Lamont flips script
Governor cuts watchdog funds he had promised as candidate.
While running for governor in 2018, Democrat Ned Lamont said on a written campaign questionnaire from a state employees’ union that he supported “fully funding and staffing” a watchdog agency called the State Contracting Standards Board.
But Tuesday, he cut $450,000 in staffing funds that the legislature days earlier had included in the new $23 billion annual state budget to hire five additional employees at the long-underfunded board. The agency is intended to prevent improprieties in the award of state contracts, but for years has had only one full-time staffer.
“By killing this funding, the governor broke a promise to us, and he rubber-stamped the existing broken system of contracting,” said David Glidden, executive director of CSEA SEIU Local 2001, which he said represents about 25,000 state employees and retirees.
He was referring to Question 18 on the union’s campaign questionnaire that Lamont answered in an effort to win the labor organization’s endorsement of his 2018 campaign, which ended with his election victory over Republican Bob Stefanowski.
“Do you support fully funding and staffing the State Contracting Standards Board?” was the question.
“Yes,” was Lamont’s answer. Lamont’s director of communications, Max Reiss, responded Thursday much as he did Tuesday when first asked about taking the newly approved staffing funds out of the budget for the watchdog board: “First of all, we haven’t cut any funding whatsoever from the State Contracting Standards Board.”
On Tuesday, he had described it as “flat-funding” the contracting board, adding that “they’re getting the same level of funding that they received in recent years.” Reiss said that means the governor has kept his promise.
“What Gov. Ned Lamont
has done is support the modernization of public services, and our success has been as a direct result of state employees,” Reiss said. “Earlier this week, we celebrated the fact that tens of thousands of Connecticut residents have been able to renew their vehicle registrations online through the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s a testament to the governor’s commitment to ensuring that ... residents get the best services at an appropriate cost.”
‘We took him at his word’
Glidden wasn’t buying it. “We took him at his word that he’d help make the Contracting Standards Board live up to its immense promise by finally properly funding and staffing it,” the union chief said Thursday, “and in part because of that answer, we endorsed him and CSEA members worked hard for him to get elected.”
“That’s why it was an enormous gut punch,” he said, when after the House and Senate had voted approval of a $46 billion two-year budget that included the $450,000 in new staffing money in each of the two years, “we learned that ... he demanded that it immediately be removed.”
The legislature’s initial approval of the budget funds led to a short-lived moment of elation by members of the contracting board, which was created as a reform in the wake of the corruption scandal that landed ex-Gov. John G. Rowland in federal prison a decade and a half ago.
“I couldn’t be happier,” board Chairman Lawrence Fox said at the panel’s meeting June 11.
But on Tuesday, it became known that Lamont’s office wiped out the funds in a section buried deep in a massive budget implementation bill.
“This came directly from the governor’s office,” said Sen. Cathy Osten, co-chair of the legislature’s appropriations committee and Lamont’s fellow Democrat. “I truly think that this is a mistake” because the board provides needed “transparency and oversight,” she said, adding that she thinks it wasn’t a question of money for Lamont, but of “not wanting the oversight.”
This year, members of the legislature’s appropriations committee were persuaded to budget additional money for the watchdog agency after hearing the arguments of Fox, as well the agency’s executive director, David Guay, and other members of the unusually activist volunteer board.
The result was about $450,000 in new funds in each of the next two fiscal years, to hire five additional employees to join Guay: a $130,000 chief procurement officer’s position that is called for in the state statute that created the board, but is vacant; along with a $73,000 research analyst, an $84,000 staff attorney, a $73,000 trainer and a $76,000 accounts examiner.
Now all that’s left is little more than Guay’s $143,000 salary.
Hiring the five new employees was “critically important because every day we see the colossal waste caused by the state’s ill-advised contracting practices,” Glidden said. “We see consultants performing the same work as CSEA members, but the consultants are paid more while often delivering substandard work.”
Glidden said the question about the watchdog’s staffing was “a key litmus test for our process of evaluating candidates. A ‘yes’ means CSEA members can rely on the candidate to be an advocate for fair and above-board contracting . ... He made a promise to this workforce on an issue he knew was critically important, and then he failed to make good on that promise.”
He said Lamont’s cut of the newly approved funds “is bad for CSEA members, but it’s even worse for Connecticut taxpayers because he shut down the path to fair, cost-effective contracting.”
Earlier in the week, Reiss said that “what taxpayers
... do not want is a duplication of services ... across government.” He said that while the watchdog agency wanted to hire a chief procurement officer, “we already have that at the Department of Administrative Services.”
Reiss said the state’s contract procurement process is already “transparent.”
Watchdog members say their procurement officer would be a new and needed set of eyes to watch what the DAS’ procurement section does.
Glidden said that Lamont has turned away from another important answer he gave on the 2018 questionnaire, about whether he supported “privatization” of services to the public that state employees now perform.
Lamont had answered by saying: “I do not support privatization of public services performed by state workers.”
On Thursday, Reiss said that Lamont “does not support privatizing for the sake of privatizing. What the governor supports are better services and results for our residents who are our customers.” He said Lamont has kept faith with the unions, adding: “The governor has not laid off a single employee.”
Little respect
Over the years, the contracting standards board has not received much in the way of operating funds or respect from those at the top of state government’s executive and legislative branches. They have seemed to treat it as a lingering migraine, despite its repeated successes in uncovering irregularities and improprieties in bidding and procurement procedures by executive branch and “quasi-public” agencies. More than once it has barely survived being cut from the state budget completely.
Fox says he thinks maybe the board might fare better if moved into the legislative branch, where its budget funds would be safer from being canceled as now has happened. The state Auditors of Public Accounts, for example, are part of the legislative branch of government.
Meanwhile, The Day of New London criticized Lamont in an editorial published Wednesday, saying he “was wrong to strip out funding that the state legislature had approved to help a watchdog agency better do its job of evaluating state contracts. It’s bad policy. It’s bad optics. And it could well come back to bite him.”
“The creation of the
State Contracting Standards Board was among the reforms approved in the wake of the pay-for-play scandal that drove
Gov. John G. Rowland out of office and into federal prison in 2004,” The Day editorial said. “Its job is to look for questionable stipulations, irregularities, and improprieties in state contracts and bidding procurement procedures.”
To some critics, Lamont’s cut of the watchdog board’s funds may be reminiscent of his turnabout in early 2019 when, freshly inaugurated, he proposed a comprehensive program to toll cars and trucks on Connecticut highways — after having said during the 2018 campaign that he was only in favor of tolling trucks, not cars.
That tolling proposal met fierce public resistance and turned into the governor’s first major political defeat, when it flopped despite a heavy push by both the administration and its allies in the Capitol lobbying trade.
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.