Greenwich senator pays for private help
State Sen. Alex Bergstein has hired a former campaign aide to be her privately funded office staffer, in a move that could raise transparency issues.
The Hartford Courant reported that the first-term lawmaker, using her own money, hired the additional staff.
The employee is using her own computer, but Cheri Quickmire, executive director of Common Cause in Connecticut, the election and government watchdog, said the hiring could raise questions that date back to the era of Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. in the early 1990s, when loaned executives were brought into his administration.
“I thinks there needs to be an administrative policy or legislative rules on how we deal with this to make sure things are done ethically,” Quickmire said in a Friday night interview. “That would include somehow making the non-state employee using her non-state private email system somehow accountable to the state if she is working for a legislator.”
Colleen Murphy, who is the state’s chief transparency official as executive director of the state Freedom of Information Act, said Friday that whether or not she’s paid by Bergstein, work generated by the aide is subject to the provisions of Connecticut public-records law.
“The source of her salary is irrelevant,” Murphy said Friday night. “It doesn’t matter if you use private resources. It’s the content created that is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. If she’s performing a public function on behalf of the senator, it’s a public record.”
Bergstein did not respond to a request for comment Friday night.