Neil Avallone started working for the city in 1961, retired in 1993 — and promptly returned as a part-time “consultant.” He hasn’t left since.
Avallone’s boss considers him an indispensable trouble-shooter and devoted public servant; he even checked in with the office from a recent Italian cruise in case there were any glitches in the city’s computer systems.
“I love the city of New Haven. I love this department,” Avallone said the other day. He called city government his “second love — my wife is my first.”
Avallone (pictured), 66, is also what’s known as a “double-dipper.” He collects a pension. And he receives a paycheck for continuing to work for the city on an indefinite basis.
He’s not alone.
Since Mayor John DeStefano’s election in 1993, he has been renewing contracts annually with higher-paid management employees who retired and then returned to City Hall or the schools department as de facto high-level staffers.
They are required to do work not performed by union members. In most cases they can’t officially work more than 19 hours a week.
In one case, the mayor had a double-dipper holding a top executive post for more than a decade on a perennially renewed “temporary contract.”
A bill before New Haven’s aldermanic Finance Committee targets the practice. It would require retiree/ consultants to forgo collecting their pensions while working on city contracts. Click here to read the bill, which was sponsored by Aldermen Jorge Perez, Andrea Jackson-Brooks, Allan Brison, and Robert Lee.
The bill was introduced after city unions raised the issue in an effort to preserve members’ jobs in the current wave of layoffs.
Double-dipping extends to blue-collar seasonal jobs as well as to white-collar offices.
Neil Avallone is paid $65 an hour on top of his $60,900 pension. Since 2000, he has been paid $542,975.75 for his services, according to the city. Avallone regularly works closer to 25 or 30 hours a week, though he’s paid for only 19, according to city Controller Mark Pietrosimone. Pietrosimone said Avallone’s expertise and hard work have helped hold together a crucial part of the city bureaucracy, the Information Technology department, through waves of management departures and computer upgrades.
Brian McGrath, a veteran Democratic Party vote-puller, said he’s been receiving $4,100 a month under various contracts since he retired four years ago as the city’s traffic czar. He collects a $57,810 annual pension.
Over at the school board, perennial “consultants” and retired administrators Eugene Vitelli and Joseph Montagna collect $103,604 and $74,383 pensions each year from the Connecticut Teachers Retirement Board, according to Assistant Administrator Leanne Appleton. Meanwhile, the city has paid Vitelli $255,691 since 2000; Montagna, $107,492 since 2004.
New Haven, like municipal governments across the country (especially school systems), has come to see retired employees as low-cost, high-quality help for troubled budgetary times.
Some aldermen question the practice of relying on that help as a permanent solution or handing out two paychecks to one employee.
Rather than seeking to impose a specific solution — or single out any contract workers — the point of the bill is to highlight a practice that has been going on for years and see whether it makes sense as long-term policy, argued Alderman Perez.
He asked whether reliance on consultants to hold top staff positions for years at a time is the best “long-term way to do business.”
Neil Avallone, for instance, has been repeatedly filling in for, then replacing, managers who last no longer than two years on the job — continually solving short-term crises that stem from apparent institutional challenges.
Perez wants the DeStefano administration to provide a detailed list of part-time consultants as part of deliberations on the bill.
“We’re not going after people working 19 hours and making $10 an hour, the way the administration makes it appear,” Perez said.
In Neil Avallone’s case, for instance, he has been repeatedly filling in for, then replacing, managers who last no longer than two years on the job.
“If we need somebody, they should get one salary for the 15 years,” Alderwoman Jackson-Brooks said. “I just don’t see why we pay people double.”
Because, Brian McGrath argued, he could just as easily work at McDonald’s. And the city needs him.
Flipping Utilities, Not Burgers
McGrath (pictured) retired four years ago after 33 years in city government. He has worked on several part-time contracts since then, while holding a second job, running the Chapel West Special Services District.
Last year he had a $50,000 contract to “provide daily assistance” to his old department, traffic and parking, for up to 21 hours a week. He agreed to review challenges to parking tickets, “analyze enforcement data,” “provide staff support as needed to the group supervisor,” “review … ordinances and other group protocols,” “assist with resource allocation.”
That contract is done. These days the city pays the hardworking McGrath to track down shoddy road work by utilities and help craft a plan to get them to pay for repairs.
“The utilities have been digging a lot of holes in the street. They’ve been costing the city millions of dollars a year in repairs,” McGrath said. “I intend to go out and find all the holes that are no good.”
McGrath was asked if he agrees with the bill’s sponsors that he should give up his city pension while drawing a city paycheck.
“That’s kind of ludicrous,” he responded. “I put in 33 years, every week. I earned my pension. I worked like a dog.”
After 31 years, a city employee has no incentive to stay on the job, he argued. Because at that point the employee has “maxed out” on how much he or she will receive in pension benefits. “Anything after that, you’re wasting your time,” he said. “You can make more money working at McDonald’s and getting” 70 percent of the former city salary in a pension check.
“Then go to McDonald’s,” Alderwoman Jackson-Brooks said when told of McGrath’s argument. “If you’re retired, you’re retired. You shouldn’t get both at the same time.”
McGrath said he works for the city as a consultant, rather than at McDonald’s, “because it just so happens my expertise” is needed in government.
He was asked if the city should consider changing a system that gives workers an incentive to cash out, then return to the job to collect two checks instead of one.
“They’re not going to change the system,” he said. “This resolution [before the aldermen] is not going to pass. I question the motivation.”
Back To School
Eugene Vitelli has had a series of assignments since his retirement from the school system. These days he’s at the central office helping trouble-shoot and craft policy, said the school system’s chief administrative officer, Will Clark.
“He is very good at understanding the rules of the Board of Education, the rules of the State Board of Education, budgeting,” Clark said. “He’s someone you can send if there’s a problem in this school, that school. You can send him right in, mentor the principal, report back.” Vitelli served on the committee that reviewed the system’s policy toward bullying. “He knows the list of all the problems we’ve had for years now,” Clark said.
Joseph Montagna, who retired as principal of Fair Haven Middle School, is on assignment at Katherine Brennan School. The West Rock school is part of a two-building campus (including the former Clarence Rogers School building). The principal there was out ill for a while. Plus, “that’s a school that needs to improve,” Clark said. For all those reasons, Clark said, the system needed his “steady hand” and “experience” in “understanding how to run a building.”
The longer-range policy challenge is finding and keeping good administrators. Clark said New Haven’s school system faces the same shortage of “highly qualified administrators” that its counterparts confront around the country. He noted that Hartford’s school leaders are asking for a change in state law that will make it easier to bring retirees back on staff full-time without sacrificing their pensions.
Defenders of the double-dipping practice note that, at least with the schools, administrators’ pensions come from the state teachers retirement fund, not from city coffers.
“Whether it’s the state [or the city] paying for, it still coming out of our pockets,” argued Alderman Perez.
Last Man Standing?
Neil Avallone’s office in the Information Technology department feels like the set of Survivor, a bureaucratic island where most of the characters have been voted off. But the work still needs to get done.
Asked why the city would continue relying on a retired part-time consultant to fill what seems like a permanent job for 16 years running, Avallone and Controller Pietrosimone each described a department that has gone through continual change and upheaval.
Avallone retired from the department — then known as the Office of Management and Information Systems — under former Mayor John Daniels during another budget crisis, in the early ’90s. The city was cutting jobs. It encouraged people to retire, offering them lifetime medical benefits for early retirees.
Not only did Avallone retire. So did the two managers he reported to, the unit’s manager as well as the city’s deputy controller.
The city needed someone around who understood the largely paper-based, patchwork system of record-keeping for payroll and other budgeting matters. Avallone came right back, part time on a consultant’s contract, to run the office until a new manager could be found.
The department evolved over the next 16 years. Its name changed a few more times, as did its methods. It gradually moved from in-house, old-school record-keeping systems geared to 13 unions and 15 different pay groups — keypunch cards, reams of candy-striped paper reports — to more modern software-based systems designed by outside companies.
At each step, especially with the approach of Y2K and the need for an overhaul of the computer system, the department desperately needed Avallone’s services.
Meanwhile, it needed Avallone to train each new manager, according to Pietrosimone (pictured). No sooner would the job be done — than the manager would quit. Then the department needed Avallone was needed to fill in until a replacement could be found. Then he was needed to train the new guy…
“We had,” Pietrosimone reflected, “transitional issues.”
Avallone trained his first permanent replacement, Carl Ahern, in 1993. Ahern was gone in 1994. “He got frustrated one day and went to Utah,” Avallone recalled with a shrug.
Why do managers keep passing through the revolving door so quickly?
“I don’t know,” Avallone said. “They get disgusted. Maybe it’s pressure. Sometimes they can do a job on the outside making more money.”
They work in a continually shrinking workplace. Avallone said he had upwards of 40 coworkers when he started out in the department in the 1960s. Now the department has four people on contract, seven on staff.
One staffer is in charge of the city’s website, one in charge of geographic information systems (mapping). “One person supports tax and assessment systems. Only one!” Avallone remarked, pointing a finger in the air for emphasis. The remaining skeleton crew continually assumes new responsibilities.
Which doesn’t faze Avallone. He has kept up with changes in technology. His current contract shows him responsible for providing advice and help in improving and running the city’s MUNIS financial system, payroll security functions, “back-up and redundancy planning,” scouting out hardware for upgrades, assessing financial software.
“If they had to bring in anyone to fill my shoes, you’re talking upwards of $65,000, $80,000,” plus pension benefits, Avallone said.
While officials tackle the question of whether to look at the root causes of relying on retirees to carry out quasi-permanent jobs, Avallone is happy to continue plugging the gaps at least into the next decade.
“I’d like to go for 50 years,” he said. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. If they said, ‘Neil, you’re not going to get another contract,’ I’d still take calls.”
I'd be smiling to if I hit the patronage jackpot!