New Haven Independent

DaRos’s action came last Friday as the year was drawing to a close and as DaRos completed his first working month as the town’s top administrator. DaRos said he sent Smith a letter and also spoke with him in person.

Former First Selectwoman Cheryl Morris came under heavy fire for appointing Smith, her close political operative, to the position. He began work last June. His position also carried the title of department head.

The appointment set off a political firestorm because Smith also served as the majority leader of the RTM at the same time that he reported directly to Morris. In a direct repudiation of the Morris-Smith appointment, not one of the 175 Democratic voters who attended the District 3 local election in Short Beach, where Smith lives, would re-nominate him to the RTM last summer.

RTM members on both sides of the aisle also questioned whether Smith was qualified for the position and asked why Morris rejected the recommendation of Cindy Coville, then the town’s human resources director and Janice Plaziack, the town engineer, who wanted another applicant. But Morris went her own way. Smith insisted he was entitled to work for the town and to serve on the RTM as majority leader. He now has neither job.

In a related action Friday, DaRos let go another town employee, Leno Torelli, who, like Smith, was a Cheryl Morris-Ed Marcus appointee. He was dismissed from the town’s building department. DaRos said he ended Torelli’s job because “there wasn’t enough work for him to do, especially this time of year.”

DaRos also disclosed that on Nov. 19th, the evening before DaRos was sworn into office, Morris wrote her own evaluation of Smith, one that differed dramatically from the assessment DaRos later wrote.

DaRos said he had every department “give me a report on how the buildings were taken care of …and there were problems. There was enough to show that the report Cheryl did was not the same report I was going to do. And my job is to watch over these things. If I didn’t do it, I would be shirking my job.”

DaRos did not provide details, but the Eagle learned from other sources that top police and fire officials were very unhappy with Smith’s decisions. It didn’t help that Smith failed to send snow and ice removal crews to Town Hall and to the Senior Center after the most recent storm.

Smith was removed within his probationary period. DaRos will advertise for the facilities manager position again. “It was more how the hiring process worked than anything. It wasn’t fair to the professionals who were out there,” he said of the prior Morris process.

In the meantime, he added, “all department heads have been notified that they are responsible for their buildings. This is a difficult job and you have to have quite a bit of experience to do this job.”

The Smith appointment generated widespread outrage. Back in June, Democratic RTM member Anthony Giardiello sought to unseat Smith because he believed a job that had Smith reporting to the first selectwoman violated the principle of separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government.

Smith held fast and then former Town Attorney #2 Shelley Marcus advocated on Smith’s behalf, maintaining that state statutes were on his side. Several RTM members were deeply upset that the town counsel was representing Smith in this instance and not the RTM.

The RTM sent the Smith issue to its administrative services committee to investigate the town’s hiring process. After hearing from former first selectmen and others, the committee concluded that Morris did not follow standard operating procedures when she appointed Smith. But the committee’s final vote could not be taken because it lacked a quorum.

Nor did the town’s Board of Ethics fare much better. For some reason the board couldn’t quite define a conflict of interest, as in the town’s chief administrator handing out a job to the RTM’s majority leader. It turned out the Board needed more facts. It also turned out that the Smith case revealed contradictions between state and local ethics laws. The Board is now in the process of working on changes that will permit it to actually function.

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