Lamont signs legislation updating rules, procedures
The state will be required to make greater use of digital technology and to abandon time consuming paperwork when trying to make purchases under changes in procurement policies enacted by the General Assembly.
The legislation, signed into law by Gov. Ned Lamont Tuesday, replaces outdated procurement rules slowed efforts to find personal protective gear during the coronavirus pandemic.
The legislation, which passed overwhelmingly in the General Assembly, also requires greater use of digital technology, sweeping aside outdated practices that rely on paperwork and conventional U.S. mail.
The new law simplifies and streamlines processes such as eliminating more than 80,000 forms for businesses to notarize and scan to do business with the state, said Josh Geballe, Commissioner of Administrative Services. The new law also eliminates duplicative state standards for minority-owned businesses and aligns rules with federal standards, he said.
In addition, the law eliminates requirements for paper transactions, giving state agencies permission to use digital technology, Geballe said.
Lamont, members of his administration, local officials, lawmakers and others appeared at Grace Farms, a New Canaan humanitarian organization that helped state officials track down personal protective equipment.
As he signed the legislation Tuesday Lamont recalled how his administration had to quickly find personal protective equipment. “We were able to move pretty fast,” he said.
“We were looking all over the globe,” the governor said.
Faced with a broken global supply chain for PPE, Geballe said the state “had to turn to trusted friends and partners like Grace Farms who basically stopped everything
they were doing and turned their attention to the world’s
biggest problem at the time, which was how do we find PPE.’’
“In government we typically have a bad case of the slows. We don’t do things fast,” he said. “But during
COVID we did a lot of stuff really fast and we need to learn from why it was and how we did it.”
Geballe cited public-private partnerships that helped speed the acquisition of PPE. He also said the Lamont administration took the “traditional procurement playbook” that slowed efforts and “threw it out the window.”
“And we were just out in the wild west trying to find what we needed,” he said. “That’s not sustainable in
the long term, but there are things that we have done historically and rules that get built up, laws that get
passed that kind of accumulate over the years and very rarely do we go back in government and kind of question, ‘do we really still need those?’ ”
Rohit Bhalla, chief clinical and quality officer at Stamford Health, said securing PPE in the spring of 2020 was an “extraordinary challenge.”
“It was only by collective and sustained effort that we were able to secure necessary supplies and equipment,” he said.
The legislation passed the state House of Representative 142-3 May 27 and was approved in the Senate in a 36-0 vote June 5.
Lamont, a Greenwich businessman before entering statewide politics, has frequently criticized Connecticut government’s cumbersome and at times clunky machinery. In April, he and Geballe announced upgrades that centralize human resources that are spread across state government and broadening the use of technology to replace fewer retiring workers.