Former state health commissioner

says she was target of discrimination by Gov. Ned Lamont.

Renee Coleman-Mitchell, whom Gov. Ned Lamont fired in May as public health commissioner in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, is accusing the governor and his administration of discriminatory treatment, saying she was shut out of key policy discussions and dismissed from her job without cause.

Coleman-Mitchell, who is Black, said that before she was fired, she was supplanted by Connecticut’s chief operating officer and commissioner of administrative services, Josh Geballe, whom she described as a “young, white male” who “usurped” her authority and ran a “shadow department” with no public health experience. Geballe, 45, is a former senior IBM executive Lamont hired to modernize state government.

She said she waited months to make her discrimination accusation because she needed time to think. Coleman-Mitchell also referenced the national political conversation that has ensued about police brutality and the oppression of Black people since the death of George Floyd, which occurred two weeks after she was fired.

“Following more than two months of self-reflection and deep probing conversation with friends, mentors, and colleagues I now have clarity about what happened to me,” she said in a statement emailed Monday night to reporters by her lawyer, Eric R. Brown. “As our country faces a reckoning over race and white privilege, I am going to set the record straight in my own words.”

A spokesman for the Lamont administration declined to comment on the accusations, as did Geballe. Brown and Coleman-Mitchell could not be reached for additional comment Tuesday.

The statement made a claim of discrimination without promising a lawsuit or seeking redress, but it contained a link to a website titled “Redemption for Renee.” She said a promised letter of recommendation from the governor never was produced.

Lamont acknowledged in May that he fired Coleman-Mitchell but did not offer a detailed explanation for the ouster, saying only that there was a desire for closer coordination among state agencies as Connecticut approached its first phase of reopening businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coleman-Mitchell appeared at a news conference in March when the governor declared a public health emergency. Her tenure with the administration, which lasted just more than a year, included a public falling out with one of her top appointees, Deputy Commissioner Susan Roman, who alleged she was discriminated against by Coleman-Mitchell.

Vaccination controversy

The former commissioner also had an awkward first summer in the job over the issue of whether to end nonmedical exemptions for child immunizations, sparking a controversy with the release of school-byschool vaccination data, then shrinking from the ensuing public debate.

Coleman-Mitchell, who has a master’s degree in public health from Yale University and 25 years of experience as a public health administrator, annoyed Democratic lawmakers by refusing for months after the data was published to offer a professional opinion on whether the exemptions posed a public health threat.

The episode also appeared to undermine her relationship with the governor’s office but she remained in her post. The pandemic put the governor’s office in close daily contact with the health department, exposing morale and management problems at the agency.

Coleman-Mitchell said in her statement that she was the target of “discriminatory and biased treatment.” She described no specific incidents but rather an atmosphere.

“Over the last two months I have been able to acknowledge the insidious characteristics of discriminatory bias,” she said. “They are unwarranted cruelty of oppression perpetuated by intentional efforts to humiliate, erase, discredit, and defame. This historical practice of discrediting and erasing the noble contributions of Black leaders like myself is not acceptable and must end now.”

Overall, the Lamont administration has assembled a team that is racially diverse. In his first months as governor, Lamont named 14 new agency heads, half of whom were women. Six of the new appointees were Black or Hispanic. The new governor said diversity was important for two reasons.

“One, I want Connecticut to be able to look at my administration and see somebody just like them and say, ‘I could do that, too, someday.’ And just as importantly when I sit at the table, I want to have different points of view represented,” Lamont said then.