Paul Mounds, Governor Ned Lamont’s former chief of staff, remains on the state payroll. Mounds continues to receive more than $4,000 a week from taxpayers–plus the state’s generous employee benefits.

Lamont spokesman Adam Joseph tells Daily Ructions that Mounds “is still an active state employee. Paul agreed to work through the month of January to assist with the transition.” The job ends Friday, February 3rd.

It’s an unusual arrangement. The governor announced on November 15th that Mounds’s deputy, Jonathan Dach, would serve as chief of staff in the second Lamont administration. That announcement, a week after Lamont’s re-election, provided seven weeks for the transition to a deputy. It was not enough in the curious world of the governor’s office.

Rebel Dog Coffee Co. in East Hartford has served an auxiliary state office as Mounds assists with the transition to his longtime deputy.

Published February 1, 2023.

Members of the General Assembly, if the concluding pandemic will continue to cause you to do the people’s business from a distance, please mute your Zoom. This sort of moment lets too much light in on the mysteries of the sausage factory.

Published January 31, 2023.

ConnectiCare Medicare Advantage members received notice last week that the health insurer and Prospect hospitals and its medical group providers will no longer provide services to plan members beginning May 1st. ConnectiCare told its members it was not able to reach an agreement with Waterbury Hospital, Manchester Memorial Hospital, Rockville Hospital and Prospect Provider Group Connecticut.

Failure to reach an agreement, the letter announced to members, “means the health care professionals you have been seeing for treatment [at those hospitals and the provider group] may no longer be part of ConnectiCare’s network.” The Connecticut-based insurer told members they “may still be able to continue care with your doctor if they are affiliated with another participating hospital or provider group in our network.”

ConnectiCare members will be able to continue to use Prospect hospitals and doctors through April 30th. Other eligibility rules for certain treatments and conditions may extend the eligibility period.

Prospect may soon be replaced by Yale-New Haven in negotiations with ConnectiCare. Yale-New Haven’s takeover of Prospect’s Connecticut holdings awaits state regulators’ approvals. The takeover may not change the result in the brutal world of escalating hospital costs and harsh negotiating tactics.

Published January 31, 2023.

Members of the Executive and Legislative Nominations Committee will be batting for their colleagues on Tuesday. The committee takes up the renomination of Michelle Gilman to serve as Commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) at its 10 a.m. meeting.

The meeting will be streamed on the committee’s YouTube channel.

Gilman is the most elusive and nonsense-generating Lamont nominee the committee will face this term. She has shown herself heedless in refusing to respond with meaningful answers to questions posed by legislators of both parties. The confirmation hearing provides a crucial occasion for institutional integrity to overcome blind party partisanship.

Gilman parachuted into the job last year as waves from the school construction scandal continued to lap at the Governor Ned Lamont’s office after Josh Geballe resigned. Some of what appeared to be the subject of a federal criminal investigation occurred while Geballe’s agency was home to the Office of School Construction Grants & Review (OSCG&R). Gilman shutdown all inquiries by pledging an audit of the program.

When the finance committee held a meeting on the school construction grants program, Senate co-chairman John Fonfara served as Gilman’s blocker in preventing questions about specific school construction progress. Gilman pledged to commission an audit of the program that would include periodic updates for legislators. The barebones audit was released late in the day on Friday, January 21st. Gilman served the legislature one heaping helping of whitewash.

Tuesday provides legislators to remind Lamont, Gilman and themselves that they are members of an equal branch of government at a critical moment. Holding one of the governor’s nominations on the House calendar at the behest of two lobbyists makes a point, but not the one House leaders believe they did. Members will diminish themselves and the institution they serve if they allow Gilman to execute her wordy dodge in answer to reasonable inquiries about the people’s business.

Members of the nominations committee ought to ask Gilman on Tuesday why auditors spoke to no local officials in performing the audit of the school construction grant program. Who imposed that severe limitation and why? Who decided to discard Gilman’s promise and provide no updates on the progress of the audit?

The CT Mirror reported last week that DAS has terminated a contract with hazardous waste remediation company AAIS. The Mirror reported last year that the company had received most of the purchase orders under the state’s contracts for emergency services. DAS announced it terminated the AAIS contract “in the best interest of the state.” What criteria did it use to decide what was in the best interest of the state? What did DAS officials learn recently about AAIS that they did not know months ago? How was it in the best interest of the state to commission an audit of the school construction grant program by precluding auditors from speaking with local officials?

Has Gilman asked employees who work in OSCG&R if they were aware of the unusual course the no-bid construction of Tolland’s Birch Grove Primary School took? Did they raise any concerns about alleged threats to withhold project funding if Tolland officials did not hire contractors former program director Kostantinos Diamantis may have favored? If not, why were they silent? Isn’t it in the public interest to know?

Did any DAS employees know that Construction Advocacy Professionals (CAP) received half a million dollars on the Tolland project while employing Diamantis’s daughter–who had a full-time state job? Did Gilman ask what did they know and when did they know it? When did they know that CAP was hired on a Hartford school construction to perform the same jobs as another owner advocate? Has Gilman asked? Isn’t it in the public’s interest to know?

The portable classrooms at Birch Grove cost $9 million. What happened to them? Isn’t it in the public interest to know?

The DAS website did not post a press release from May of last year until a week ago. Does the agency do nothing in those months that it wanted the public to know?

Is Gilman aware of any DAS employees receiving subpoenas to testify before a grand jury about any DAS program? Isn’t it in the public interest to know?

Published January 30, 2023.

Katherine Scharf Dykes is alone on the House calendar. Democrats did not act Thursday on her reappointment as Commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP).

The delay is unrelated to Dykes’ costly bungling of energy policy. Enough House members are dismayed over the inclusion of hard cider on the 2022 expanded bottle bill. Members believed they had an agreement that hard cider would not be included in the containers subject to a ten cent deposit.

A DEEP explanation of its administration of the bill notes “that Public Act 21-58 makes explicit that spirit-based beverages labeled or marketed as hard seltzers are covered, due to the inclusion of ‘hard seltzer’ in the definition of ‘carbonated beverage.'” Enough House members feel betrayed by Dykes that they prevailed upon leaders to meet in session Thursday without taking up the resolution confirming Dykes.

The impetus for the Dykes delay was hard cider but the controversy gave House Democratic leaders an opportunity early in the session to remind the Lamont administration that Democrats in the legislature possess independent authority and may choose now and then to exercise it. They are not the hired help.

The House meets again in February on a day to be announced.

Published January 27, 2023.

Farmington Republican John Healey is the new chief of staff for the dozen-member Senate Republican caucus. He replaces Rob Poudrier.

Healey was cast in a featured role in a 2013 pay-to-play federal criminal trail of an aide to former Speaker of the House Christopher Donovan. A government wired government witness, Raymond Soucy, recorded his attempt to put $5,000 in cash in the refrigerator of then-House Minority Leader Lawrence Cafero. The Norwalk Republican told Soucy not to leave the cash and directed him to take a walk with Healey, a Cafero aide known as Johnny Angel.

“Soucy later gave five $1,000 checks to Republican political action committees using straw donors,” Dave Altimari reported from the trial, “including his own mother.” A House Republican campaign committee accepted the checks.

Healey served as New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart’s chief of staff during her first term. Healey left that position to embark on a career in the private sector managing municipal finances–including New Britain’s.

Senate Republicans won 18 seats in 2016 and have been on a losing streak since. In November they were lost one seat while eking out wins in two others, leaving them with 12 of the Senate’s 36 members. If Republicans nominate Donald Trump for president next year, they may suffer more defeats.

Published January 26, 2023.

Many Daily Ructions readers will be paying attention to the unfurling saga of U.S. Representative George Santos (R-who knows?). Details of Santos’ fabrications and cons continue to emerge. Santos amended his campaign finance reports Tuesday. The origins of the impecunious Santos’ $700,000 personal loan to his 2022 campaign remain the immediate threat to his status in the House of Representatives.

The media capital of the world has provided few explanations of how the George Santos story received no attention from the big beasts of the region until after the shapeshifting con man was about to take office. There is a hero in the bewildering story. The New Yorker’s Clare Malone interviews North Shore Leader publisher Grant Lally. He had Santos’ number before voters went to the polls–and wrote about him.

Here’s the link to the 22 minute interview on Apple podcasts and it’s embedded in at The New Yorker.

Published January 26, 2023.

An alliance to raise taxes in nine states will add to the bad economic news buffeting Governor Ned Lamont this week–and it’s only Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal editorial page shines a light today on a growing coalition of Democratic legislators from nine states intent on imposing a wealth tax on their most affluent residents.

Connecticut governors have long been sensitive to the state’s coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich Democrat with deep roots in the world of finance, pays close attention to the Journal’s influential editorial page. Lamont refers to the 2018 Journal opinion piece headline “What’s the Matter With Connecticut?” in his freeform public remarks emphasizing his stewardship of the state’s finances. Today’s editorial raises a threat to Lamont’s efforts to reassure business leaders that it’s a new world in Connecticut with one of their own in charge and resolute.

The Journal wrote:

Democrats finally have a strategy to stop billionaires from fleeing high tax states: Block the escape routes. That’s the logic behind coordinated moves in progressive states to tax wealth. The reforms aren’t likely to pass immediately, but they illustrate the increasingly open socialist goals of progressives and their public-union backers.

The confiscatory tax alliance emerged late last week when lawmakers from eight states unveiled plans to target wealthy residents. California, New York, Illinois, Maryland, Hawaii, Minnesota, Connecticut and Washington state are all represented, and several of the sponsors have already released bills. “We are here today to put billionaires and multimillionaires on notice,” said Washington state Sen. Noel Frame on a Zoom call. “They will pay what they owe.”

Fund Our Future is coordinating the movement. Read more about it here.

Tuesday brought more immediate bad news for jobs and opportunity in Connecticut. Lego, the toy buying block maker, announced it will move its headquarters from Enfield to Boston. The global company will begin packing up in 2025. The company’s American headquarters employs more than 700 workers in Enfield.

Lego signaled its commitment to Connecticut was fading when it announced last summer that it would build a $1 billion, 1.7 million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Virginia. The facility will provide more than 1,700 jobs.

Economist Don Klepper-Smith provided more grim news Tuesday. The number of people moving to the state is outstripped by the leavers. Connecticut suffered a net loss of 13,547 our neighbors between July 2021 and July 2022. See the numbers at the top of this posting.

Published January 25, 2023.

State Representative Cara Pavalock-D’Amato (R-Bristol) has proposed legislation to close the Alice Bruno loophole in state statutes. Pavalock-D’Amato’s bill would amend state statutes to “allow for the forfeiture of the vested right to a retirement salary in the event an individual takes an extended period of unauthorized absence from duty that results in the individual being subject to an administrative disciplinary hearing.”

Bruno was the Superior Court judge who left her chambers in November 2019 and never returned. She continued to be paid by judicial branch administrators until last spring. Bruno had claimed a short illness when she left her Waterbury assignment in 2019. Her absence grew longer as explanations became more terse.

In 2020, Bruno claimed on the attendance records she submitted at the end of that year that she had been sick every work day. The 2015 Malloy appointee told the Supreme Court in a special 2022 proceeding that she could return to work under more congenial conditions than she found in Waterbury–where Bruno was distress when her colleague in that courthouse, Judge Anna M. Ficeto, did not greet her when they passed in the hallway.

Bruno, under investigation by a designee of the Supreme Court, applied to the Judicial Review Council for a disability pension. That proceeding was held in secret. Her application was granted in October. Bruno, who served as the executive director of the Connecticut Bar Association for a year and a half before eventually becoming a judge, is receiving a full judicial pension. This year that will be more than $120,000. She was paid more than $400,000 for the more than two years she did not work.

Pavalock-D’Amato serves on the judiciary committee, where her bill will first be considered.

Published January 23, 2023.

The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) released not long before 4 p.m. Friday a limited number of copies of a school construction grant program audit. The release many months after Commissioner Michelle Gilman pledged regular updates would be provided to legislators. 

The multi-billion dollar program has been the subject of a federal criminal investigation. Audit updates were not provided last year, protecting Governor Ned Lamont from having sunshine cast on an embarrassing failure of oversight by his administration during his and Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz’s re-election campaign.

The limited release of the interim report comes three days before the legislature’s School Construction Project Priority Review Committee meets Monday afternoon. The status of the audit is likely to be a top interest of legislators. 

Calls to Gilman’s office went to voicemail Friday afternoon. Its website continues to list Lora Rae Anderson as the head of communications. She’s now the chief of staff at Department of Transportation. The most recent press release on the department’s website was posted in May of last year.

Gilman’s predecessor at DAS, Josh Geballe, entered into a memorandum of understanding early in the Lamont administration that transferred the school construction office from DAS to the state budget office. That move accommodated then-school construction office head Kostantinos Diamantis’ move to the budget office to serve as deputy to his close friend Melissa McCaw. The Geballe/McCaw agreement violated state law and was terminated when scandal struck the Lamont administration and the school construction program.

Published January 20, 2023.