AUGUSTA — A legislative committee has received a summary of claims, inconsistencies and answers from six current and former Maine Center for Disease Control officials at the heart of the committee’s document-shredding probe.

The Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability presented the 32-page summary to the Government Oversight Committee on Friday. The summary outlined the committee’s original questions, what the CDC officials testified to during their six hours of questioning on March 14 and where that testimony was contradicted by other testimony or evidence. 

For the first time, the committee heard that four of those six officials took part in an Aug. 15, 2011, CDC senior management meeting in which they were told the CDC was not complying with record-retention policies.

A number of the officials had told the committee they’d received no public document training until recently. CDC Deputy Director Christine Zukas has said she wanted documents destroyed for “version control” and thought working documents did not have to be kept.

The 2011 meeting’s minutes don’t say in what way CDC was out of compliance and don’t say whether the officials had been trained about keeping public documents. However, OPEGA Director Beth Ashcroft told the committee, “It doesn’t appear that it should have been a completely foreign concept to them based on what we see in the minutes, that there were records retention policies that needed to be adhered to.”

The news rankled some members of the Government Oversight Committee.

“For anyone involved on the management team, I would think that (2011 record-retention discussion) would be a red flag. That would not be something you’d forget,” state Sen. Christopher Johnson, D-Somerville, said. 

The 2011 minutes also show that Zukas was assigned to oversee the appointment of records officers from each CDC division. It was unclear whether she did that. Officials have testified that they had no idea who the CDC’s records officers were or whether it had any.

Committee members are expected to take up the CDC probe again at their next meeting.

The allegations of document destruction came to light last spring when Sharon 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, OPEGA investigated the CDC 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 vanished.

Money, the investigation found, may have gone where it shouldn’t have.

The committee subpoenaed six current and former CDC officials to appear before it on March 14. 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: 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.

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.

The committee’s next meeting has not yet been scheduled.

ltice@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link