“No rush in giving it” -- Jodi Rell, Lisa Moody, and the trouble with sharing
By Ted Mann
Published 10/20/2009 12:00 AM
Updated 10/20/2009 11:26 AM
Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s administration
has produced reams of documents and
correspondence, with significant prodding,
about the work being done for the
governor’s office by UConn professor Ken
Dautrich.
Dautrich has offered Rell advice on ways
to streamline state agencies over the past
year and a half or so, but also acted as a
sort of pollster on retainer to Rell’s top
aide, helping frame the governor’s rhetoric
and advising which policy decisions would
be more or less popular with voters.
Through all those records, largely
obtained through Freedom of Information
Act requests, a theme emerges: secrecy.
In a series of fairly indignant responses
to our stories about the Dautrich project
and the administration’s clandestine
research into public opinion, various
representatives of the administration,
including the governor herself, have
suggested that the media is overlooking
the valid recommendations for
streamlining state agencies that Dautrich
and his coworkers provided. And it’s true,
they did interview commissioners and
cobble together a broad array of plans
to change the way state government is
structured. (We published a front-page
story about those ideas, and published
Dautrich’s interim report on our web site,
more than six months ago.)
But in their current argument that
sensationalist reporters are overlooking
valid budget proposals like cutting the
number of state cars to save money, Rell
and her representatives are carefully
omitting a relevant fact: the administration
tried its hardest not to share Dautrich’s
findings, not to mention the other, overtly
political scope of his duties, for as long as
it could.
And you can’t just chalk it up to the
administration’s public relations strategy,
which often evinces supreme distrust of
the press and a general resentment toward
the requirements of public disclosure.
(Witness the two-month battle to get
a copy of Dautrich’s interim report on
budget recommendations, a document
the professor readily shared with us even
as the Office of Policy and Management
continued to stonewall.
But it’s not just us. Witness the following
email exchange, between Rell’s chief of
staff, M. Lisa Moody, and her top budget
advisor, Robert L. Genuario, the secretary
of the Office of Policy and Management.
“OFA has asked for the Dautrich report,”
Genuario wrote to Moody on Tuesday,
Jan. 27. OFA is the Office of Fiscal
Analysis, the publicly supported agency
that is charged with providing accurate
budget numbers for legislators to use as
they craft legislation. In theory at least,
these two parties are supposed to talk to
one another, in order to strike a budget
deal.
Here’s Moody’s entire response, sent the
same day:
“No rush in giving it.”
Now, there are plenty of political reasons
not to want to share Dautrich’s report.
Rell and Moody probably feared that any
details in the report shared with OFA
would soon find their way to legislators.
Perhaps the lawmakers would steal
the thunder from Rell’s budget, which
she would present just a few days after
this exchange, by embracing one of the
Dautrich proposals that Rell too had
endorsed. (Though much from the report
remains on the cutting room floor.) Or
maybe the governor and her ubiquitous
aide feared that Democrats would comb
through the report to see which proposals
Rell had picked to include in her budget,
and which she’d left out. (They might have
seen what we did, that while Dautrich
had recommended eliminating some
state watchdog agencies, he had done so
while recommending the creation of a
new standalone agency to perform the
same function; in her budget, Rell readily
endorsed the first part, nearly eliminating
some institutional enemies in the process,
but dropped the second part.)
It’s surely the prerogative of the governor
to keep private counsel, and to craft
a budget in relative privacy before
presenting it, as Rell has said in recent
days. But to now harp at the media,
through intermediaries like the governor’s
special assistant or her spokesman, for
having not sufficiently covered a set of
recommendations that the administration
actively tried to keep secret -- well, that
seems just a tad disingenuous.
And it also seems like an attempt to
change the subject from the issue actually
at hand here: not the budget reforms
Dautrich was offering, but the political
advice he readily acknowledges he gave
Moody while on the public dime.
The budget reform project was something
Rell and her budget staff admitted was
happening, even if they went out of their
way to make those reform proposals
difficult for the press and the public to
learn about.
The political advice, and Dautrich’s efforts
to weigh public opinion for his boss, is
something else altogether, and a part of
the project kept wholly secret, including
from many of Rell’s ostensible allies,
including Republicans in the legislature.
They breathed not a word about it until it
hit the newspapers.
Why they kept this effort such a secret
if they believed it was appropriate is but
one more question for the governor and
Moody. It’s one they have yet to fully
answer.