The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)

Contract reforms speed on as scandal unfolds

- DAN HAAR

How hard are they pushing at the state Department of Administra­tive Services to right the ship of school constructi­on contracts? They’re bringing in outside auditors to audit the inside auditors of contracts going back to 2018.

And they have permanentl­y moved those school constructi­on contract auditors out of the school constructi­on unit that’s under federal investigat­ion, “so that they can work at arms length,” said Noel Petra, deputy commission­er of the department, who is temporaril­y overseeing the state Office of School Constructi­on Grants and Review.

Those are just two of the many moves Petra and newly promoted Commission­er Michelle Gilman have made at the wide-ranging adminstrat­ive services agency since Oct. 28, when the former head of that school constructi­on office was fired from his appointed job as deputy state budget director and retired from his classified job running the school constructi­on unit.

When the state auditors audit the outside auditors’ audits of the inside auditors, we may really have something. But seriously, the reforms Petra described to me this week, and to the public Friday at a related press conference with Gilman and Gov. Ned Lamont, amount to a wholesale cleanup of a unit that, as the Lamont administra­tion sees it, had gotten out of control.

Federal prosecutor­s are believed to be looking into ways the school constructi­on unit, under former head Konstantin­os “Kosta” Diamantis, may have improperly pushed local officials to use certain contractor­s.

“As we look at some of the allegation­s out there, bid steering and other things that are unproven, but we’re taking a look at that and putting in place processes to make sure this never happens again,” Lamont said Friday, emphasizin­g those last three words.

In short, they’re fixing things while they and others investigat­e whether there was wrongdoing. Republican­s say Lamont acted too late after the damage was done; the Democratic governor running for re-election this year says he acted swiftly as soon as he knew there was a problem.

Angry words over reforms

The list of reforms and correcive actions is long, including going over every contract with all the local school boards — clawing back some reimbursem­ent promises, putting others back in.

“There were a number of policies that were in conflict with statute,” Petra told me. “A lot of it had to do with reimbursem­ent rates, particular­ly with board of ed buildings.”

In Farmington, for example, Dimantis’ unit didn’t properly lower the state payback rate for the sections of a newly rebuilt high school that will house the school board offices, Petra said. Then again, a review showed Farmington was due an equal or even greater amount for something else it has not properly claimed.

Now that’s all been changed, town by town, on the DAS website and in emails and letters to local officials. “It was a pretty big project,” Petra said. “We had to do it very quickly.”

The reforms include telling towns to cancel deals with a certain group of firms on a pre-approved list of contractor­s in hazardous materials abatement and demolition.

Diamantis objects strongly to how the Lamont team is painting the picture. “Our program had become one of the best in the country,” he told me Friday. “I was president of the National Council on School Facilities. [I checked; he was.] I certainly would debate it with him any time, any place.”

I want to moderate that debate. Diamantis and Petra both went into way more detail than I can even hint at here.

Diamantis: “For someone to judge what is a discrepanc­y to someone who never knew the program and learned it in five minutes is a disservice to the program, is a disservice to the people who worked at that program and cared about the communitie­s we worked with, and a disservice to the reader, who gets an impression that somebody who walks in in one week that took others years to learn has a better idea.”

Speaking of those staff members, Petra met with the nine who work on school constructi­on projects soon after they moved back under DAS, where they previously worked, along with Diamantis, until the whole department moved to the state Office of Policy and Management in late 2019.

“They were thrilled to be able to bring the program back into compliance,” Petra said. “For the ethics training for our staff, we’re going to highlight this, use it an an example … if ever something like this happens again.”

One irony of many in this is that by the time Republican­s in the legislatur­e conduct the investigat­ion that they called for Thursday, which Lamont supports, the changes they suggest in their report will be long in the books.

Unless they invoke rare subpoena powers and spend millions of dollars they don’t have, the lawmakers aren’t going to find any corruption with a capital C; what they’ll find is systems out of whack and maybe that Diamantis went too far in telling local officials to use certain contractor­s, as various public officials and lawyers have alleged.

Diamantis denies any steering, although on the $46 million Tolland High School project that’s been in the news over alleged steering, he did not have an immediate explanatio­n.

The political picture

Lamont called folks together on a winter-mixxy Friday afternoon to announce that Melissa McCaw, his right-hand-woman budget chief as head of the Office of Policy and Management — and Diamantis’ former boss — had decided to leave.

The circumstan­ces of McCaw’s departure would rival any work of Shakespear­e minus the actual bloodshed. Noel Petra and Michelle Gilman have a steep climb to keep politics out of their ongoing reforms.

Petra got his marching orders from Lamont at a political event last fall in Guilford, where he ran for and won a seat on the board of education as an independen­t candidate, aligned with Democrats to handily beat back a slate of right-wing Republican­s.

Lamont, he said, “asked me to find the problems, drag them out into the light and rebuild the program that is efficient and done according to statute.”

And in another irony, the only thing that’s clear in all this is that some state policies lived in a gray area and need to be clearer, whether or not they were violated. The grayest of those gray areas was the use of a group of ongoing contracts with four hazardous waste abatement and demolition firms, which I’ve been writing about over the last two weeks.

Those standing contracts were meant to be used for small jobs and emergencie­s, but state and municipal and local school officials called on that list, and those contract terms, more and more, for bigger and bigger jobs.

“What was happening was, they were recommendi­ng the use of these contracts inappropri­ately,” Petra said.

Diamantis — you guessed it — denies that adamantly and the picture remains unclear.

And so the reforms speed ahead even as we learn what, exactly, happened in a $350 million-a-year office few of us knew much about just a few short weeks ago.

 ?? ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States