State Workers Getting Ready To End Careers With Buyout
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Four among 3,000 look back fondly
Published on 6/29/2009
As of Tuesday, several thousand state employees will be retired under an incentive program meant to cut costs. The Day spoke with four longtime employees whose faces have become familiar.
Investigator Jim Dignoti
Jim Dignoti said he will not miss being called out to crime scenes at all hours or sitting through long court proceedings.
The 64-year-old investigator spent the last quarter-century prying confessions out of suspects, hunting down reluctant witnesses and generally helping police and prosecutors put the bad guys in prison.
As of Tuesday, he’s clearing out of his office in the Norwich courthouse. He’ll be back for the occasional staff barbecues, he said.
A large man with healthy appetites for food, laughter and fly fishing, James J. Dignoti said he was waiting for the state’s early retirement incentive package. He has worked in the state’s attorney’s office for 25 years. He spent 12 years before that on the Norwich police force.
In August, he’ll take his annual fishing trip to Montana with the guys, including Hon. James J. Devine, administrative judge for the New London Judicial District.
”He’s been a dedicated public servant,” said Devine. “Being a police officer for 10 years, he learned his craft well and therefore used those skills as an investigator.”
One of Dignoti’s proudest moments was in 1981, when he was working as a Norwich detective. The body of 6-year-old Michelle Spencer was found in an underground grate in a sewage pumping station at the edge of the Thames River. Officers who talked to a man who lived upstairs from the girl noticed the paint in his apartment matched the paint on the telephone cord that had been used to strangle Michelle. They spotted that a section of carpet had been torn up and suspected it was the rug the killer had used to wrap the girl’s body.
”We stayed up all night to do a search warrant,” Dignoti remembered. “I brought him to the station and started talking to him. He spilled his guts.”
Douglas A. Simmons’ six-page confession left little for his attorneys to work with. Simmons pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was freed 22 years later, much to Dignoti’s dismay. He lives out of state.
”I was always an advocate of the death penalty and thought he should have been killed,” Dignoti said.
The cases involving children always “hurt” the most, said Dignoti, who has two daughters and four grandchildren. Dignoti worked on the case of Joseph Sanko, who is serving a 35½-year prison sentence for the hit-and-run deaths of two teenage girls in Lebanon in 1997. It is the longest prison sentence meted out in this area for a drinking-related fatality.
”He was an old-school cop who knew everyone on his beat and had the ability to communicate effectively with people from all walks of life,” said Thomas M. Pedersen, an inspector for the state’s attorney’s office and former Norwich police captain. “During his 25 years at GA21, he was a valuable resource and mentor to many of the officers he dealt with on a daily basis.”
Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Stephen M. Carney said Dignoti taught him how to try cases when he was assigned to the Norwich courthouse as a young state’s attorney.
”He’d sit in the courtroom with me,” Carney said. “He’d tell me how to stand and what to object to.”
Dignoti said he would always be grateful to prosecutor Thomas M. Griffin, “the greatest supervisor ever,” and to secretaries Maria Lindia and Maureen Grohocki. Lindia and Grohocki organized a June 19 surprise retirement party for Dignoti that was attended by about 200 people from the legal and law enforcement communities.
”It’s life-changing, really,” said Lindia. “We’ve all been together here more than 20 years.”
Dignoti is one of a handful of court employees in the region who opted for the state buy-out.
”They are all people who will be tough to replace,” Devine said.
- Karen Florin
State Trooper Vic Lenda
Hopefully, someone new will step in and buy flowers for the administrative staff in the first selectman’s office on Administrative Professionals’ Day.
For the past three years, Resident State Trooper Vic Lenda brought them flowers to commemorate the April appreciation day. But Lenda, along with fellow troopers Sonny Soler and Donald Hill, took advantage of the state’s early retirement incentive and is ending his 29-year state police career July 1.
”He’s an absolute gentleman,” office bookkeeper Janine Skaggs said.
Lenda, 56, has been assigned to North Stonington for nearly three years. He has also been a resident state trooper in East Lyme and in Colchester.
”I actually did enjoy being in the cruiser, going on patrol, stopping and talking to the neighbors … in this job, it’s not always the big trooper hat – we wear many hats,” Lenda said.
”I always felt that patrol, working out in the public, is the best thing you can do.”
Lenda said he always tried to treat people he encountered the way he would want police to treat his family, whether dealing with a toppled mailbox or a major crime. He said that he always thinks after the fact about things he could have done differently, or better.
”For the most part, I take it home with me. I think about the job all the time,” Lenda said.
As he packed his desk in mid-June, Lenda did not bestow his town cell phone to his replacement, Trooper Thomas Fabian, right away. He wanted to go through his contact lists and make farewell calls first.
Fabian had Lenda as an instructor at the State Police Academy in 1990, and the recruits voted him best instructor that year.
”What made him the best one? ‘Cause you could tell he loved what he was doing,” Fabian said.
- Kira Goldenberg
Wildlife biologist Dale May
Dale May spent his last week on the job helping trap a meandering moose.
The moose had wandered into New Britain, attracting media and stopping traffic. It fell to the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Wildlife Division, which May headed for 15 years, to find a way to move the moose before it caused an accident.
DEP wildlife biologists successfully tranquilized the moose and relocated it to a heavily forested area. But after 23 years at the DEP, including assignments as deer biologist, turkey biologist and division head, May knows all too well that anything involving wildlife is unpredictable – especially when the situation, like this one, involves close interaction with humans.
”It went too perfectly,” said May, 55, who retired June 1 along with his boss, Edward Parker, chief of the DEP bureau that oversees natural resources, and the wildlife division’s assistant director, Gregory Chasko.
May managed 46 permanent staff and 50 seasonal workers in the wildife division, which tends to be highly visible because of the issues it’s charged with – from hunting regulations to nuisance wildlife control to setting conservation priorities. May also became known for “From the Field,” his regular column in the DEP’s wildlife magazine, which has about 8,000 subscribers.
May said he tried to get out on field biology projects with his staff as much as possible – everything from bear den checks to eagle banding to phragmites control. Last year he met with police and animal control officers in shoreline towns about the growing coyote population.
May was involved in the decision to cull the deer herd at Bluff Point Coastal Reserve and Mumford Cove through hunting and the outcry a couple of years ago over fisher cats in Ledyard.
Now May, who lives in rural Hampton next door to Goodwin State Forest, said he’s looking forward to spending more time at home with his family enjoying the outdoors.
- Judy Benson
Warden John Sieminski
As soon as Warden John Sieminski announced he was retiring, he started preparing his “transition binder.”
The black three-ring binder, about 4 inches thick, is supposed to help the next warden at Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center step into Sieminski’s shoes.
Last week, the binder was sitting on top of his desk, next to retirement cards and paperwork. On Tuesday he’ll pass it off to the next person.
Sieminski has spent more than 25 years in corrections, mostly at prisons in the northern part of the state. He’s moved up the ranks from correctional officer to counselor, counselor supervisor, major and then warden. He arrived at Corrigan-Radgowski as warden in April 2007.
He’s retiring at the young age of 47.
”It’s just time where I can go out and do something different,” Sieminski said. “I never thought I’d reach this level. I’m fortunate.”
Sieminski isn’t sure what he’ll do next, but he plans to continue to teach corrections part-time at Manchester Community College.
During the last few weeks, Sieminski has been walking around saying goodbye to staff and inmates.
”A lot of people I’ve grown up with in the department are leaving at the same time,” Sieminski said. “I’m going to miss the interaction with staff over the years working at the different facilities. I’ve met a diverse group of people.”
Of the 27 retiring from Corrigan-Radgowski, one is Deputy Warden Raymond Coggeshall, who has spent almost 26 years in corrections.
Coggeshall, 57, has worked at prisons around the state, the majority at facilities in Niantic. He said the last week has felt like a high school graduation.
”You are coming to an end, moving on with another part of your life,” Coggeshall said.
”In corrections,” he added, “it becomes a family atmosphere.”
According to Brian Garnett, Department of Correction spokesman, about 440 out of 7,000 total employees in the department are retiring, including the commissioner, two deputy commissioners, two district administrators and eight facility wardens.
- Amy Renczkowski
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