AUGUSTA — Gov. Paul LePage on Thursday defended himself and his administration against accusations of cronyism in hiring Gary Alexander, a controversial consultant, to study and make recommendations for Maine’s welfare system and potential Medicaid expansion.

LePage said he has met with Alexander just three times: One of those meetings took place in 2010, when LePage offered the Rhode Island conservative the job as Maine’s commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services, which the governor said Alexander turned down for salary reasons. DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew’s total compensation in 2012 — including salary and benefits — was $131,168, according to the state government payroll tracking website maineopengov.org.

LePage said Thursday that he also has met with Alexander twice since Alexander’s firm was hired on a nearly $1 million sole-source contract awarded by Mayhew in September.

“If that’s a ‘crony,’ what’s [Democratic Senate President] Justin Alfond? I see him once a week,” the governor said in an interview with State House reporters.

LePage also reiterated that while he admires the work Alexander has done in other states — specifically his success in winning a global Medicaid waiver in Rhode Island — he was not involved in hiring The Alexander Group for Maine’s welfare and Medicaid expansion study.

All sole-source contracts must go through the governor’s office for review, but that step is routinely conducted by policy staff, not the governor himself, said LePage’s spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett.

LePage also said that he was not concerned that Alexander had missed a Dec. 1 deadline to file an initial report with DHHS. A draft of that report was received Monday, Dec. 16, according to a DHHS spokesman, and is expected to be completed in early January.

“In business, everybody gets extensions,” he said.

Democrats in Augusta have criticized the LePage administration for hiring Alexander, a former public welfare chief in both Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, who they say is a kindred spirit to LePage and will deliver a report based on ideology, not a detached analysis.

Alexander was the subject of an audit in Pennsylvania, which said long-term mismanagement of that state’s home health care worker payroll service cost the state $7 million annually. Democrats have also blasted Alexander for overseeing a Pennsylvania public welfare department that saw nearly 80,000 children lose taxpayer-funded health care benefits.

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