“The settlement is covered by our insurance policy.” The lottery corporation’s insurance carrier, Chubb, “strongly recommended that the board agree to the settlement,” said Tara Chozet, director of public relations and social media for the CLC. The two “no” votes on the settlement came from Birney and board member Michael Thompson. “I think this is a difficult vote for a lot of us, but we want to do the right thing for the corporation and our new chair,” said board member Meghan Culmo. So, again, any criticism of an individual for delaying or postpoining the vote is unfair and misdirected.”īoard member Margaret Morton agreed with Blanchette. came to Birney’s defense although he mentioned no names.īlanchette said that last month, “certain people were criticized unfairly for delaying or postponing the vote ” and “my recollection of the discussions at the time indicted that a consensus was reached to delay a vote based on a reasonable belief that further opportunities existed to improve our position on collateral issues. When the time came to vote Thursday after a 38-minute closed session (during which the audio feed was shut down to the public from the telephonic meeting), board member Wilfred Blanchette Jr. Simmelkjaer immediately agreed last month that the matter needed to be voted on, and made sure that happened at Thursday’s meeting, the first at which he has presided as new chairman. That led state Treasurer Shawn Wooden, who has a seat on the lottery board, to say he was “shocked and appalled” that an agreement beneficial to taxpayers had been turned down without Birney putting it to a vote, and he called on Birney to resign. The quasi-public lottery agency raised $370 million in state revenue last year on $1.3 billion in ticket sales.īut the lottery’s governing board, under the leadership of its longtime vice chairman, Patrick Birney, never brought it to a vote - and finally on May 20, Jim Shea, the CLC-retained lawyer from the firm Jackson Lewis, called Brown to tell him the board rejected the settlement. “This corporation has a great track record of delivering financial returns to the state, something that isn’t really discussed enough, quite frankly,” Simmelkjaer said. Ned Lamont’s new appointee as board chairman. “Now is the time to put whatever negative storylines that have existed aside, clean up any past issues as quickly and as fairly as we can and to focus on the work of generating revenue for the taxpayers of the state at a time that this is definitely needed,” said Rob Simmelkjaer, Gov. In voting 8-2 to pay $205,000 to former lottery security chief Alfred DuPuis, the CLC’s board of directors closed the book on one of several lingering legal disputes that have hindered the high-profile agency from moving beyond bitter internal enmities rooted in the past. reversed itself Thursday and approved a legal settlement that it had spurned last month with one of its former top officials, who had claimed in a long-running human rights complaint and a lawsuit that he’d suffered retaliation for blowing the whistle on problems at the CLC going back five years.
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