Will anyone ever answer the phone at state agencies?

Gov. Ned Lamont often pledged to bring Connecticut’s state government into the 21st century. Our sales tax, he claimed in 2019, was designed for a Sears Roebuck economy and he wanted to acknowledge we live in the age of Amazon. Modernization is the all the rage. Yet some state agencies remain mired in a Wells Fargo wagon phase.

Take the Governor’s Workforce Council. It was an early focus of reform for the Greenwich Democrat’s administration.

The council’s first of four priorities, according to its website, is to “create a system where businesses are setting the overall workforce agenda through robust partnerships that focus on aligning curriculum with the needs of Connecticut employers and industries.” Take a few deep breaths if you are woozy on jargon.

The council needs another priority: putting a phone number on its website. The Office of Workforce Strategy provides the GWC with its 10 member administrative staff. The OWS proclaims its “mission is to build systems, teams, and approaches that will make Connecticut a talent environment that attracts and motivates students, career builders, and companies alike.”

First contacts often arrive by telephone. Declining to provide a phone number on an agency website throws away opportunities to build those “robust partnerships.”

The pandemic brought seismic changes to white collar state employees’ work rules. Many now work remote much of the time. Opinions may vary on the effect this new arrangement has on productivity. But technology in some state agencies has not kept pace with the changes.

Making direct phone contact with some state agencies has became an endurance contest. Automated answering systems tell callers how long they can expect to wait until they will speak to a person. It can be as long as six hours. When an automated voice tells a caller that at 2 p.m. that the wait to speak to someone will be six hours, that call will not be answered. The caller will concede defeat.

Experience adds to the frustration. Conversations with state agency workers are reliably productive, brief and cordial. State government wastes the asset of contact by failing to deploy technology that allows residents easy access to state employees.

The legislature, now at the start of its long regular session, should exercise its informal powers. State agency leaders will soon begin to appear before legislative committees seeking money and new authority. Those public hearings provide frequent opportunities to ask those Lamont administration leaders what they are doing to accommodate immediate and direct contact from the public.

Commissioners and others must know what the average wait time is for residents calling with a question or nettlesome problem to talk to an employee. Frustrated constituents sometimes contact their legislators for assistance with state agencies. Many members will have a sense of the technology failure that is keeping residents from their government. No law is going to remedy these troubles but a general sense of frustration among legislators shared with executive branch leaders should spur action.

Democrats enjoy overwhelming control of state government. Rigid partisan lines mean Democratic legislators are often reluc

tant to ask pointed questions to the fellow Democrats who lead state agencies. Some Republicans know how to pose direct questions on agency shortcomings but their impact is limited by their small numbers.

A critical test of the legislature’s independence should arrive with the appearance before a committee of Department of Administrative Services Commissioner Michelle Gilman. Lamont tapped Gilman to lead the sprawling agency as federal criminal law enforcement officials had begun investigating the agency’s school construction grants program.

The governor’s decision to allow deputy budget director Kostantinos Diamantis to continue to head the school construction grant office was a serious blunder. Lamont fired Diamantis from the budget job, Diamantis simultaneously retired from school construction. Gilman, an old hand in state Democratic politics, was a safe pair of hands for a ticking election year issue.

Gilman, an experienced practitioner of conjuring evasive answers, announced an audit of the school construction program. The audit was to be conducted quickly and include updates. Its completion date has been pushed into June — likely after the legislature adjourns. Secrecy once more smothers transparency in the Lamont administration.

How the program to build schools may have been abused requires more than shrouds and shrugs. This is a season for answers.