Pressure on watchdog

Board has saved taxpayers $86M over 46 years; Lamont admin now seeks to rein it in

Lamont administration seeks limits on review board’s powers.

The watchdog State Properties Review Board (SPRB) was lauded in 2018 by thenstate Sen. Scott Frantz as a champion for taxpayers and a “firewall against bad deals” for government land purchases, office leases, consulting contracts and “design/ build” projects awarded without traditional bidding.

The board has saved state taxpayers $86.75 million in the 46 years of its existence by rejecting deals until they’re renegotiated at a better price for the state, according to its latest annual report.

But 2 ½ years later after Frantz, a Republican, sang the watchdogs’ praises, the Democratic Lamont administration is singing a different and discordant tune.

On March 10, a deputy commissioner for real estate and construction at the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), Noel Petra, blasted the board for allegedly wasting time and money, as part of his legislative testimony for passage of a bill that would significantly curb the SPRB’s power to approve and reject DAS initiatives.

“We spend hundreds and hundreds of hours every year ... explaining to them ... basic construction contract law, explaining to them ‘basic 101’ contract construction best practices . ... [T]hey don’t have the expertise ... to understand the complexities,” Petra said at a public hearing by the legislative Government Administration and Elections (GAE) committee.

But SPRB officials pushed back, saying they have quicker turnarounds in their decision-making than DAS does. They said Petra’s assertions were incorrect and his manner was “insulting.”

Although the Lamont administration said its bill, SB 1015, would “clarify” the SPRB’s powers, it actually would “minimize and restrict the board’s authority given by the legislature since 1975,” SPRB member Jeffrey Berger said. “The legislature established this bipartisan independent board in 1975 as a watchdog entity to ensure that the state’s real estate acquisitions and leases would be in the state’s best interest and free from ‘political patronage, cronyism, personal spoils systems and friendship.’ ”

No decision has been made by the GAE committee as to whether the bill will advance toward final legislative approval. But, whatever happens to SB 1015, it’s the second bill proposed by the Lamont executive branch that aims to clip the wings of a clean government watchdog agency created by the General Assembly.

The other such bill, proposed by Lamont’s Department of Transportation commissioner, was Senate Bill 920, to “revise the requirements regarding the utilization of public-private partnerships to design, develop, finance, construct, operate or maintain projects.” One revision would have cut the State Contracting Standards Board out of the approval process for such public-private partnerships. The legislative transportation committee rebuffed that DOT attempt last week, and, in approving substitute

language, left the contracting board’s role intact.

Saying yes to no-bid deals

The administration’s moves to curb the watchdogs come at a time when Lamont and his appointees have developed a penchant for granting no-bid contracts, using the governor’s legislatively granted COVID-19 emergency powers to bypass customary competitive bidding.

The no-bid agreements go back to 2020, but recent ones have included: the state Department of Public Health’s hiring late last year of the public relations firm of Duby McDowell, a locally prominent former TV reporter and Democratic supporter of Lamont; and the new, quasi-public Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Authority’s hiring of the communications consulting firm of Democratic activist Patty McQueen, a former newspaper reporter who assisted Lamont’s successful 2018 campaign for governor.

On Friday, it was reported that the Lamont administration is partnering with a firm that has experience in running Democratic political campaigns to field a 71-person “vaccine campaign team” to canvass city neighborhoods this summer to urge residents to get COVID-19 vaccinations. No contract cost has been announced.

According to a Connecticut Mirror story by Dave Altimari and Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, the firm, Grossman Solutions, will be paid from $24 million in federal money the state is receiving through a Biden administration effort to encourage more people to get vaccinated., The firm already has a state contract through Access Health CT, a quasi-public state agency, they reported.

Like ‘gnats at a campfire’

The persistent appearance of such political connections in no-bid contract awards led state House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora,

R-North Branford, to doubt Petra’s March 10 testimony that the state now has developed enough layers of “checks and balances” to prevent a repeat a scandal like in the early 1970s. In that episode, sweetheart lease deals were made with politically connected landlords for state office space. The board’s creation in 1975 was a reform to prevent such a mess in the future.

In a Friday phone interview, Candelora said the Lamont administration is “treating the Properties Review Board like a bunch of gnats at a campfire.”

At the March 10 hearing, Petra had said “[I]t’s very frustrating ... to have to answer their increasingly detailed and minutiae-oriented questions,” and, “we would really like to focus them on the most important aspect and the reason why they were created, which is to make sure that we’re following the procurement laws.”

Candelora said it sounds like the DAS-backed bill would reduce the SPRB’s role from real decision-making to checking off procedural boxes. “Government oversight comes with a cost,” he said, adding that the SPRB is a reasonable cost for avoiding government waste or corruption — and “to turn it into a clipboard checklist, and claim that that’s oversight, is very dangerous.”

As an example, he said, “we can just point to the Orange train station deal [of 2018] where Gov. [Dannel] Malloy tried to circumvent the Properties Review Board” and the state almost overpaid by millions of dollars for a vacant 8-acre land parcel on the railroad line owned by a major Democratic political donor.

In that deal, the Malloy administration decided to give a state grant to the town of Orange, so it could make a state-funded purchase of the parcel for $5.5 million. The SPRB lacks jurisdiction over land purchases by towns, and only could have reviewed the deal if the state had been the legal purchaser, so it was bypassed.

Candelora doubted such a purchase by the state would have withstood SPRB scrutiny. The high appraisal supporting the $5.5 million price was based on what was termed an “extraordinary assumption” that a state Department of Transportation commuter rail station would ever be built there. Ultimately, the town’s proposed purchase of the parcel for a transit-oriented development collapsed amid newspaper disclosures, and the parcel was sold on the private market for only $1.7 million — less than one-third of what state taxpayers were almost on the hook for.

Money motive suggested, denied

SPRB officials didn’t like their expertise being questioned at the March 10 hearing, but one thing that particularly bothered them was Petra’s testimony that the six board members have a financial motivation to spend a lot of time deliberating on proposals by DAS and other executive-branch agencies.

The members receive “per diem” compensation of $200 per meeting, and Petra said, “The more that they review, the more that they get paid.” He said the board members are in effect “outside consultants,” adding, “Their goal is like any other consultant, to grow their scope, to grow their authority, to increase their payments.”

“I’ve been on the board for a long time [since 1995], and our motivation has never been driven either by money or politics,” SPRB Chairman Edwin Greenberg said during a conference call with Government Watch along with Berger and Dimple Desai, the board’s $123,683-a-year executive director (he’s one of two salaried SPRB staff members).

“The comments [by Petra] were almost borderline personal attacks against members of the [SPRB],” Berger said. “I was somewhat disappointed in that,” he said, but the “bigger issue, I feel, was inaccurate information.”

Berger is an ex-state representative from Waterbury

— a Democrat who chaired the commerce and finance committees and served as deputy speaker. He said that giving misinformation in testimony is “probably the worst thing you can do” in the eyes of legislators, even though those who testify aren’t sworn to tell the truth.

Putting words in AG’s mouth?

That brings up one particular piece of March 10 testimony from Petra: He said that DAS wasn’t alone in thinking the legislature has granted the review board powers that are too broad, and that state Attorney General William Tong thought so, too.

The DAS deputy cited a May 31, 2019, formal opinion by Tong, which the SPRB had requested because of disagreements with DAS about its powers.

Petra paraphrased Tong’s opinion as saying the the SPRB’s enabling legislation “gives them a really broad purview,” but “the AG also commented that the legislation is overly broad and it needs to be defined.”

Here’s the thing, though: Tong’s opinion didn’t really say that.

The opinion concluded: “[I]f the legislature had intended to limit the scope of the Board’s review, it could have done so” any time since 1975. “The [SPRB] performs a quality control function with respect to DAS’s real estate and development decisions. Under the legislature’s statutory scheme, we conclude that the Board’s review of the No-Bid Construction, No-Bid Consultant and Design Build Contracts may ... consider ‘all aspects of the proposed transactions,’ and include ‘access to all information, files and records, including financial records, of the Commissioner of Administrative Services.’ ”

Tong’s opinion seems to say that the SPRB’s powers are appropriately broad — not “overly broad,” Berger and the other SPRB officials said.

The Courant made three unsuccessful attempts to reach Petra to ask about this, leaving voicemails Thursday and Friday and finally sending an email late Friday afternoon to him and the DAS’ communications officer, Lora Rae Anderson. Petra left the answers to Anderson.

One question was whether the DAS could specify any part of Tong’s opinion that said the SPRB’s enabling legislation is “overly broad and it needs to be defined,” or words to that effect. She could not point to any such language.

‘We value our partnership’

Instead, she issued this statement: “We value our partnership with, and the role the Board plays in ensuring compliance with the procurement process. We believe that it’s clear from the AG’s opinion that the board’s purview is broad, [and] the length of and level of detail in the opinion make it clear that clarification would be incredibly helpful.”

Anderson was asked what in the opinion makes it “clear that clarification would be incredibly helpful.” She responded that “in our reading of it — we feel it’s clear that clarity would be helpful.”

Her statement resumed: “DAS’s proposal addresses the fundamental issue that this broad scope can create such as duplication of efforts, confusion among all parties tasked with oversight of this process, and costly delays that slow projects — and business in the state. We look forward to further discussion with legislators and others about this important issue.”

This is far from the first time executive branch officials have complained about the SPRB and asked legislators to cut its authority. In 1988, it was the commissioner of the Department of Public Works (which has since then been absorbed into DAS) who was doing the complaining. The Courant’s lead editorial of Dec. 6, 1988, was headlined, “Don’t Weaken This Watchdog.” Legislators rejected the DPW’s request back then and, over the years, have maintained that basic stance.

The six SPRB members’ per diem compensation ranged from $16,854 to $27,772 and totaled $137,915 in 2020, for an average of $22,986. Every year since 1975, the board has noted what the state would have paid for each deal it was asked to approve, versus the lower price that the state actually paid after the cost reductions the SPRB insisted on before approving the deal. The lower cost is subtracted from the higher one to determine the savings. Then the board totals the savings on all the deals and enters them in its annual report. Since 1975 the savings add up to $88.75 million, versus $14.3 million in operating expenditures, according to the latest SPRB annual report.

In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, the board saved $960,604 while making budget expenditures of $355,456.

Petra makes $176,460 a year as deputy commissioner. He was hired in early 2019 by his fellow Guilford resident, Josh Geballe, who serves Lamont in the dual roles of DAS commissioner and chief operating officer in the governor’s office. “Josh and Noel did know each other prior to working together, and Josh recruited Noel based on his significant experience” as a New Haven-area developer, Anderson said.

The SPRB has requested its own legislation, House Bill 6577, which would “expand the purview of the State Properties Review Board to include licensing agreements, the purchasing of agricultural development rights and contracts entered into by other state agencies and quasi-public agencies.” It also would formally recognize that the SPRB is a creature of the General Assembly, which created it, not the executive branch, which Petra told legislators on March 10 that it was part of. Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant’s investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@courant.com, 860-2416524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, P.O. Box 569, Hartford, CT 06141-0569 and find him on Twitter @jonlender.