Sitting on a bench in the middle of the sprawling grounds of the Connecticut Department of Veteran Affairs, Deputy Commissioner Joseph Danao describes a commute home a couple Fridays ago that took over five hours. Part of the reason the drive took so long was because of weather; the other part was because his home is in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, a more than three-hour drive from Rocky Hill, even on a good day.

It is also not a drive he makes every day. Danao, a career military man from a military family, had been working for the CT DVA since 2015, and when his daughter and son-in-law were stationed in Japan, leaving him and his wife with an empty nest, he thought it might be time to retire.

They put their Oakdale home on the market in 2023, and it sold immediately, something they weren’t prepared for. Unsure of what to do so quickly, they moved everything to their home in Moultonborough, just north of Concord, which they have owned since 2002. At the same time, a new commissioner was brought on to lead the DVA and Danao no longer felt it was the right time to leave – there was just too much going on.

“It’s all about the veterans, for me. Without them, I wouldn’t be doing any of this,” he said.

Although Danao could likely do some of his work from home, employees within the DVA say he is there in the office every single day. He keeps an apartment in Connecticut where he stays during the week and makes the run home to New Hampshire on the weekends.

Danao is not alone in working for a state he doesn’t technically reside in. Inside Investigator submitted a Freedom of Information request to the state Comptroller’s office for all full-time executive branch employees with mailing addresses outside the state of Connecticut and received back 505 names, with town and state data. The information did not include actual street addresses, nor did it include employees in the higher education system, where professors and graduate students can often cycle in and out of teaching posts at different institutions.

By far, most of those employees live in Connecticut’s next door neighbor states, New York (79 employees), Massachusetts (275 employees), and Rhode Island (88 employees). Danao was one of twelve employees with mailing addresses in New Hampshire.

Some other employee addresses were much farther away, however, and yet they still maintain their job duties under Connecticut’s telework policy, which allows department heads to determine how often an employee actually needs to be in the office.

Christopher Martin, Division Director for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), for instance, lists his residence as Morrill, Maine, a roughly five-hour drive from Hartford. Martin sold his home in Ellington, CT, in 2022, according to property records. 

Reached for comment, Will Healy, communications director for DEEP, indicated that, “Christopher Martin, like other managers at DEEP, works under an approved telework schedule in accordance with the State’s telework policy,” and said that no special accommodations were made for Martin’s work schedule.

A fiscal supervisor for the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) lives in Clark, New Jersey, a more than 2.5-hour drive from Hartford, yet, according to department spokesman Chris McClure, the employee “commutes to Hartford twice a week at minimum and is able and willing to adjust as business needs or exigent circumstances arrive.”

“She supervises three employees (with the unit maintaining the same telework/in office schedule) and the unit’s work is largely billing data analysis,” McClure wrote in an emailed response. 

But there were others for whom a commute of any kind seems largely impossible.

A case manager for the Connecticut Department of Disability Services (DDS) sold her home in Wethersfield in 2021 and relocated to Clinton, North Carolina. According to DDS Spokesman Kevin Bronson, the state’s telework agreement “does not require minimum in-office presence,” and the employee “has maintained an appropriate level of in-person presence and has continued to fulfill their job duties satisfactorily.”

“Per the statewide telework agreement, DDS reviews each telework request and analyzes based on each employee’s specific job duties,” Bronson wrote in an emailed response to Inside Investigator’s questions. “Many DDS employees, including case managers, are approved for some amount of telework. Specific to case managers’ duties, much of their work is computer based and can be completed remotely. They are typically required to maintain some in-person presence, in particular to complete field work.”

An IT manager for the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) sold her home in Tolland in 2023 and relocated to Palm Bay, FL with her husband where she is registered to vote and maintains an online business selling crystals, while continuing to work for DAS and receiving over $150,000 per year, according to state records. 

She is one of several DAS employees, generally in the field of IT, who list out of state addresses that include New Hampshire and South Carolina. Reached for comment, DAS spokesman Leigh Appleby said he “cannot speak to individual circumstances, but there is no prohibition on employees living out of state as long as they can report to their duty as required within a reasonable amount of time based on the needs of the agency they work for.”

“Generally speaking, managers are given discretion to allow employees to telework at a level that makes business sense for their agency,” Appleby wrote.

Working from home when one lives in Clark, NJ, Moultonborough, NH, or Morrill, ME, can mean a long commute; working from home when one lives in Florida or South Carolina, however, is a different story. But the raw data requires some caution – it is messy and not necessarily indicative of where someone actually resides or how often they may or may not be in the office, or whether they need to be in the office at all.

In looking at the Comptroller’s data, Inside Investigator eliminated employees whose listed address was Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and most of New York, as those commutes can easily be made, especially if they only need to be in the office once or twice per week. 

For the remaining employees, we compared addresses with property records, voter registration, online state records, and, in some cases, social media accounts to determine whether they actually lived in those states, and then reached out to their employer to confirm.

In some cases, the data was just wrong or lagging: at least one manager who lived in Florida had actually retired and was no longer an active state employee. Others had retired, purchased homes in other states, but have since returned to state service as a temporary worker/retiree and maintain residence in-state. Others were seasonal employees or substitute teachers who only worked occasionally, yet were still included in the data.

Because employees must actually go into the state system to change their mailing address, and because the state hires people from all over the country who then relocate to Connecticut, we also eliminated any employee who was hired within the last year – more likely than not their address simply hasn’t been updated. In some instances, we found employees whose mailing address was out of state but who clearly lived in Connecticut because their jobs meant they couldn’t work from home.

In some cases, the employees living in states like Georgia and Tennessee were durational project managers, who are generally hired by a state agency for a period of up to three years when there is limited funding tied to a grant, or a there is a particular project that requires additional staff but the agency doesn’t have the budget to take on a permanent employee. While they function like full-time state employees, once their term is over, they move on to other jobs.

One employee whose listed address is in Georgia after selling their Connecticut home in 2023, was an IT manager for DAS for nearly seven years, before becoming a durational project employee for the Department of Social Services in 2025. 

In other cases, the fact that the employee lived far out of state made perfect sense. As Senior Advisor for Federal and State Affairs, Daniel DeSimone has been Connecticut’s eyes and ears in Washington D.C. and has been head of Connecticut’s D.C. office since he was promoted in 2011 by Gov. Dannel Malloy. He lived in D.C. back then, too.

For the remaining full-time, active employees who had out of state mailing addresses – of which there were thirteen – they were nearly all long-time employees, making over six figures, and working in IT or a similarly computer-based role. DAS employs several IT experts with out of state addresses, as does Connecticut’s Paid Family and Medical Leave Authority (CT PFMLA).

Reached for comment, Jessica Vargas, chief experience officer for CT PFMLA, said the four individuals employed by the quasi-public agency — who range in location from Maine to Florida to Texas — were necessary because they possessed specific technical expertise that the agency had difficulty finding in Connecticut.

The CT PFMLA, however, is somewhat remarkable in another way, when it comes to telework for its employees: the quasi-public agency is a child of the COVID-19 pandemic that sparked the mass work from home movement in both the private and public sectors. The paid leave authority has never had a central office for anyone to go to.

“Our board of directors has discussed the question of hiring out-of-state employees in the past and determined that it is permissible to hire out-of-state employees if necessary to meet hiring needs, particularly for IT roles for which specific technical expertise is required and efforts to recruit local workers have not been successful,” Vargas wrote in an email. “Additionally, the Authority, as an agency that was created during the pandemic, has never had a traditional central office to which all of its employees report daily.”

While the IT professionals for CT PFMLA were hired from outside the state and continue to reside in their home states, other employees have lived in Connecticut and worked for the state for a long time before moving and maintaining their jobs. Of the moves that were traceable, most have happened in the last five years, and involved long-time employees who are likely on the verge of retirement.

Living in other states – or getting a head start on retirement by moving to other states – can convey certain tax advantages. Connecticut is known for its high cost of living and high taxes and is generally ranked quite low on the list of ideal retirement states. States like Florida, the Carolinas, and New Hampshire have lower taxes and a lower cost of living, which is why they’ve long been viewed as retirement destinations. 

According to the state’s open data website, most Connecticut state employees retire in Connecticut. The runners up, however, are Florida, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Georgia, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine – the same states that took up the majority of out-of-state address listings.

“All of our employees know and abide by the expectation that if their physical presence is needed at a particular location for a particular reason, they will do so,” Vargas continued. “But in general, much of the work done by the staff of the Authority is done via telework.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, state employees whose jobs could be done from a computer at home were told to stay home to prevent the spread of the virus, while employees whose jobs required in-person work, like the Department of Correction or hospital employees, continued in their public facing roles. 

The pandemic lockdowns, however, set a work precedent for state employees and resulted in a policy agreement between Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration and the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition (SEBAC) that allows state employees the option to work from home some or all of the week.

It is an agreement that has come under criticism by the public, Republicans in the General Assembly, and, indeed, by Gov. Ned Lamont himself, who has remarked that he’d like to see employees back in the office. Early attempts at limiting telework requests by employees, however, were met with arbitration decisions that overrode management and essentially solidified the agreement.

Under the statewide telework policy, there is essentially no required office time, so a valued, long-time employee who can do the job entirely remote could, per se, get a head start on retirement by moving to a new home in their preferred state while the Connecticut agency that employs them gets to continue utilizing their experience. 

How much an employee can work from home is basically determined by the department based on their needs and the job requirements. There are few actual restrictions on telework; if a job can be done from home, there is little to prevent the department from allowing it, and home can be practically anywhere.

Most state employees are union members. Under the terms of the telework policy, union members can request to work from home for any amount of time. The only restriction on that policy is that a union member cannot seek arbitration if they are required to be in the office one day per week. But really, it is up to the department. The out-of-state employees listed in the data were a mix of management and union members.

The other restriction, which was referenced by some of the department responses to Inside Investigator’s questions, is that teleworking employees “shall report to the official duty station when directed, based on management priorities, such as for meetings, training or other work-related requirements.”

“Business meetings, meetings with customers or regularly scheduled meetings with co-workers shall not be held at the telework location unless they can be accomplished through a teleconference process,” the policy states. “Management will provide reasonable notice where practicable prior to mandating the employee report to the office and is encouraged to offer an alternate telework day unless operational needs make it impractical.”

Essentially, one can live in Florida or the Carolinas and, if they are required to be in the office, be given reasonable notice by the department to get on a flight to Hartford. Considering the ubiquity of teleconferencing, however, this is likely a rare event.

Few state departments have come under as much criticism for utilizing telework as the Department of Children and Families (DCF), whose job it is to monitor families in distress for child abuse and neglect. Their failures, when they happen, can involve the death of children. 

The department has come under intense scrutiny by lawmakers and the public in such cases, and the state’s telework policy has been part of that criticism. DCF officials, however, indicate the public should not be confused: DCF has always conducted in-person visits, even during the pandemic.

But some of the concern regarding the state’s telework policy as it relates to an agency that deals in horrible life and death situations, is that something can be missed without the person-to-person interaction of an office environment and direct supervision.

The Office of the Child Advocate (OCA), in their report on the January 2023 death of three-year-old Liam Rivera said the “legislature should review agency workloads and workforce needs, and the impact of telework (workers are supervisors are eligible for 80% telework) on case practice.”

Former head of the OCA Sarah Eagan continued her push for the legislature to examine the impact of teleworking in her testimony for Senate Bill 126 in 2024 – which required DCF to conduct in-person visits per the requirements of a safety plan — arguing the state should ‘review the impact of telework and workforce trends of DCF case practice, staff retention and supervision.”

“It is essential to examine however how teleworking at DCF impacts the critical functions of the agency, including engagement with children and families and providers as well as recruitment and retention of staff, professional development, and supervision – and whether DCF can meet its child protection mandates with a largely virtual workforce,” Eagan wrote in testimony.

The bill, which was passed unanimously by the House and Senate, was also supported by DCF Commissioner Jodi Hill-Lilly, who testified that it conformed with DCF’s established internal policies, which were re-enacted in May of 2021, following the COVID-19 shut down.

“The first time DCF used remote visits was during the COVID-19 pandemic when many state agencies and providers followed federal and state public health guidance to maintain the safety of staff and the families we serve,” Hill-Lilly testified. “Even during the pandemic, the Department implemented protocols to visit homes and children using personal protective equipment, often meeting in doorways, driveways and back yards.”

“DCF social workers have always been required to conduct in-home inspections, even during the COVID years,” DCF Director of Communications Peter Yazbak wrote in an email. “In 2021, DCF fully resumed its internal policy to require that the agency’s [case-carrying employees/social workers] conduct in-person standards for youth-family visits in DCF facilities, monthly or twice-monthly case home visits, and parent-child visitation for youth in DCF care.”

Inside Investigator had reached out to DCF when it appeared one of their long-time social workers lived in North Carolina. While that employee did buy a home there in 2020, purportedly with a plan to retire, she is currently living in West Hartford and she is, Yazbak indicated, a very dedicated employee.

Despite negotiating the telework policy with SEBAC, Gov. Ned Lamont has insisted since the end of the pandemic that he would like to see state employees return to the office. With the teleworking matter now a subject of collective bargaining, it is probably unlikely to happen, even as the governor negotiates the next round of wage agreements. 

State agencies tried to limit some employees’ telework requests in 2022, but they were overturned across three arbitration decisions, setting a precedent for all future telework arrangements and union negotiations. Any changes to the policy would amount to SEBAC conceding a benefit that is immensely popular with their members and is, indeed, utilized in the private sector.

According to Census Bureau estimates, roughly 20 percent of the workforce worked from home at least some of the time in 2023; for Connecticut specifically, the figure was 10.7 percent.

During the 2025 legislative session, House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, who has been outspoken in his desire to see state employees back in the office, proposed a bill that would require them to be in the office more often. House Bill 5369 would have allowed the commissioner of any state agency to “establish an on-site or in-person work policy that requires employees of such agency to work on-site or in person,” up to sixty percent of the time – or three days per week.

In written testimony, Candelora argued that telework leaves new hires with little opportunity to get on-the-job training and experience, could potentially impact future union wage negotiations, and that there are “few controls in place to monitor the performance of our state employees working from home.”

The opposition, however, was massive – at least on paper; it was hardly mentioned at all during the actual public hearing. Nevertheless, hundreds of state employees, union leaders, and anonymous individuals submitted hundreds of pieces of written testimony in opposition to the bill.

Most argued that telework allowed them a better work/life balance, was more efficient, allowed them to be more productive with fewer office distractions, reduced time lost in commuting, and was in line with the private sector. Some threatened to quit state employment if required to return to the office.

Among the hundreds who submitted testimony in opposition to the bill were two state employees whose mailing addresses are from out of state: the DHMAS fiscal supervisor who lives in Clark, NJ, and an accountant for the Office of Early Childhood who sold his home in Connecticut in 2022 and moved to Delaware.

The bill never went further than the public hearing, where few even acknowledged its existence during in-person testimony. In 2024, Candelora had proposed a similar bill that met with similar opposition. 

None of that really makes a difference for Deputy Commissioner Joseph Danao, however. Regardless of where his home address is, he is committed to showing up in the office every day, and more on busy weekends like Memorial Day weekend, when he travels to different locations throughout the state to attend ceremonies for fallen soldiers.

Obviously, he has a place to live in Connecticut, but for a little while, it was a toss-up, and he debated sleeping in his car so he could still come into work.

“I’m military,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor if I have to.” 

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