The 2020 Warning Of Abuse in the State’s School Construction Program.

By the summer of 2020, contractors and labor organizations were alarmed at abuses they were witnessing in the state’s school construction program. They were frustrated by “a shroud of secrecy over this Trade Labor List or State Contract List.” They had specific concerns and solutions. The association leaders were fluent in the substance of state construction contracting issues and, remarkably, unafraid to criticize two of Governor Ned Lamont’s most favored advisers, Kostantinos Diamantis and Josh Geballe.

The document above was prepared for the July 22, 2020, meeting with Lamont. It subsequently made its way to other state agencies. The document confirms that Governor Lamont was warned that he needed to make changes in his administration. In November 2019, the school construction program was moved from the Department of Administrative Services, where a state statute required it to be administered, to the Office of Policy Management. Diamantis, who had been running school construction, became deputy budget director that month at McCaw’s ferocious insistence. Lamont married that terrible decision to a worse one: allowing Diamantis to take school construction with him to OPM. Anyone familiar with state government at that time knew that Secretary Melissa McCaw was the person in the Lamont administration least likely to subject her close friend Diamantis to rigorous supervision.

Lamont failed to act and now faces the humiliation of a federal criminal investigation into the highest levels of his administration.

The governor can continue to avert his gaze, claim he knew nothing, and hope he gets to Election Day before lawyers the U.S. Attorney’s office begin marching defendants before judges to enter guilty pleas. There is another way. Lamont can tell the public what he knew and what he did about the warnings brave people delivered to his administration. As bad as knowing and doing nothing was, the governor not knowing that a rising tide of corruption was flooding his administration while people around him were eyeing the lifeboats is as alarming.

Published February 15, 2022.