Anastasia Diamantis Omitted Construction Company Job From Resume.

Anastasia Diamantis, Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo’s $104,000 year executive assistant, submitted an incomplete resume when she applied for the Division of Criminal Justice job that is a growing embarrassment for Governor Ned Lamont’s administration. Diamantis failed to include her job with a construction company that had a no-bid contract to build a Tolland elementary school. The Department of Administrative Services (DAS), which runs the state’s school construction grant program was deeply involved in the project.

The CT Mirror‘s Mark Pazniokas reports today that Anastasia Diamantis was employed by Construction Advocacy Professionals while it worked on the planning and construction of Birch Grove Primary School in 2019 and 2020. Anastasia Diamantis’s father, Kostantinos Diamantis, was in charge of school construction grants at the time. He reported to DAS Commissioner Josh Geballe.

Colangelo told the Mirror that he was aware of Anastasia Diamantis’s part-time job, though he would not have known about it from her resume. It makes no mention of her construction industry job.

The Birch Grove project raised concerns when Tolland officials waived traditional bidding to replace the elementary school. They had discovered in late 2018 that the building’s foundation was defective due to the presence of pyrrhotite mineral.

“Everyone has been pushing this along,” Tolland Councilman Louis Luba said, according to a 2019 Journal Inquirer story. “The sense of urgency has overridden their obligation of due diligence and we are sacrificing proper practices for the sake of expediency.” In the same story, Fred Carstensen, professor of finance and economics and the director for the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut, called the process “messy.”

The construction contract for the school was awarded to D’Amato Construction Company, Inc., of Bristol. Kostantinos Diamantis represented Bristol while he served in the House of Representatives. D’Amato had a thin history of building schools before it was awarded the Birch Grove contract. The decision to abandon bids raised serious concerns from building trades unions.

Between the discovery of the pyrrhotite in the school foundation at the end of December 2018 and a local bond referendum to approve the construction of a new school on May 7, 2019, there was time to seek proposals in an orderly manner that would have benefited the public and preserved the integrity of the system for awarding construction contracts.

Diamantis kept control of the school construction grants program when his friend Melissa McCaw, Lamont’s budget director, appointed him as her deputy in 2019. Lamont’s inexplicable consent to the move will likely cause him considerable embarrassment in the year ahead.

Kostantinos Diamantis was suspended from his influential position at OPM after this column revealing his daughter’s job with Colangelo appeared in the Hartford Courant. Diamantis retired and delivered an ugly assessment of Lamont’s top advisers.