AUGUSTA — A legislative committee postponed action Friday in its Maine Center for Disease Control document-shredding probe.
Members of the Government Oversight Committee decided they needed more information and asked to speak to representatives from the Secretary of State’s Office, the Office of Information Technology and the Maine State Archives at their next meeting in two weeks.
However, it was unclear whether those representatives will appear then or later. The head of the committee’s Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability said she may talk with the committee’s co-chairs about scheduling the representative to appear later in April because the next meeting will be shorter than usual and the committee has a number of agenda items that have been pushed back lately.
Committee members also indicated Friday that they may ask Mary Mayhew, commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, to appear at a later date or to respond to the revealing testimony given two weeks ago by six current and former CDC officials.
OPEGA is expected to continue to review all testimony from the March 14 hearing and to present a report to the committee at its next meeting.
At that hearing, the committee heard from six current and former Maine CDC officials as part of its probe into allegations that CDC leaders ordered the destruction of public documents. During the six hours of testimony that day, the officials contradicted each other, blamed each other and, in some cases, pleaded ignorance or poor recollection of the controversial Healthy Maine Partnerships grant funding process they helped create or oversee.
Two things during that meeting became clear: Deputy Director Christine Zukas told employees to destroy public documents related to funding for the HMP program. And scoring was changed at the end of the competitive grant process, sending public money to a favored partnership whose original scores didn’t support it — possibly at the direction of CDC Director Sheila Pinette.
Committee members said Friday they were alarmed by several comments made during the six hours of testimony, including those of a supervisor who said she did nothing after an employee told her he’d been asked to destroy documents.
“Her comment was, ‘Well, do what you think,’ and, ‘We all have our own compass.’ That kind of bothered me because it seems that we’ve got to look at whether there is a department compass,” said State Rep. Andrea Boland, D-Sanford.
Members were also concerned about comments made by former division director Sharon Leahy-Lind, who told them she had been instructed by superiors to use instant messaging to communicate with them because the messages could not be retrieved under the state’s Freedom of Access Act.
The Governor’s Office this week revised the state communications policy. It now prohibits state employees from using text-messaging or instant messaging for official business.
The allegations of document destruction came to light last spring when Leahy-Lind, then-director of the CDC’s Division of Local Public Health, filed a complaint of harassment with the Maine Human Rights Commission. She has since filed a federal whistle-blower lawsuit.
She has said her bosses at the CDC told her to shred public documents related to the grant funding for the state’s Healthy Maine Partnerships program. When she refused, she said, she faced harassment and retaliation. She has since left her job at the CDC.
A CDC office manager has echoed Leahy-Lind’s allegations and is seeking to be added as a plaintiff to her suit.
At the Government Oversight Committee’s behest, the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability investigated the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention over several months last year.
OPEGA’s December report noted a host of problems, including supervisors who ordered the destruction of public documents, workers who created documents specifically to fulfill a Sun Journal Freedom of Access Act request, funding criteria that was changed during the selection process, HMP funding scores that were changed just before the final selection, a tribal partnership contract for which OPEGA couldn’t discern who was responsible and a critical Healthy Maine Partnership scoring sheet that has vanished.
Money, the investigation found, may have gone where it shouldn’t have.
Since that report, the Government Oversight Committee has been trying to determine why public records were ordered destroyed and what should be done to prevent it from happening again.
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