Paul Bass Photo
John Cirello raised a fuss about how the Regional Workforce Alliance accounts for spending government money to train people for jobs. Then he learned he was no longer a member of the Alliance’s board of directors.
Cirello (pictured) said he sees a connection between those two facts.
At the Alliance’s July board meeting (read about that here), Cirello publicly criticized what he called a lack of transparency — including having the board vote on a budget without information on how money was spent the year before.
Days later, on July 21, Cirello, who’s a New Haven attorney, received a letter from board Chairman Joseph Mirra.
“As you know, new governing legislation called the Workforce Investment Opportunity Act requires that a new workforce development board be appointed by July, 2015,” it read. “Nominations were requested from the mandated constituent groups for the various positions required by the legislation and those nominations were then forwarded to the Chief Elected Official (CEO) Executive Committee for approval. At the CEO Executive Committee meeting on July 9th a smaller, 23 member board was appointed and your name was not among those put forward for membership. This action is consistent with the intent and regulations of the new legislation.”
“I just think it’s sad. It’s $16 million our money” supporting the agency’s important job-training work, Cirello said in a subsequent interview. “The fact that I spoke out made it that much easier for them” to remove him from the board.
The other board member who spoke out at the July meeting, Michael Piscitelli, a deputy city economic development official, also was not reappointed. Asked about the reason, he did not attribute the action to his comments.
Mirra told the Independent Thursday that there was no connection between the two members’ remarks and the decision not to reappoint them to the board.
The new board appointments had already been decided upon before the last meeting, but time ran out before they could be announced then, Mirra said. The board had to shrink by more than a third under the new federal legislation governing the agency. A nominating committee took nominations, and CIrello’s and Piscitelli’s names did not come up, according to Mirra.
Mirra was asked if Cirello had a good point that when board members vote on a budget they should also receive information about how actual dollars were spent in the prior year’s budget.
“Here’s the problem with that whole system,” Mirra responded.” We used to have a simpler financial report, and a couple of years ago the chief elected officials asked us to change it. It made the new one a little more difficult to understand. We’ve been asking the board members to please sit in on committee meetings. This is all open book type of stuff. This is not a budget that’s just put together. There’s a budget committee.
“It would been nice if he was at a budget committee meeting or [the report] had a different format. But one of the first things we’re doing with the new board is to have a little retreat and go over how [the budget is prepared]. … We’re going to take the time to retrain he new board members. … We’re going to try to come up with an easier reporting for the board. Before we do that, they’re all going to be invited to the Finance Committee.”