State government suffers from a crisis of lost memories.
Human memories in the heads of powerful officials are fading as their recollections are critical to uncovering the truth. Luckily, nothing retrieves a lost recollection like some questions from a law enforcement official.
FBI agents have been reacquainting themselves with Connecticut’s state government after a brief hiatus. Plenty of encounters will cause them to scratch their heads and wonder at how much money gets shoveled out the door and forgotten.
A $100,000 grant for a 2023 summer jobs program has caught federal criminal investigators’ attention in the early going of a probe that is asking questions on state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield, and his close friend Sonserae Cicero-Hamlin. Federal subpoenas have commanded recipients, including one state agency, to produce “all documents concerning any personal or non-professional relationship between” McCrory and Cicero-Hamlin.
The legislature approved the job program money for Bloomfield. The Department of Education, which administered the funds, was told by state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, to send the money not to the town but to a Cicero-Hamlin’s entity Society of Human Engagement and Business Alignment, or SHEBA. In 2023, SHEBA was a year old. Under normal circumstances, state agencies would take a close look at a year-old non-profit beginning to receive state funds. Instead, millions flowed into SHEBA’s non-profit coffers.
Osten told The Courant the change from Bloomfield to SHEBA was normal practice. “Legislative staff prepared the list. These are programs that need clarification. It is not unusual for this to happen. Most legislators, Doug included, don’t contact me. I get a list from staff that are working to put everything together. I never heard about Bloomfield.”
Osten’s letter to the education department worked. The money was sent to SHEBA, not Bloomfield. Osten is co-chair of the legislature’s budget committee. Her position is not the only source of her considerable power. A few legislators know as much about the details of the budget, but none know it better. Osten also has an interest in paying attention to McCrory. Eventually, there will be a shift in the leadership of the state Senate. President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven. will one day announce he is leaving after more than 40 years in the legislature. When he does, the first reshuffle in a political generation will occur.
McCrory’s vote will matter and it would not be a surprise if Osten would like to be able to count on him as a supporter. The budget chair makes a lot of deposits in the favor banks of her colleagues. Some are going to be merely misjudged. The $100,000 for SHEBA could turn out to be toxic for Osten’s reputation.
The potency of a federal investigation into state spending ought to have caused a detail-oriented legislator like Osten to try to reconstruct why that money meant for Bloomfield went to SHEBA. Human engagement is not exclusively reserved to Cicero-Hamlin’s organization. A few calls from Osten would have those unnamed staff members explaining, to borrow a phrase from the Watergate scandal, what they knew and when they knew it.
As a reminder of how tiny the upper reaches of Connecticut politics are, one name — Theresa Govert — has appeared in two scandals undermining the public’s confidence in its government. Govert was a Senate Democratic staff member when she sent by email to the Appropriations Committee a list of organizations that were to receive money. SHEBA was included on it.
Govert told Connecticut Public, “I don’t recollect exactly how that information was conveyed to me.” This should surprise no one. Govert is at the center of the mass memory loss surrounding a December 2024 opinion piece and the text messages referring to it.
State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, and state Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, co-chairs of the General Assembly’s energy committee, attached their names to a bizarre screed attacking utilities and bond rating agencies late last year. It appeared in the online CT Mirror.
Text messages obtained by The Courant’s Edmund Mahony reveal an exchange between Steinberg and Public Utilities Regulation Authority Marissa Gillett that appears it could refer to the op-ed a few days before it was published. Gillett tells Steinberg that Govert and others are going to review her draft before she sends it to Steinberg.
The texts have become central to an appeal of a PURA rate decision by two gas companies. If Gillett had a hand in the whacky, conspiracy-laden opinion piece, she would have forfeited her position as a fair-minded regulator. Govert, now PURA’s chief of staff, and Gillett, were deposed about the op-ed and text messages this summer. Govert said her memory of anything written in December is gone because of medication she was taking at the time.
It took months for Gillett to reveal through her lawyers that the text messages with Steinberg had been deleted from her cellphone–months before. Gillett’s phone, she told her lawyers, had been programmed to delete automatically all texts after 30 days. It appears not to have occurred to Gillett that she was destroying public documents.
Judge Matthew Budzik, who has been overseeing the case, has told PURA’s lawyers to prepare to explain to him why they claimed their client had engaged in exhaustive searches for documents related to the op-ed when she knew that any text messages had been deleted.
The gas companies have asked the judge for permission to depose Steinberg and Needleman. Writing something together ought to have included emails, texts and documents. Given the incendiary nature of their work, it’s not something two legislators with many opinions would forget, except in Connecticut.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com
