An ill-conceived disaster for Lamont and Connecticut
Two top advisers to Gov. Ned Lamont announced in November 2019 that they had agreed to exploit “synergies” to make the state’s school construction program more “efficient and effective.” Details on those synergies were absent from an agreement two top Lamont advisers signed. We are learning daily that the decision was an ill-conceived disaster for Lamont, state government, and the public.
Department of Administrative
Services then-Commissioner Josh Geballe and Office of Policy and Management Secretary Melissa McCaw moved the program that spends billions on building schools from the DAS to the state’s budget office. (The agreement they both signed stipulated that Kostantinos Diamantis, who had been overseeing school construction at DAS, would continue to be in charge as he moved to OPM to become the deputy budget director.
Those synergies, if they ever existed, were forgotten long ago. The school construction program appears to be the focus of a federal criminal investigation for alleged contract steering. Synergies curdled into scandal. What an ugly recipe that will turn out to be.
No one would listen. Legislators raised objections to the November 2019 move, but they never did anything to reverse it. State Sen. Billie Miller, D-Stamford, asked Diamantis last March at a legislative hearing when the agreement on school construction transfer would end. “It expires with me,” the former Democratic state representative said in happier times. His unintended prophecy came true.
Diamantis left both jobs in late October, weeks after this column revealed Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo had hired Diamantis’s daughter as a $99,000 a year executive
assistant. Diamantis, who denies any wrongdoing, claims he was fired for defending McCaw, ostensibly his boss, against the abuse heaped on her by some of Lamont’s advisors.
Lamont continues to scramble to limit the damage being done by growing revelations of an alleged contracting scandal at the heart of his administration. Lamont recently referred to Diamantis, not long ago one of the most powerful members of the administration, as “some deputy at OPM.” When Lamont was announcing an agreement advancing the long-delayed State Pier project in New London, he declared that he gave the speeches and “it’s up to Kosta to deliver the goods.” Some deputy at OPM indeed.
The school construction synergies were not referred to in the late 2021 agreement moving the program back to DAS, where the law said all along it was supposed to be. Lamont points to that as a quick reaction to scandal. The Greenwich Democrat continues to seem oddly incurious of the details of a scandal consuming his administration.
The school construction program is now in the hands of a Noel Petra, a Guilford Democrat (like Geballe), who is a vocal opponent of common sense oversight of government spending. In March 2021, former Courant columnist Jon Lender reported that Petra “blasted” the State Properties Review Board “for allegedly wasting time and money, as part of his legislative testimony for passage of a bill that would significantly curb the SPRB’s power to approve and reject DAS initiatives.”
“We spend hundreds and hundreds of hours every year
... explaining to them ... basic construction contract law, explaining to them ‘basic 101’ contract construction best practices . ... [T]hey don’t have the expertise ... to understand the complexities,” Petra testified at a public hearing, Lender reported. The SPRB has saved taxpayers millions since it was created in 1975. The SPRB, unlike DAS, has never been stained by scandal, a claim Petra cannot make of DAS.
Two related patterns are emerging. The school construction program appears to have been manipulated and perverted for the benefit of a few. The Lamont administration has been consistently hostile to transparency and oversight. Today, in the teeth of a corrosive corruption scandal, the administration continues to appear to disdain the public’s right to know how its government conducts the people’s business.
To further undermine public confidence in his administration, Lamont has appointed veteran Democratic operative Michelle Gilman to serve as DAS commissioner. Gilman skedaddled out of then-Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz’s office in 2010, shortly after Richard Blumenthal, then in his 20th year as attorney general, issued a report criticizing the maintenance of a politically related database in Bysiewicz’s office.
Gilman, who was Bysiewicz’s chief of staff at the time of the database controversy, testified to investigators she had no idea who had entered the suspect information into the system. Gilman and Petra at DAS together are no one’s definition of reform.