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| Lamont |
The leave taking of Mellissa McCaw, head of Governor Ned Lamont’s Office of Policy Management and Connecticut’s first Black OPM Secretary, made Connecticut papers at the end of February, inviting rude comparisons to disgraced former President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre.”
Previous to McCaw, Lamont had dumped Konstantinos ‘Kosta’
Diamantis. Lamont in on record as having said that Chief State’s Attorney
Richard Colangelo Jr., who has retired,
would “be gone” if the governor had the power to fire him.
McCaw may be the last high ranking Lamont official -- not
yet a target or a person of interest in an FBI investigation -- to quit service
in the governor’s administration.
McCaw has accepted a job as finance director for the town of
East Hartford, and Lamont gave her an affectionate send off.
The Hearst papers reported, “In an
afternoon press conference outside his office at the state Capitol, Lamont and
other administration officials heaped praised on McCaw. The governor called her
a ‘great friend’ and credited her with turning the state’s finances around.
“’She took over at a real time of dire need in this state
when we were confronted with a $3.75 billion deficit,’ Lamont said. ‘We had
about 60 days to put that budget together. We worked around the clock to get that
right. A lot of people said “this isn’t a real budget. It’s smoke and mirrors.
It’s not going to be in balance.” That’s not the way Melissa McCaw does it.’”
The presser announcing McCaw’s job transfer gave Lamont an
opportunity to luxuriate, if only for a brief moment, in a biennial budget
surplus of about $3.2 billion, part of which may be attributed to President Joe
Biden who, having reaped the rewards of taxing, borrowing and inflating the
money supply, was able to pass around to his troops in the political field such
as Lamont boodles of walking around money.
Before she had moved on to safe harbor in East Hartford,
Lamont was asked “whether McCaw had properly supervised her deputy, Konstantinos
‘Kosta’ Diamantis, who is being investigated by federal authorities for his
role in school construction projects and the state-financed redevelopment of
the State Pier,” Hearst reported.
Lamont said: “I’ve got confidence in her as secretary of OPM.
I think she did a good job. It’s a big agency with a lot of things going on.”
Asked if McCaw “bore any responsibility for the unfurling
scandal,” Lamont responded, “She was overseeing a $24 billion budget in the
middle of the pandemic. There was a lot of things going on.”
In the absence of a congressional investigating committee, people
in Connecticut are not likely to discover precisely what was going on any time
soon. The FBI is usually slow and methodical in its investigations. Leaks are
few and deniable. The case or cases devoted to exploring possible corruption in
state government – what a surprise! -- will be bouncing through Connecticut’s
media until a final report by the FBI is issued, possibly after the upcoming
2022 state elections.
Republicans in Connecticut are urging the formation of a
separate, public, transparent legislative investigation. Democrats have
controlled both the House and Senate in the Connecticut’s General Assembly from
1992-2020, Republicans controlling the House for only two years – 1995-96 –
during this period, according to Ballotpedia. Democrats know they do
not stand to benefit from a public flogging so close to the election season and
have splashed cold water on the prospect of an impartial Watergate-like
ventilation of possible Democrat hanky-panky in the General Assembly by
dominant Democrat state legislators.
Connecticut Democrats – members of a party that for years
has assembled one U.S. investigating committee after another to search
meticulously through former President Donald Trump’s bureau in search of soiled
underwear – have told Republicans they believe a state audit would be
sufficient to restore public confidence in their government, a claim that
brought forth from Republican Rep. Holly Cheeseman, the ranking House
Republican on the tax writing committee, the best line quoted so far concerning
Lamont’s odiferous dumpster fire.
“Who is providing oversight?” Cheesman asked. “It’s obvious
there are failings here” – just count the rolling heads. “An audit of an
audit,” Cheeseman added pointedly, “is not filling me with a great deal of
confidence.”
One of the more interesting speculative bon-bons may be
found mentioned cursorily in a CTMirror
piece titled “An
unsigned memo provoked a vigorous defense from Kosta Diamantis.”
CTMirror points to a “conflict between Diamantis and trade
unions” and adds, “A subtext to the union’s complaints was the suspicion that
Diamantis, then the state official in charge of school construction grants, was
disparaging the use of project-labor agreements (PLAs) that guarantee, among
other things, the use of union labor.” Actually, Connecticut’s PLAs dampen
price competition within state approved building contracts by requiring
non-union contractors to offer the same salary and benefits as unionized
contractors.
Is it possible that Diamantis was attempting to cut labor
costs, possibly on behalf of Lamont, when he ran afoul of the pro-PLA crowd?
If such was the case, the hidden effort likely will not be
brought to light through the usual state audit. Only a special legislative
committee can uncover motives, as well as cover-ups, the sort of thing that
sent former Governor John Rowland to jail – twice.
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