By Chris Powell
Since Connecticut state government is a big place, it will make mistakes even in the best of circumstances. But Governor Lamont and state legislators should pay much more attention to state government’s most expensive undertaking — payroll administration — and less attention to what engaged them last week — new highway signs on the state’s borders touting the state as the home of great pizza, gourmet food, college basketball, and submarines.
In July Connecticut Inside Investigator, a product of the Yankee Institute, disclosed that Central Connecticut State University had paid nearly $763,000 in back pay to a former executive, who, the state Supreme Court ruled, had been wrongly fired in 2018. The firing was prompted by the man’s arrest in an incident unrelated to his job. But he denied the charges and eventually they were dismissed.
In August the state auditors reported a similar situation, wherein the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection overpaid a conservation officer $109,000 during 19 months of paid administrative leave after he was charged criminally, though state regulations restrict paid administrative leaves to 30 days. The charge here was dropped too and the officer returned to work after what was effectively a year and a half of paid vacation.
Audits covering 2018 through 2020 already had faulted the department for violating paid leave rules.
Two weeks ago the auditors reported pervasive financial mismanagement at the Correction Department. The most expensive incident involved an employee who was entitled to a $3,032 payment for working holidays. Instead he got 54 bi-weekly payments of $3,032, or $161,000 more than he was owed.
The Correction Department audit also found improprieties with payments for compensatory time, overtime, workers’ compensation, and union leave, as well as raises awarded without evaluations.
Last year the auditors found that the University of Connecticut had overpaid two professors on sabbatical leave by more than $450,000 altogether. And who can forget the UConn Health Center’s having kept a professor on the payroll for five months after he had stopped showing up for work in 2018. He had been murdered by his wife but it took five months for anyone in authority to notice that he wasn’t doing his job anymore.
Two members of the state Senate’s Republican minority issued a statement about the Correction Department audit, asking if the department would try to recover the $161,000 from the improper year-and-a-half paid vacation. But even the most embarrassing audits seldom prompt any acknowledgment from legislators, and especially not from Democratic legislators, since the state administration is controlled — or, rather, often left uncontrolled — by a Democratic governor.
Connecticut Inside Investigator reported the other day that government employees in Connecticut are the most unionized government employees in the country. This is in large part because state law virtually requires their unionization and, through binding arbitration of their contracts, gives them great control over their compensation and work rules. Since their members are often the beneficiaries of the mismanagement identified by the state auditors, the unions don’t complain about it. Indeed, the great effort the unions make at election time to sustain the regime that is indifferent to such mismanagement may be why so few candidates for state office dare to question it.
But if voters ever tire of Connecticut’s rapidly increasing cost of living, this expensive mismanagement may be worth remembering at the election for the General Assembly two months hence.
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IS ANYBODY HOME?: Connecticut might be safer if anyone in the chief court administrator’s office and the chief state’s attorney’s office read the newspapers or maybe just cared a little more.
Last week the Hartford Courant reported that a Windsor man has been arrested and charged with drunken driving in four incidents in the state since last December. Other charges against him include driving under suspension and driving without insurance.
He has yet to be brought to trial and after his most recent arrest he was released on bail again. It’s not hard to imagine a deadly end to this crime spree if no one in authority thinks it’s urgent.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 