Hiring daughter leads to firing

A $102,561-a-year state epidemiologist was fired Aug. 29 by the Department of Public Health for her role in hiring her daughter last year to a temporary summer job under her direct supervision — and her $137,814-a-year supervisor has been handed a 60-day unpaid suspension for failing to take action once she learned of the arrangement.

The episode appears far from over, as both employees — epidemiologist Andrea Lombard of the DPH’s Hepatitis C program, and her supervisor, Division Chief Heidi Jenkins Glowacki — are said to be pursuing administrative appeals on the grounds that the punishment is disproportionate to their conduct.

The personnel actions are shown in two letters obtained last week by The Courant from DPH via a Freedom of Information Act request:

“This letter constitutes official notice of your dismissal from State service, effective at the close of business on August 29, 2019 … as a result of your involvement in the hiring and supervision of an immediate family member (your daughter) as a temporary employee on assignment at the [DPH],” the department’s human resources administrator, Michael Carey, wrote to Lombard Aug. 14. He told her she would be on paid leave until her termination date arrived.

A day earlier, Carey had hit Glowacki, a 29-year state employee, with the strongest discipline permitted under state personnel rules short of firing. “The Agency … has decided to issue a suspension of (60) sixty days without pay, rather than the contemplated penalty of dismissal,” Carey wrote to her Aug. 13. “The reason for this action is your involvement in a matter of ethics. Specifically, you failed to take action upon learning that an employee under your supervision hired and supervised an immediate family member.”

Lombard’s lawyer, Louis George, said Thursday that his client is “pursuing all her legal options regarding the termination,” including the possibility of winning reinstatement, through the New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 SEIU. The union’s communications director, Pedro Zayas, did not respond to calls from The Courant. But George said Thursday that Lombard hadn’t hidden the fact that she selected her daughter, “her supervisor knew about it,” and she was in effect “a cog” in the hiring process.

“Obviously, there’s an agenda here [by DPH] that’s yet to be fully determined,” he said. “This should not result in the loss of a job.”

Sources say that Glowacki, a management employee not represented by a union, is pursuing

the route available to her. That would be an appeal to the state’s Office of Labor Relations on the way to a potential hearing by the Employees’ Review Board, which has the power to modify personnel decisions. Glowacki declined comment when reached by phone Thursday.

Ethics violations

The first glimpse into the problem at DPH came Monday, when the Office of State Ethics announced that it had reached a settlement with Lombard under which she was fined $2,500 for using her position to financially benefit her daughter and failing to file a state-required written disclosure of her conflict of interest.

The Courant then viewed the ethics office’s investigative file and asked DPH for records of the personnel actions it took concerning the situation.

State records from DPH and the Office of State Ethics show that:

In 2018, DPH used a contracted state vendor, the A.R. Mazzotta employment agency in Middletown, to hire four temporary workers, including Lombard’s daughter, Mikaela Lombard Poirot. The temps were employees of the Mazzotta agency, which paid them, but they were assigned to work at the DPH under the state-contracted arrangement. Lombard’s daughter was paid $10,455 from May through August of 2018.

Lombard communicated with the temp agency about her daughter’s candidacy for one of the four positions, and personally selected her for the job assignment at DPH that fell under her supervision.

Lombard also approved the electronic timesheets that determined what the Mazzotta agency paid her daughter and the other temporary workers. A report by the Office of State Ethics found that “the median amount of hours received/worked by Mikaela [Lombard Poirot] during these pay periods was approximately 70% greater than the average of the other temp staffers.”

Lombard also approved overtime, and her daughter was the only one of the four temps to work OT — 14.5 hours at $34.95 an hour, in addition to 427 hours of regular pay at an hourly rate of $23.30 — according to a memo by an ethics office investigator.

An investigator for the state ethics office wrote a summary memo in April, quoting a DPH human resource official’s conclusion in November 2018 that

“there can be no conclusion other than Ms. Lombard misused her position as a state employee to benefit her daughter by hiring her as a temporary worker for her project. … She acknowledged that she had her daughter, and [three others] apply to A.R. Mazzotta for temporary employment. Once they were hired by A.R. Mazzotta, she received their resumes and hired them without interviews. … It was Andrea Lombard’s position that although she did not openly disclose the fact that she hired her daughter, ‘everyone should have been aware.’ ”

Glowacki, Lombard’s supervisor, was interviewed in May by an ethics office investigator and, according to a memo summarizing her comments, she said that Lombard “did not come to her and ask for permission to hire her daughter.” Instead, the memo said, “when she first learned that Mikaela had been hired, it was after the fact when Mikaela was at the Central office.” According to the investigator’s memo, Glowacki said there was a

“chance meeting,” in which she “happened to stop by Andrea’s cubicle and there was a young female there sitting in a chair” who Lombard introduced as “Mikaela, one of our temps.” Glowacki said after she had said hello, Lombard “followed her saying ‘that’s my daughter.’”

The investigator’s memo continued that Glowacki said, “my thought process at that time was … her daughter’s working here … Hhmmmm … I know there is two other situations on this floor where state employee children were working there for the summer. So it must be OK.”

George represented Lombard in the state ethics office’s inquiry, and on June 3 he wrote to Ethics Enforcement Officer Mark Wasielewski saying that in Lombard’s 19 years at the DPH, “this is the first time such allegations have been made against her. …

Ms. Lombard only put forth her daughter as a candidate with the full knowledge and approval of her supervisor, Heidi Jenkins [Glowacki]. She did not know that having Mikaela work in the same department would result in an ethics violation, as she knew of similar working relationships throughout the DPH. Ms. Lombard was never informed … that she could not sign timesheets for Mikaela nor that she needed to complete a written [conflict of interest] statement.”

George wrote that Lombard only chose her daughter after “time passed” in the search for candidates and “she grew desperate because there were no [qualified] candidates to fill the fourth position,” and “Mikaela, as a health science major in college, was qualified for the position. … Ms. Lombard works within a chain of authority, as well as with a project team. She does not have the authority to create positions, job descriptions or hire workers without approval from other supervisors.”

George noted that Steve Beaupre, the HR officer at DPH who investigated Lombard and found she had “misused her position,” had still only recommended in November that “a 30 day suspension without pay” be considered. So, George said, it is difficult to understand how the penalty ended up as dismissal.

While it’s uncertain how any appeals by Lombard and Glowacki will fare, history shows that state employees often win relief. For example, in the past couple of years, a state Department of Education administrator, James Mindek, was able to get a 60-day suspension cut in half by the state Employees’ Review Board in a similar nepotism case after he helped his son, and a colleague’s daughter, get jobs in the department through a temp agency.

The Mindek case could have implications for Glowacki if she ever brings an appeal to the Employees’ Review Board, because two education department supervisors who Mindek had informed of his son’s hiring, and who allowed it to happen, were not suspended as Glowacki now has been, from Aug. 16 through Oct. 14. Those two administrators only got oral reprimands from theneducation commissioner Dianna Wentzell, prompting an Employees’ Review Board member to say that “they got away, literally, with a slap on the wrist.”

Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant’s investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@courant.com, 860-241-6524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115 and find him on Twitter@jonlender.