‘Change is coming’ for state employees

Connecticut’s chief administrative officer keeps a spotless desk. Outside his 15thfloor office in a downtown Hartford complex is a big empty space once occupied by file cabinets. Both are signs of things to come in state government — or more precisely, things to disappear.

“You’ll notice when you look around here, there is no paper. People know not to bring paper in here,” said Josh Geballe, a former IBM executive and tech entrepreneur. “We’re working really hard to digitize everything we do.”

Geballe is commissioner of the Department of Administrative Services, the blandly named agency at the heart of the state bureaucracy. DAS is the state’s landlord and construction manager, its hiring hall and purchasing agent, and, perhaps most vitally in the digital age, its information technology office.

He is one of the midcareer, privatesector executives to join the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur who took office on Jan. 9 and hired Geballe two weeks later.

“My hypothesis coming in was that there are going to be more similarities to how we solve some of the challenges we have than differences, private to public,” Geballe said. “With the benefit of fiveandahalf months, I’m increasingly confident that is true.”

Geballe is no stranger to bureaucracies and the opportunities, challenges and necessities of wrenching change: He spent 11 years at IBM, which employs 350,000 people worldwide and preaches that the world is in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution, a convergence of new technologies powered by cloud computing.

Government bureaucracies are notoriously resistant to change, layered with rules, processes, union contracts, all contributing to a workplace culture. Administrations come and go, taking with them their priorities. As a federal EPA employee recently told the Washingtonian in a piece about the Trump administration, “I fully intend to outlast these people.”

But the Lamont administration is facing a gathering wave of retirements, producing a sense of urgency that Geballe says is shared by labor and management.

“I think we’re at a time where change is coming, whether people like it or not. A third of the state workforce is going to retire in the next three years,” Geballe said.

By the latest estimates of the comptroller’s office, 14,764 state employees — a quarter of the workforce — will be eligible to retire on July 1, 2022, when a concession deal negotiated in 2017 by the administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy takes effect. It will slow costofliving adjustments for all new retirees and raise health costs for a few, primarily high earners.

Retired state employees now get annual costofliving adjustments: a minimum of 2 percent and a maximum of 7 percent, depending on inflation. There will be no guaranteed minimum for those who retire after July 1, 2022, and their first potential COLA would come in 30 months, not 12.

The comptroller’s office cautions that some those eligible to retire will not yet have earned full retirement benefits, giving some an incentive to stay. But two union leaders say they see the state’s expectations of a significant retirement wave as wellfounded.

“We share the concern about what’s going to happen in 2022,” said Dave Glidden, the executive director of CSEA SEIU Local 2001, which represents 5,000 state employees. Its members include scientists, engineers and information technology professionals.

“We have three years to plan for that,” Geballe said. “That’s a big risk, but it’s also an amazing opportunity to reinvent how we do things, to bring in technology to automate a lot of the manual processes that can be more efficiently done by software today.”

Automation is a word that makes unions nervous, even as they acknowledge the nature of work is changing. Sal Luciano, a former social worker who is the president of the Connecticut AFLCIO, said many state agencies are understaffed.

“We’ve already seen the changing workforce,” Luciano said. “We’ve seen clerical workers go from a high of almost 9,000 to 4,000.”

Geballe said the administration has a vision of where to go with technology, primarily by offering consumers and businesses a digital portal to state government.

In hiring the 44yearold Geballe, the governor said he was bringing a fresh approach to a state government badly in need of modernization. Lamont called DAS “one of the jobs where we wanted to think a little more out of the box.”

Like Lamont, Geballe is a graduate of the School of Management at Yale. (His mother, Shelley, a lawyer and professor of public health at Yale, is a founding board member of the nonprofit Connecticut News Project Inc., operator of CTMirror.org.)

After leaving IBM, he became chief executive officer of Core Informatics, a software startup that Hartford Business Journal included in its 2017 list of best places to work in Connecticut. Thermo Fisher Scientific bought the company the same year.

Amazon and others in the private sector have “made it very easy to envision what that future could look like, if you think about online shopping or online bank services,” Geballe said. “But the journey to get from here to there, and the ordering of initiatives, is very complex to think about.”

Geballe’s office is open to a conference room, where an erasable white board hangs on the wall, running the length of the room. It was covered recently in goals and ideas tossed around in a brainstorming exercise, then numbered as priorities.

Some reflected frustrations by the public in dealing with state agencies, as well as employees knowing what is happening elsewhere in government. Number one: “What if the state developed a way for citizens to be known across agencies by the end of 2022?”

Some changes already have come, pushed by Nicholas Hermes, a West Point grad who is the statewide human resources director at DAS, hired in 2016.

The newest class of state police trainees will be selected from a pool of candidates who were recruited on social media and applied and initially screened online. DAS says the process was cheaper, nearly paperless, and attracted a diverse pool of applicants — with a third more women and minorities — and a 105percent increase in veterans.