The Connecticut State Contracting Standards Board’s (SCSB) work has been delayed as Greg Daniels, the executive director appointed by Gov. Ned Lamont, has unilaterally canceled the board’s regularly scheduled meetings in March, April, and May, claiming that because Lamont has not named a new chairman following the departure of Michael Walsh, the board cannot legally meet.

Daniels’ assertion flies in the face of past board practice as recently as September of 2023, when Larry Fox retired but Walsh was not yet able to assume the position: during that time, the board voted for Robert Rinker to act as interim board chair so that meetings could continue. Walsh left the position just a few months after assuming the board chairman role when he took a municipal job, making him ineligible to serve.

Daniels’ sudden cancellation of the March meeting rankled more outspoken members of the board, and clashes between Daniels and some board members have devolved into accusations of unprofessionalism, exceeding statutory authority, and claims of harassment.

According to emails received by Inside Investigator and conversations both on and off the record, Daniels believes he is following state statute by telling the board they cannot meet until Lamont selects a new chair, while some members of the board see it as the hidden hand of the Lamont administration pushing back on the board’s authority, particularly in light of the SCSB’s look into the scandals of the CT Port Authority.

The board, created in the wake of the contracting scandal that sent former Gov. John Rowland to prison, has oversight over state contracts entered into by executive branch agencies, including the large and powerful Department of Administrative Services (DAS) and the Office of Policy and Management (OPM) – which has had some contracting issues during the Lamont administration tied to school contracts administered by Kosta Diamantis and the Port Authority’s State Pier project.

Unlike the Auditors of Public Accounts, which is under the legislature, the SCSB can exercise power over executive branch agencies and their contracting practices. State contracts with outside vendors account for a significant portion of the state’s budget, and the board has found in past studies that more than half of those contracts are not competitively bid.

But the disintegration in the relationship between the board and the executive director, who acts as administrator for the board and its newly funded staff, also comes as the board seeks to expand its statutory authority to look into contracts entered into by quasi-public state agencies like the Port Authority, the Connecticut Lottery Corporation, and the Connecticut Airport Authority, all of whom opposed the legislation, along with Secretary of OPM Jeffrey Beckham.

The board had originally scheduled a special meeting for March 5 after Walsh’s sudden departure to select an interim chairperson so meetings could continue, but that meeting, along with the regularly scheduled March 8 meeting were both canceled by Daniels.

“Since statute clearly states that only the Governor has the authority to appoint the chairperson, interim or otherwise, to the board, the Special Meeting on March 5 and the Regular Meeting on March 8, 2024, are cancelled,” Daniels wrote in a March 1, 2024, email. “Upon appointment of a new Chair by the Governor, we will resume our regularly scheduled meetings.”

Daniels’ announcement was met with confusion and pushback by some board members.

“Greg, I just heard that you are cancelling all meetings until the Governor appoints a chair. That’s ridiculous if true,” board member Sal Luciano wrote in a March 1 email to Daniels. “While no one doubts that the Governor has the sole authority to pick a chairman, you have just made this body held hostage if the Governor delays his choice. That was never the legislative intent and violates past practices.”

“I would recommend Mr. Daniels reconsider this very strange, unprecedented and legally questionable decision,” board member Lauren Gauthier also wrote on March 1. “And because I have no problem saying the truth plainly, this is an obvious attempt by the Lamont administration to further prevent the work of our agency. I cannot for the life of me understand the Governor’s obsession with hamstringing, hampering, and hindering the State Contracting Standards Board. The more he drives to get rid of us, the more suspicious of a conclusion I draw.”

In her email, Gauthier notes that the board has only 30 days to render a decision on contested solicitations and mentioned the pending privatization case that questions whether the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection essentially privatized some services previously handled by state employees under a contract with an outside vendor.

Another email dated April 5, cancelled the meetings for April and May.

“Nowhere is the Executive Director explicitly permitted this duty or right,” Gauthier wrote in an April 5 email, “and if we are to read this as one of his ‘administrative duties,’ it would follow that Mr. Daniels could choose to call or cancel meetings regardless of there being a chairperson.”

On the SCSB, the executive director serves as an ex-officio member, and, according to former SCSB Chairman Lawrence Fox, the move to cancel meetings because there is no appointed chairman flies in the face of past practice.

“When I couldn’t be present, I would recommend, and have the board members designate, a chair in my absence. Because the meetings that the board has — the board is really required to meet and provided that there’s a quorum, the board should be meeting on a monthly basis,” Fox said in an interview. “I’m not sure how that’s the executive director’s authority, to be frank.”

“He is overreaching his authority,” Gauthier said in an interview. “Clear as day.”

“A quorum of board members asked him to hold a march meeting, asked him to hold an April meeting,” Gauthier said. “I’m just stunned. If you look at the statute as to what his powers and duties are, nowhere in there does it give him the unilateral authority to call or cancel our meetings.”

Also, in a rather interesting turn of events, after cancelling the special and regular board meetings in March and April, Daniels unilaterally scheduled an April 5 special meeting for board member ethics training. Only two members showed up, according to meeting minutes, meaning there was no quorum, yet the meeting went on, and was posted to the board’s website.

“It’s an illegally held meeting,” Gauthier said. “If were not allowed to meet for our regular meeting because we don’t have a chairperson, why are we allowed to meet for a special meeting?”

Special meetings cannot be altered from their stated agenda, whereas regular meetings can be changed with a two-thirds vote of the board. That means, in theory, during a regular meeting the board could vote to add an additional item to the agenda and elect an interim chairperson.

“It’s apparent to us that the executive director is operating under the assumption that if he lets us meet, he’s going to get fired by the governor. He serves at the leisure of the governor,” Gauthier said. “Isn’t it so odd that a governor would be so publicly opposed to an agency that was created from a scandal of a previous governor illegally contracting?”

“I’ll probably end up filing an Attorney General complaint at some point soon,” Gauthier continued.

The SCSB is made up of fourteen appointed members, many of whom are from state labor unions who tend to know contracts very well. Board members’ terms run conterminously with those who appointed them, although their website hasn’t been updated with their latest appointments. The board votes on the regular board meeting schedule and sets that schedule a year in advance through both the Secretary of State’s Office and the Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC).

The governor appoints half the board and the executive director, while the remaining members are appointed by majority and minority leaders in the House of Representatives and Senate, meaning that a member’s ability to speak out or rock the boat could be dependent on who appointed them. Members, like Gauthier, who feel their appointments are safe are more willing to speak up.

In February of 2024, just two days before the regularly scheduled meeting, the Lamont administration unceremoniously bounced long-time board member and labor leader Robert Rinker, a gubernatorial appointee, from the board, replacing him Keith Brothers, another labor leader. 

While that move, in and of itself, was perhaps not all that noteworthy in terms of the makeup of the board, there had already been an existing vacancy on the SCSB since before Lamont’s term began in 2018, leading some to suspect that Rinker’s outspokenness led to his dismissal and replacement.

“Bob Rinker wrote the statute that created the board, he’s been incredibly instrumental, he’s incredibly intelligent, very well respected amongst board members and other people throughout state service and he’s also been a very vocal critic of the Lamont administration,” Gauthier said. “They didn’t need to replace Bob to put Keith on, they specifically chose to replace Bob.”

Rinker’s abrupt and sudden departure was cause for some comment during the February meeting of the SCSB, according to Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie, with accusations that it was politically motivated. Former Executive Director David Guay also addressed the board, congratulating Keith on his appointment, but lamenting the way Rinker’s removal was handled.

“I am saddened and disappointed that he has been replaced by Governor Lamont, when the Governor has had a long-standing vacancy, he could have used to fill with Bob’s replacement,” Guay said. “Bob was notified by an unexpected letter, two days before today’s meeting. His replacement was effective that very day. The letter was not from Governor Lamont. It was staffed out. No courtesy call or heads up was made. No opportunity or chance provided for a final meeting to say goodbye and receive honors from his fellow Board members.”

Interestingly, Guay offered himself up as board chairman to Gov. Lamont in a letter dated February 25, 2024, to replace Walsh, but Lamont has apparently passed on the offer.

“I view it more that I was fired,” Rinker said in an interview. “The irony of it was that there was a position that could have been filled and then we would have been to the full complement of 14 board members.”

According to documents received by Inside Investigator, the Lamont administration in July of 2022 had a list of six candidates DAS had sent to Tom Scanlon, deputy director of boards and commissions, as they were considering possible changes to the board and searching for an executive director.

Of those six recommendations, five were women, three of whom were women of color “who would bring a more diverse perspective to the SCSB,” one of the emails read. They included women who served on the Minority Construction Council, the Entrepreneurial Center & Women’s Business Center for the University of Hartford, and a board member and past president of the Public Purchasing Association of Connecticut. 

None of those recommendations were selected and, aside from Fox retiring as chairman, no one on the board was replaced until Rinker was ousted and replaced with Brothers earlier this year.

Rinker, who was involved in working out the administrative framework of the SCSB with Gov. Jodi Rell’s administration, says there was never any contemplation that the board would be restricted from meeting or having an interim chair to serve while there was a vacancy. He also questions what this means for other watchdog agencies which chairpersons appointed by the governor.

“Can he kneecap any board or commission by not appointing the chairperson?” Rinker asked. “That’s a fundamental question that I think the attorney general should be asked.”

In conversations, the SCSB’s investigation into the contracting problems and scandals of the CT Port Authority in the redevelopment of the State Pier into an offshore wind turbine hub, repeatedly came up. The SCSB investigated the Port Authority in 2020 and 2021, much to the chagrin of the Lamont administration which championed the project even as ethical and contractual problems arose and the cost spiraled from $93 million to $353 million.

The CT Port Authority investigation raised the public profile of the SCSB and led to disagreement between the board and OPM. Attorney General William Tong paused the SCSB’s investigation into the Port Authority, saying they didn’t have authority over the quasi-public agency. The General Assembly, however, passed legislation to allow the investigation to continue in 2021.

Rinker says that to the extent he could be considered critical of the administration, that is the job of a watchdog agency. 

“Nobody likes a watchdog agency,” Rinker said. “But we’re nonpartisan group that has bipartisan support of the General Assembly. Everybody that I worked with on the board actually believed in the mission of the agency and did the work.”

“Some of the board members who want to continue to serve, don’t want to be so outwardly vocal that they’re next, especially the gubernatorial appointments,” Gauthier said.

Rinker says that during a recent speaking engagement in Groton, he crossed the Gold Star Bridge in New London where he could see the State Pier. “I said two things: One, that costs $300 million? And second, I got fired because of that?”

The SCSB’s status as being an executive branch agency that has power over other executive branch agencies creates a natural tension between the agencies and the board, Fox said.

“I think that some operating agencies don’t always appreciate having the board doing oversight. A major part of our mission is oversight of executive agencies that are doing contracts, it’s a huge amount of the state’s budget that is carried out through contracting and the board’s mission to make sure that contracting is done fairly and equitably and appropriately, so there’s that tension,” Fox said. “We had a long struggle to get the legislature to fund the board and the governor agreed to that.”

The board had, for more than a decade, operated with only the board members, an executive director and maybe an intern, particularly during Gov. Malloy’s tenure when the state faced multiple budget crises. Gauthier says the board was “mostly ignored” by Malloy, and by Lamont up until the CT Port Authority found itself being investigated by the SCSB.

In 2021, Lamont essentially blocked the SCSB from using its appropriated funds to hire a full staff in the budget implementer, preferring, instead, to send that money to the Auditors of Public Accounts. The administration, at the time, said the SCSB was “duplicative,” even though state auditors do not have enforcement powers. Nevertheless, the budget implementer also included a provision to allow the SCSB to continue their look into the Port Authority.

In 2022, the administration attempted to strip enforcement powers from the SCSB, again in the budget, by directing contracting procurement issues to State Auditors instead. 

In 2023, a bill to give the SCSB enforcement powers over quasi-public agencies and protect their funding was opposed by quasi-public agencies and the Lamont administration. And while that bill passed out of two committees, it was never passed by the General Assembly.

This year, the governor submitted a bill that included combining the CT Airport Authority and the CT Port Authority to create a Connecticut Maritime Authority which, according to the legislation, would be outside the authority of the SCSB.

“Lamont has line-item vetoed funding for our staff,” Gauthier said. “The only reason we got that was because of the CT Port Authority Scandal. He has quashed both publicly and in the background any kind of bills that we move forward to make contracting better in the state.”

This year, the bill giving SCSB oversight over quasi-public agencies with additional staff and locking in their meager funding has again received pushback from the quasi-publics – including the CT Green Bank, which awards no-bid contracts to a nonprofit it created and shares office space with – and from Lamont administration through the budget-writing OPM.

In written testimony, Lamont budget chief Jeffrey Beckham testified that expanding SCSB’s oversight would create “additional obstacles to the timely procurement of goods and services that are needed,” citing emergency actions taken during the COVID-19 pandemic and saying the additional requirements would cause time constraints and impeded the administration’s ability to be flexible.

While the Lamont administration has pushed back at the board in recent years, past and present SCSB members say, historically, it is OPM and DAS that have pushed back against the board. Those two agencies are responsible for a vast amount of state contracting procurements and are instrumental in crafting the state budget.

“I think Lamont thinks of us as a nuisance. It’s unclear to me if he really understands what we’re doing,” Gauthier said. “This is more actions coming out of OPM and DAS are very powerful within the state, very powerful in the budget process, and they for a long time have been kind of shadow adversaries.”

“There’s a natural tension built into the board’s mission which is that we have oversight of executive agencies including OPM and DAS,” Fox said. “So, you know, I’ve always understood while I chaired that board that while we’re a part of the executive branch there’s always going to be a tension with the executive branch.”

Interestingly, in the context of the breakdown in the relationship between some board members, Daniels, and the staff, Beckham also noted that the SCSB is currently fully staffed and that the staff is adjusting to their responsibilities with many deliverables outstanding. Therefore adding additional responsibilities of monitoring quasi-public agencies could potentially overburden the SCSB.

“OPM recommends maintaining rather than expanding the SCSB’s roles and responsibilities. As this committee is aware, the SCSB has just recently achieved full staffing. These staff are still very early in the process of attempting to stand up the SCSB and comply with its current statutory obligations,” Beckham wrote. “As noted in the SCSB December 8, 2023, Board Minutes, there are 23 specific deliverables required by existing statutes that the SCSB has not been able to deliver since its inception. This proposed bill would create significant additional responsibilities before the board has had the opportunity to establish that it can effectively carry out its current responsibilities.” 

During that December 8, 2023, meeting – the same meeting in which the board scheduled their regular meetings for 2024 – then-chairman Walsh raised the issue of outstanding statutory deliverables that the board has been unable to meet because it lacked staff. Walsh said that now, with an executive director and staff, the board would “pivot” to focus on delivering these requirements.

“As a Watch Dog Agency, we must have our house in order to cultivate productive working relationships with all State agencies to ensure that the citizens of the State of Connecticut have faith in the procurement work our government undertakes, Walsh said, according to meeting minutes. “This is our work list for 2024 and beyond.”

Those outstanding statutory requirements are in addition to state agency contracting audits that were being sent out by staff. The board is supposed to conduct 11 audits of state agencies during fiscal year 2024, including an audit of OPM, but by December, there had only been four. 

Gauthier suggested that board members help with the audits as they had done in the past. Walsh, however, “expressed conflict of interest concerns regarding SCSB Members interfacing directly with state agencies as part of the audit process, particularly now that the SCSB has staff.”

During that same meeting, Walsh also indicated that all communications between board members and staff, including the newly hired attorney and chief procurement officer, would have to go through Daniels from now on.

“In order to begin this important work, Greg Daniels is our ED and the entire staff report to him, so all communications must go to and through Greg,” Walsh said. “We now have an operating agency staffed by capable employees, so in support of them and the CTSCSB mission as defined by CGS, this Board’s 2024 workload will focus on policy and procedure creation, oversight, and governance.”

Two months later, Walsh was gone, and the chairman vacancy prompted Daniels to start canceling meetings, touching off some heated backroom debate, accusations, anger, and a breakdown in communication.

Past board members like Rinker recount fondly the way the board worked together with their executive director for more than a decade and see the cancellation of SCSB meetings by Daniels as legally suspect. 

Gauthier, for one, has filed two complaints with the Freedom of Information Commission – one for canceling the meetings because there is no chairman: a second for holding a special meeting without a quorum – as well as, she says, a complaint with the state auditors.

In email exchanges, Daniels cites state statute that makes no mention of an interim chairperson. Board members like Sal Luciano and Gauthier pushed back, citing Roberts Rules of Order – the guidebook that sets the rules and traditions by which public meetings are conducted.

Daniels responded to a series of questions sent by Luciano – who was trying to understand “part of what is going on” – in an April 12, 2024, email, arguing that public meetings and records are subject to the Freedom of Information Act, and that Roberts Rules “is one of several standards for facilitating meetings, but it is not the law.”

Additionally, according to emails and phone conversations, some board members claim their emails to staff, or other board members, are now blocked; phone calls and requests for phone calls aren’t returned in a timely manner, or at all, and board members are unsure of what the staff is doing.

According to that same April 12 email, some board members were not aware that Daniels had requested additional staff for the SCSB in the legislation to give them more oversight over quasi-publics. 

There was some disagreement during the December 8, 2023, meeting over the timeliness of getting the board’s legislative requests to the appropriate constitutional officers. The board had voted to send its legislative priorities in October of 2023, and by December they had still not been submitted.

In response to Daniels’ April 12, 2024, email, Luciano wrote that he didn’t agree with much of Daniels’ take on the issues at hand, including his take on Roberts Rules and his legislative requests. 

“Requesting additional staff was not a recommendation of the board,” Luciano wrote. “Nor did you communicate that you required extra staff to the board members. Requesting staff adds a fiscal note that very likely will act as a poison pill for the board’s legislative requests.”

Whether the funding question acts as a poison pill for the SCSB’s legislation remains to be seen, but, for now, the board is at an impasse – at odds with their executive director who won’t let them hold a meeting until a new chair is appointed and waiting for that new chair be appointed by Lamont. Until then, any work the board has before them is stalled.

Rinker says he believes that instead of arguing with the board, the staff should be leaning on them for guidance, particularly as many of them have been on the board for extensive periods of time.

“What I’m hearing is friction between the board and the staff,” Rinker said. “If I was a staff person, I would be leaning on the incredible expertise of the board in terms of fulfilling the mission. I wouldn’t even pretend that I knew everything, and so I think it’s disappointing.”

“There’s no question in my mind that the board plays an essential role and not having the board not meet while there’s a new chair being recruited, I think it’s not good public policy,” Fox said. “My opinion is the board should be meeting.”

Neither Daniels, nor the Lamont administration has returned requests for comment or answers to a series of questions posed by Inside Investigator for this article.

Republish This Story

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.