Governor Patrick heaped praise, some of it undeserved, upon his four departing secretaries last week. He also bristled at questioners wanting to know if Secretary of Health and Human Services JudyAnn Bigby was steered out of the administration following high-profile failures in her department.
“There’s going to be, in large organizations, things that go wrong,’’ said Patrick. That’s true enough. But there is a gulf separating the usual bureaucratic bumps from the deadly fungal meningitis outbreak traced to the New England Compounding Center or the tainting of thousands of criminal cases at a state drug lab. Both breakdowns occurred under Bigby’s watch. Beacon Hill Republicans had demanded her ouster. Meanwhile, outgoing Public Safety Secretary Mary Beth Heffernan had been involved, when she was assistant secretary, in the hiring of Sheila Burgess, a woman with a long list of driving citations, as the state highway-safety director.
Comments
The Globe is finally realizing what most of us have known all along. He is an elitist, arrogant, smug governor who know's more than the rest of us.
First...when did the Compounding scandal start? Under Mr. Romney. Why do we have no knowledge of contacts between the Governor's office and New England Compounding seeking to overturn sanctions against the company using Republican political connections? Because Governor Romney absconded with all the hard drives. Oops...I mean he bought them and thus stole information belonging to the Commonwealth.
Second...the more fundamental problem in the laboratories and other areas was the buy outs offered to experienced personnel as a way to control costs. The Globe should spend some time looking how these "cost saving measures" implemented by past administrations worked out. I suspect that little, if any, money was saved; that the Peter Principle was applied broadly; that the intellectual resouces of various departments were depleted; and that the release of violent criminals because of recent events at the State Lab might more legitimately be traced to that program and those policies. By the way, the Governor and the Secretary do not sign off on the hiring of every lab assistant or administrative assistant in the Commonwealth. The Governor made some terrible decisions early in his first term, but since then, he has been very good indeed.
Alright...Sheila Burgess...ya got me there!