Scientists say the universe is expanding, but not the part of it that includes Connecticut’s watchdog agencies whose job is to uphold government ethics, freedom of information and election laws.
This glaring reality glares brighter with the hiring of a new executive director at the Office of State Ethics to replace Carol Carson, who is retiring Thursday. The office had 21 employees when Carson started in 2007 and the new director, Peter Lewandowski, will inherit an office of 14 employees.
That’s a 33% cut over the past decade-plus. And it illustrates that while the legislature and executive branch like to talk about clean government, they often don’t put up the funds to back their words. This has been especially true during years of recurrent budget nightmares. But even without fiscal problems to point at as an excuse, lawmakers have never shown any eagerness to provide much ammunition to enforcers who might come after them someday.
Lewandowski, 52, of Newington, a 13-year veteran staff attorney at the ethics office, said in a telephone interview Wednesday he realizes the agency hasn’t been alone in suffering budget cuts — and it has happened to the FOI and election enforcement commissions, too (as well as regular state agencies that don’t serve a watchdog role).
But, he added, “we’ve gotten to the point where we really have difficulty performing our statutory duties.” Those duties go beyond enforcing laws that ban unethical behavior, such as using your state job for personal gain. For example, another duty is to audit lobbyists’ reports on what they receive and spend in their efforts to influence officials’ decisions. The law says 40 lobbyists should be audited annually, and lately the agency has only been able to do 10, Lewandowski said.
“The citizens of Connecticut are our clients, and they do expect and deserve ethical government,” said Lewandowski. While he said he’s “acutely aware of … the importance of operating the agency with limited resources and within fiscal constraints,” he thinks at least some of the lost staff positions need to be reinstated for the agency to do its job of “promoting integrity, honesty and accountability.”
Lewandowski, who’s now paid $113,389 as deputy general counsel at the ethics agency, was selected from an original field of 90 applicants by a supervisory panel, the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board. The board voted July 18 to offer him the job, which has a potential maximum pay level of more than $130,000, but his appointment isn’t yet official pending final arrangements including his new salary.
The married father of three children ages 11, 9 and 16 months got his law degree at Indiana University in 2001, 10 years after earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at St. Hyacinth College and Seminary in Granby, Mass. In 1996 he received a master of arts in religion from Yale Divinity School, where he focused his studies on business and social ethics and helped organize “a multi-disciplinary symposium on corporate social responsibility,” according to his resume.
Lewandowski worked a few years with private law firms but has spent most of his legal career working for the ethics agency on projects attracting little public notice. These included overhauling the ethics agency’s regulations and serving as counsel to Carson, the executive director, on legislative matters. He talked often with members of the General Assembly, testified at committee hearings on bills and sought to develop bipartisan support for the ethics agency’s positions.
He has a reputation at the Capitol as a calm, studious behind-the-scenes guy. Now he’ll have to step out of the background. “I am not the kind of person to take the spotlight or be in front of a camera,” he said, “but when it’s necessary … to stand for the work we do,” he will.
The way Lewandowski sees it, most state officials and employees follow the sections of the state statutes known as the Code Of Ethics for Public Officials, but there are “very few who stray” — and it’s his agency’s job “to vigorously but fairly enforce [the code] to make sure those who do stray, do not stray again” and are punished appropriately.
Fewer scandals, less money?
Carson, the $130,000-a-year director since 2007 who retires on Aug. 1, said if there aren’t scandals, the budgets of watchdog agencies tend to shrink.
“I think that watchdog agencies get a lot of funding once there’s been a big scandal, and if they are doing a good job of providing advice and providing education and ensuring transparency and enforcing [ethics laws], because they are doing a good job it looks like they could do just as good of a job with less resources, especially in the trying budget times,” she said.
During Carson’s tenure, the ethics office has collected fines several times a year from present or former state officials who violated conflict-of-interest provisions of the code of ethics or used their offices for private gain — for example, by taking a job with a company they had dealt with in their public capacity without waiting the mandatory year. The fines and restitution typically range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, and occasionally rise to the $10,000 or $20,000 range.
But there haven’t been any problems as big as the corruption scandal that forced Gov. John G. Rowland to resign as governor in 2004 and sent him to federal prison.
Carson said Tuesday she thinks her biggest accomplishment was “starting with an agency that just wasn’t operational and, with a great staff, making it into a respected institution … that has made a difference. … Ethical culture is hard to measure but there are examples of agencies where we have done enforcement, provided advice [and] provided education and ultimately agencies have changed some of their practices to ensure a more ethical operation.”
When she said the ethics agency wasn’t operational, she was referring to a few dark years dating back to 2004, when the former Ethics Commission imploded amid bitter internal conflict and its then-director, Alan Plofsky, was fired after playing a major role in putting the heat on Rowland over corruption issues. Legislators then abolished the old commission and set up the new Office of State Ethics.
But turmoil continued at the newly constituted agency as well, and its first executive director, Benjamin Bycel, quit amid controversy in mid-2007. Carson was hired in December of that year, and the 12 years of calm since then represent a stark contrast from what went before. Bycel’s short time in the job brought staff unrest, including allegations that he slept in his office, but none of that came close to what happened in the last days of Plofsky and the old Ethics Commission.
Plofsky’s undoing began in summer 2004 with an anonymous letter to the head of the old Ethics Commission. Although not known publicly at the time, it was written by Maureen Duggan, one of three staff attorneys for the old commission who said Plofsky had acted improperly. In her letter, Duggan posed as a parking lot attendant who said she had observed possible irregularities and improprieties at the agency’s staff office in Hartford.
The letter included intentional misspellings. For example: “I want to be anonimus,” Duggan wrote. After ethics commission members got the letter, Duggan and her two co-workers filed sworn “whistleblower” complaints against Plofsky, with allegations that he improperly ran up compensatory time and ordered an audio tape destroyed. In Duggan’s own sworn complaint, she referred to her own letter as “an anonymous letter,” as if someone else had written it. Plofsky denied all of the allegations. A state panel later reinstated him, but not to his old job. He retired in May 2008.
One of Carson’s earlier news splashes as executive director came in January 2009 when Duggan paid a $1,000 ethics fine for the “anonimus” letter incident. “There is no greater duty of employees of an agency charged with enforcing honest and open government than to conduct themselves honestly,” Carson said at the time. Duggan also received a formal reprimand from a statewide lawyers’ grievance panel for “fraud and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
By then Duggan was working as $105,000-a-year lawyer at the state Department of Children and Families. Duggan continued to advance after 2011 under Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and his DCF commissioner, Joette Katz, and now she is DCF’s legal director at an annual salary of $134,429.
Jon Lender is a reporter on The Courant’s investigative desk, with a focus on government and politics. Contact him at jlender@courant.com, 860-241-6524, or c/o The Hartford Courant, 285 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06115 and find him on Twitter @jonlender.