System failure
How is it possible no one in West Haven watched as former state Rep. Michael DiMassa allegedly swiped $636,000 in COVID-19 money?
In May, state budget director Melissa McCaw praised West Haven city officials for “the fiscal integrity and discipline built into the city’s decision-making.” No wonder former state Rep. Michael DiMassa thought he would get away with, as federal law enforcement authorities allege, looting $636,000 of the city’s federal COVID-19 assistance. West Haven’s reputation for financial integrity disappeared long ago.
What a mess. Now it seems a bitter irony that McCaw “commended” West Haven officials at a May meeting of the Municipal Accountability Review Board (MARB). The city’s dire finances prompted the state to invoke its oversight powers in late 2018. Since then until now, state budget experts have been scrutinizing West Haven’s finances and reviewing them at monthly meetings.
MARB meeting minutes from the past year reveal that city officials continued to delay changes. As recently as September, one member of the MARB West Haven committee, Stephen Falcigno, was “disturbed that items from up to three years ago have not been completed.” Minutes of the same meeting note that the city’s audit might be delayed because an accounts payable position remained vacant.
West Haven officials have been slow to respond to the imperatives of creating an efficient, modern local government. DiMassa, 30, was a city employee for 12 years. He was fired as an assistant to the city council in October — after FBI agents made a well-publicized appearance at city hall. He resigned from the legislature Monday.
Records, according to the affidavit of an FBI
agent investigating the West Haven Democrat, show that DiMassa created a consulting company, Compass Investments LLC, early this year and began billing the city in February for work that was never done. He created Compass, records show, shortly after a December 2020 meeting of the city council that authorized Mayor Nancy Rossi and two designees, DiMassa and city finance director Frank Cieplinski, to seek and appropriate COVID-19 assistance funds.
What allegedly came next suggests the state’s oversight and the city’s financial controls were lax in the extreme. DiMassa is alleged to have submitted invoices and been paid from February through September. One invoice for $87,000 was paid the day after it was submitted. Municipalities, especially ones chronically in distress, do not pay their bills in a day.
No one seemed to be monitoring the federal aid expenditures. No one appears to have noticed that there was no contract with DiMassa’s company, or that no work was being performed, but plenty of payments were made.
One of DiMassa’s invoices states that his company provided lobbying services. State legislators cannot also be registered state lobbyists. Did anyone ask who he was lobbying? Rossi, who is a CPA, and her top administrators did not notice months of unusual payments.
In January, few people had been vaccinated. Cities and towns continued to adjust to the constraining realities of a public health crisis. How much money West Haven had available to spend from those federal COVID-19 funds ought to have received city officials’ daily attention. But they did not. Cities get bank statements. More than one person in West Haven must have been responsible for reconciling them. DiMassa, records reveal, did attend one MARB meeting this year — in April, when the board discussed COVID-19 expenses in its budget, of course.
Some West Haven residents thought something was not right with the use of the COVID19 funds and alerted public officials. One resident filed a broad request for information under the Freedom of Information Act. City officials were slow to comply with it. Resisting a request for public records is a reliable indicator of a government intent on keeping secrets from the public.
A handful of local residents, frustrated that the city was concealing information, engaged a lawyer to share their concerns with Attorney General William Tong in August. McCaw, aware of the letter, consulted with a variety of state agencies, including Tong’s office and state auditors, and determined they were not going to act. Her office said Thursday that it then “communicated the commencement of an audit to West Haven.”
The failure of every safeguard on public funds for seven months must be raising as many questions with the pubic as with federal authorities, who will continue to use their power to find answers.