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Former state Senator Edith Prague has died. The veteran Democrat served in the House of Representatives before joining in the Weicker administration in 1991 as commissioner of the Department of Aging. Weicker fired her for refusing to cut the department’s budget.

After leaving that job, Prague was elected to the state Senate. The Columbia Democrat served in the legislature’s upper chamber from 1995 to 2013. She briefly returned to the reconstituted agency on agency after leaving the Senate.

Prague was a defiant advocate for making Connecticut’s roads safe from the drunk drivers. She endured the taunts and insults of powerful legislators in her quest to stiffen the state’s drug driving laws. Her resolution saved many lives.

Chris Keating’s 2014 affectionate profile tells much of the tale.

Published December 16, 2021.

Why so secret? Governor Ned Lamont’s administration entered into a settlement agreement with former Department of Public Health (DPH) spokesman Av Harris–and it includes a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

Harris was sidelined during the height of the pandemic last year and fired early this year. Harris claimed in a lawsuit against the Lamont administration that he was fired in “retaliation for his questioning the legality of a Dec. 29 order by a DPH superior that he contact city officials he knew in Bridgeport, where he’d worked, to obtain police information about a sports bar that DPH planned to cite for a COVID-related violation,” Jon Lender reported in March.

Harris, a former reporter, became a bitter critic of Lamont, mocking the Greenwich Democrat with tales of life in the administration in media appearances. Harris’s knowledge threatened to become a more serious problem for Lamont during his re-election campaign.

The settlement reached this month allows Harris to vest in the state’s pension system.

Harris had claimed he was protected by the state’s whistleblower protections for employees. The details of a firing of a public employee in retaliation for an act that embarrasses or angers officials is of interest to the public.

Published December 14, 2021.

An alert Daily Ructions reader was asked to participate in an online Survey Monkey poll this week, The reader shared three screenshots, posted above, of the questions asked of the random participants. Each question is aimed at learning if the respondent’s opinion of Governor Ned Lamont would be affected by reports of his wife’s investment company’s interests had dealings with state government.

The issue has annoyed—and lately, infuriated—Lamont as he embarks on a bid for a second term. The Greenwich Democrat startled supporters and opponents this month when he declared that Connecticut is a complicated place to do business, causing his wife, Ann Huntress Lamont, to head to Nashville to continue to add to the Lamont family fortune.

The survey asked how likely the respondent is to vote next year, the direction the is headed, opinion, if any, of Lamont, as well as Republicans Bob Stefanowski, Themis Klarides, Heather Somers, and Susan Patricelli Regan.

Posted December 11, 2021.

Australia’s Cultural Attache to a variety of astonished nations.

He brought it on himself–and us. Governor Ned Lamont made an ill-judged complaint last week that Connecticut is a complicated place to do business, using his wife, venture capitalist Ann Huntress Lamont, was doing business in Nashville at one of the good restaurants Nashville has. The mayor of Knox County, Glenn Jacobs, took note of Lamont’s deriding Connecticut and replied with a mocking tweet.

Jacobs thanked Lamont for the compliment. Tennessee welcomes Connecticut’s investors but not our taxes and regulations, Jacobs wrote. The Tennessee Republican enjoyed a long career in professional wrestling/acting before entering politics in 2018. Expect more of this in the competition between states to woo businesses.

Posted December 7, 2021.

Put down your phones. Governor Ned Lamont has had another week of own goals. He will not want to waste time listening to the ambitions of legislators who the Constitution bans from filling the vacancy created by the resignation of State Comptroller Kevin Lembo.

Read Article Third, Section 11. No member of the general assembly shall, during the term for which he is elected, hold or accept any appointive position or office in the judicial or executive department of the state government, or in the courts of the political subdivisions of the state, or in the government of any county. No member of congress, no person holding any office under the authority of the United States and no person holding any office in the judicial or executive department of the state government or in the government of any county shall be a member of the general assembly during his continuance in such office.

State Representative Sean Scanlon (D-Guilford) wants Lamont to select a placeholder, someone who will pledge not to throw her or his full energy into the job with an eye on the 2022 campaign. Scanlon is said, Daily Ructions understand, to have the backing of Senator Chris Murphy. Scanlon, who won a plum job in the hackerama when his Democratic friends appointed him as executive director of Tweed New Haven airport, may want to have a quiet word with Simsbury Democrat Mary Messina Glassman about the limits of Murphy’s patronage.

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.

Three term State Comptroller Kevin Lembo is expected to announce his resignation today, Daily Ructions has learned. The Guilford Democrat had not disclosed if he would seek a fourth term in 2022. That announcement was expected this month.

Lembo won his party’s endorsement at its 2010 convention and won a convincing victory in that summer’s Democratic primary. He was the state’s healthcare advocate at the time.

Lembo’s relationship with Dannel P. Malloy’s administration could be frosty during the Stamford Democrats two terms. Lembo has been frustrated at Governor Ned Lamont’s reluctance to support Lembo’s plans to have the state compete with private health insurance companies.

Posted Friday, December 3, 2021.

A stunning morning in a Hartford courtroom. Judge Stuart Rosen declared a mistrial in Geoffrey Luxenberg v. Michael Farina. The case, filed in 2019, is a dispute over the payments Luxenberg claims Farina owed him from the operation of Vinci Group, a well-known Democratic campaign consulting firm.

The trial was expected to reach the jury this afternoon for deliberations. The schedule was upended Thursday morning when jurors notified Judge Rosen of an issue. At least one juror discovered that Luxenberg had viewed his or her LinkdIn profile while the trial was going on.

Judge Rosen, whose background in private practice is in civil litigation, is known to have a calm disposition. Daily Ructions understands that he was visibly dismayed at Luxenberg’s actions. Jurors are a no-go zone in Connecticut and every other jurisdiction that honors the rule of law.

Posted Thursday, December 2, 2021.