treatment by Chief TaShun Bowden-Lewis. The Commission will also want to consider a request to Tong for a broader investigation. Many employees of the division would like to share their experiences and observations.

The Commission, now with three members, may want to review the state’s Freedom of Information Act. It is an arc that bends toward opening meetings, not closing them for the most tangential connections to exemptions.

Published April 3, 2023.

Some late changes Friday in appointments to the beleaguered Public Defender Services Commission. Chief Justice Richard A. Robinson rescinded his appointment of retired Associate Justice Richard Palmer, who will be appointed chair by Governor Ned Lamont. This makes Lamont the second Greenwich aristocrat to appoint Palmer to an important state government position.

Palmer is familiar with upheaval in law-related organizations. He and four Supreme Court colleagues quit the state judges’ association when a bipartisan majority of the state Senate rejected then-Governor Daniel P. Malloy’s 2018 nomination of Justice Andrew McDonald to serve as chief justice. Stories of McDonald’s bullying when he was a member of the Senate figured prominently in McDonald’s defeat despite a generously financed campaign in support of McDonald. McDonald’s vote on the high court for striking down the state’s death penalty law, passed when he was Malloy’s legal counsel, also rankled senators who had felt the lash of McDonald’s disdain.

Palmer squeaked to his final eight-year term on the court in 2017. The Senate voted 19-17 to confirm the former prosecutor who dealt a blow to the rule of law in 2015. Palmer created a legal doctrine to strike down the same death penalty law that dogged McDonald the next year. Palmer relied on his contention that the law “no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency….” to overturn the law. The gossamer but lethal Palmer doctrine makes it possible for any majority to overturn any law. Then-Chief Justice Chase Rodgers rebuked Palmer when she wrote that the legislature has a better sense of standards of decency than the high court. No one should be surprised if public defenders raise the standards of decency rule in sharing their recent experiences.

Judge Sheila Prats, appointed by Chief Justice Robinson Wednesday, remains.

Chief Justice Robinson appointed retired Superior Court Elliot Solomon to the spot Palmer occupied for a few days this week. Judge Solomon’s appointment comes as a jolt to veteran public defenders. They recall him as often hostile to their clients.

More appointments are expected early next week. Speaker of the House Matthew Ritter, who has left his vacant for months, is expected to to appoint former state Representative Russell Morin. Morin served five terms in the House. He did not seek a sixth term in 2020. Morin remains active in Democratic politics and works for the Connecticut Employees Union Independent.

Senate President Martin Looney appears likely to appoint polymath New Haven lawyer, Senate Clerk, presenter and author Michael Jefferson to the commission.

State law limits the number of members not appointed by the chief justice to no more than three from any political party.

The appointments will allow the commission to meet at their regularly scheduled meeting next week. Approving minutes from January’s executive session may prove a trial. Those minutes, in an unusual move, were tabled at the February meeting. The inability to agree on approving the meeting minutes

Posted March 31, 2023.

Introducing Stone Academy students to National Guard recruiters at an emergency career fair was not enough. More than 800 students who were locked out of the for-profit school regulated by the Office of Higher Education (OHE) want a fair deal and some help. OHE Executive Director has provided neither.

Nursing and health aide students with vivid signs took to the street Tuesday to protest Larson’s dithering. The former East Hartford mayor, airport administrator and state senator is looting the fund limited to reimbursing students who lose tuition when a school regulated by OHE closes. The 27-employee agency is paying an accounting firm $200,000 to audit student records, an unprecedented action that has historically been performed within OHE.

The students–mostly minority women–were locked out of their classes when Larson failed to reach an agreement for a teach-out that would have allowed then to complete the academic period. The Stone closing has generated heated accusations and performative press conferences, but no immediate relief for students trying to grab a rung on the ladder of advancement.

Stone has waited for a restive calm to return before beginning its fightback. That has begun.

Published March 30. 2023.

Chief Justice Richard Robinson has filled the two vacancies created by the mysterious mass resignation of members of the Public Defender Services Commission. He appointed Judge Shelia Prats and retired Justice Richard Palmer to restore confidence in a vital state agency that has been racked with fear and vengeance since the appointment of Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis last year.

The appointment of Prats will be be widely hailed as adding a resolute member who will not buckle in the face of intimidation in upholding the rule of law. Public defenders should begin to feel that they are no longer bereft of a protector.

Palmer’s route to the Supreme Court was paved with tennis courts. A former prosecutor, Palmer was a tennis partner of then-Governor Lowell P. Weicker, when the one-term A Connecticut Party governor appointed him to the high court. Palmer served on it until he turned the mandatory retirement age of 70.

Published March 29, 2023.

Four members of the Public Defender Services Commission resigned before resolving a complaint from the agency’s former human resources complaint against Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis. Erin Ryan’s eight-page February 13th letter to the Commission reveals a poisonous atmosphere at the state agency that represents indigent criminal defendants. She describes instances of “bullying,” “continuous and inappropriate belittling.” “aggressive,” “rude” and “abusive behavior.”

Ryan’s letter alleges that Bowden-Lewis told her not to disclose to the Commission that a “senior attorney in the Division” was facing “a multi-day suspension following an investigation completed by the Judicial Branch….” Bowden-Lewis suggested that [Ryan would] be undermining her authority and would be insubordinate if I said anything to the Commission about this personnel matter.” Ryan wrote that Bowden-Lewis told her that if she did disclose the matter to the Commission at its meeting she would “deal with those consequences tomorrow.”

Ryan concluded that she understood a claim by Bowden-Lewis that Ryan believed a colleague but not her was “a suggestion that I am a racist.” Bowden-Lewis is Black. Ryan is White. Ryan replied that her comments had “nothing to do with believing her and that I would follow her directive, but that stylistically, I disagreed with the approach and would prefer to be more transparent.”

The Commission, according to Ryan, had not been informed of the disciplinary matter at the time she submitted her comprehensive complaint.

Ryan, who has left the agency, concluded with a warning. “A handful of the remaining veteran employees have spoken to me about their desire to leave the agency, and I fear how decimated offices will be if the remaining veteran staff are to leave. Morale is incredibly and dangerously low and people feel disillusioned; work performed by the employees of the Division is very difficult, and the current environment is only making the work more challenging, if not downright unbearable.”

Two of the four recent vacancies will be filled by judges, but not the other two. One of them ought to go to Ryan, who has demonstrated courage while others have indulged only in silence or cryptic explanations. This is what a member of the Commission, with its duty to oversee the operation of an important state agency, should be willing to state: “I felt it was my duty to bring these matters to the Commission’s attention, trusting they will be addressed and remediated.”

Ryan is one of two public defender employees to have filed formal complaints about Bowden-Lewis’s conduct. The thick atmosphere of fear will not be lifted until the vacancies on the Commission are filled with resolute members who will not buckle in the face of intimidation. Members who understand their duties and are committed to honoring them and the more that 400 employees of the agency who perform a vital service .

Published March 28, 2023.