Angela Carella: Ethics board OKs city hire of director's son
May 9, 2013 Updated: May 9, 2013 10:26 p.m.
Nothing in the Stamford Code of Ethics prohibits the city from hiring the son of the director of operations for a job in that department.
In reaching that opinion Wednesday, members of the Board of Ethics made a point: Stamford needs a policy or ordinance that governs the hiring of relatives of city employees.
The board's opinion means that Mark Orgera can be offered a job he is seeking as a laborer in the solid waste and recycling division, which ultimately is overseen by his father, Ernie Orgera.
Mark Orgera applied for the job, passed a test and has been on a list of candidates for more than a year, Ethics Board members learned from the division supervisor, Dan Colleluori. During the time Mark Orgera has been on the list, five other laborers on the list were hired, Colleluori told the board.
Mark Orgera now is the best candidate to fill the latest vacancy, Colleluori said. The work includes helping residents unload their cars at the recycling center, moving garbage cans and other physical labor, Colleluori said. The base salary of an entry-level laborer is $41,700 a year.
Ethics Board members asked about the chain of command and learned that Mark Orgera would report to a foreman who reports to Colleluori who reports to Ernie Orgera, director of the Office of Operations and a member of the mayor's cabinet.
Colleluori went to the Board of Ethics on April 10 to request an advisory opinion on the hire. In a video of that meeting, Colleluori tells the board, "My dilemma, in my opinion it is not really a dilemma, but with the politics and the way things are, I said let's be a little proactive and make sure to get some review beforehand."
Colleluori explained that, when the job opened, he asked the city's human resources department for the candidates list. That department accepts job applications, administers tests, creates a list of qualified candidates and keeps it for two years.
When a job opens, supervisors such as Colleluori request authorization to fill it. In his case, he must obtain authorization from Ernie Orgera, policy and management Director Pete Privitera and Mayor Michael Pavia, Colleluori said. Once he has authorization, he gets the candidates list and begins interviews.
During the April meeting, Board of Ethics members asked Colleluori whether he felt pressure to hire Mark Orgera.
"Ernie has never given me, you know, `Hey, my kid.' We've talked about it. He knows he has to approve all my hiring of vacancies so he knows what I'm doing. He knows I'm coming here," Colleluori told the board. "I don't feel any pressure."
Members of the Board of Ethics discussed possible conflicts. If Mark Orgera were to be hired, would he get special consideration when he requested time off or when a promotion arose, even if his father did not ask for it but supervisors implicitly felt pressure to do it? Would he be reprimanded if he showed up late or failed to perform a task? Would he act as a whistleblower, reporting to his father when co-workers were reprimanded? Would supervisors who hired or promoted him get special consideration from Ernie Orgera?
"It's clean to come in through the door," Ethics board member Daniel Sanchez said of the hire. "What happens inside the door is where the trouble can be. ... There can be compromising situations."
But the Code of Ethics does not address such situations, the board members found. Neither do city policies or ordinances, which is why Colleluori said he went to the ethics board.
"Everybody tiptoes around this subject," said Colleluori, a New Yorker who began working for the city 16 years ago. "When I first came here ... people said, `Who do you know?' I said I didn't know anybody. ... I learned that there's an awful lot of people who work for the city who are related to people who work for the city.
"Here's my thought process," Colleluori continued. "I'm very confident that, if I do hire the guy, it's going to be in the newspaper. So, in some ways, I'll be honest with you, if you told me not to hire him, it will make my life a lot easier. I won't be in the paper, and that's a good thing. If you tell me I can hire him, I'll hire him. Whatever you tell me, I'll live with it, either way.
"But the point is, if he shouldn't be hired by Operations, then he shouldn't have been on the list that was given to me."
The point was not lost on ethics board members.
Chairman Cheryl Bader said the city needs a policy or ordinance on nepotism. The ethics board cannot write policies or ordinances. She invited Human Resources Director Emmet Hibson to Wednesday's Board of Ethics meeting and asked about it.
"There is no policy or procedure in place to govern nepotism in hiring," Hibson said.
That's so even though nepotism questions began making headlines in early 2010, when a former human resources employee, Tania Barnes, took a role in the hiring of her brother as a traffic enforcement officer.
In April 2010, city Rep. Sal Gabriele, R-16, tried to get an anti-nepotism policy on the Board of Representatives agenda, but it went nowhere.
When Hibson took over the human resources department a month later, he added a line to hiring forms requiring applicants to disclose whether relatives work in City Hall. He now reviews each potential hire, Hibson told the ethics board Wednesday. If an applicant is related to someone who works in City Hall, he checks to see whether the applicant would report to the relative.
"I take it case by case," Hibson said.
In April 2011, Hibson notified the city attorney when he saw paperwork that Mark Orgera and his brother, Steven, were applying for seasonal jobs in the parks department. Both Orgera sons had worked in the parks department as seasonal employees before, but Hibson and Mayor Michael Pavia stopped the hires in 2011, citing the Barnes controversy.
Orgera said at the time that he was furious that his sons, who were qualified, proven workers, could not get jobs "because of the position I'm in." Many City Hall employees have children who work there, Orgera said at the time.
He did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
To his point, city Rep. Mena Mallozzi, D-12, in March drafted an anti-nepotism ordinance for the Board of Representatives to consider. But the proposal has been sitting on the "pending" agenda since then.
The reason is that some representatives thought nepotism should not be addressed in an ordinance, but through a clause in the Code of Ethics, which requires a change to the city charter. If representatives go that route, they must hold a hearing on the change and vote on it by August so it can appear on the ballot for voters to consider in November, said city Rep. Mary Fedeli, R-17, head of the board's Personnel Committee.
In the meantime, Mallozzi asked that her anti-nepotism proposal be put on the board's Steering Committee agenda for Monday night. A good number of fellow representatives co-signed it, Mallozzi said.
angela.carella@scni.com or 203-964-2296.