Gov. Ned Lamont made two appointments to the State Contracting Standards Board (SCSB) with no press releases or formal announcement, finally filling all vacant seats on the board and ending a three-month standoff between board members and Executive Director Greg Daniels by naming a new board chairperson.
Lamont appointed labor leader Rochelle Palache of Bloomfield to serve as board chair. The naming of a chairperson means the board will now be able to begin holding their regularly scheduled meetings again after Daniels unilaterally canceled them, saying the board cannot meet without a chair and not allowing a vote to be held for an interim chair since former chairman Michael Walsh departed in February.
Palache is vice president of SEIU 32BJ, a union that represents roughly 4,300 service workers in both the private and public sectors, including janitors and security guards. The union, along with the larger SEIU 1199 union, backed Lamont in his gubernatorial campaigns. Palache also served on SEIU’s Connecticut State Council as a political organizer for nine years, and as political director of 32BJ, before becoming vice president of the union in 2021.
Lamont also appointed former Westport First Selectman James S. Marpe to the board, filling a seat that had been vacant prior to Lamont even taking office. Marpe, a Republican, served on Westport’s Board of Education before serving eight years as First Selectman from 2013 to 2021 before announcing he would not seek re-election.
Until he retired in 2002, Marpe was a senior executive with Accenture, an international technology and consulting firm that has contracts with the state of Connecticut for computer consulting and information technology services. Accenture was paid $15.5 million in 2023 and nearly $24 million so far in 2024.
Despite a board vacancy existing for years, Lamont chose to remove long-time board member Robert Rinker in February of 2024 and replace him with labor leader Keith Brothers.
Now with a full complement of board members and staff, the powerful, but often overlooked, board can begin their work again. There has not been a regularly scheduled meeting of the board since February when Lamont’s last chairman appointment departed after only three months in the role.
The lack of chairman caused Daniels to suspend regular meetings, arguing there was no statutory authority for the board to hold meetings without a chairman, despite the board appointing interim-chairs in the recent past. Instead, Daniels held to special meetings on ethics training and freedom of information training, neither of which attained a quorum of board members.
The cancelation of those regularly scheduled meetings caused some strife between board members and Daniels, that spilled over into heated accusations, with some board members seeing it as a deliberate move to undercut the board’s ability to effectively examine Connecticut’s contracting practices, which make up a sizeable chunk of the state budget.
Efforts by the board to pass legislation giving them oversight of the state’s quasi-public agencies was passed by the Senate but was not approved by the House.
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