Portland Press Herald: Maine Senate Democrats want more answers from workers comp chief

By Steve Mistler

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AUGUSTA –– Democratic senators on the Legislature’s labor committee want the executive director of the Maine Workers Compensation Board to further explain his decision to remove a claims resolution hearing officer from cases involving the NewPage mill in Rumford.

Sen. John Patrick, D-Rumford, said Monday that he planned to invite Paul Sighinolfi to brief the labor committee on Wednesday. Patrick, a worker and member of Local 900 of the United Steelworkers Union at the Rumford mill, is one of several labor advocates who confronted Sighinolfi during a March 11 workers compensation board meeting, after discovering that a hearing officer assigned to NewPage cases hadn’t adjudicated any claims disputes since mid-2011.

Patrick said Sighinolfi gave conflicting answers about his decision to the compensation board and to the Portland Press Herald, raising questions about whether high-ranking officials in the LePage administration gave the order or whether the director acted alone.

Sighinolfi told the Press Herald, which first reported his decision last week, that he took “unilateral” action to create a rotation of hearing officers soon after he was appointed by Gov. Paul LePage in 2011, after receiving complaints from the mill manager that the officer was biased against the company in handling claims by its employees.

However, the hearing officer, Glen Goodnough, was never inserted into the rotation and was effectively removed from adjudicating 40 workers’ compensation claims disputes that he would have otherwise reviewed.

“(Sighinolfi) unilaterally screwed up the whole workers comp system because of his decision to take action against what he calls a liberal impartial judge,” Patrick said. “That sends a message to all the other judges that if a company, any company, in the state of Maine now has a problem with their perceived judgments against them, all they have to do is call director Sighinolfi or meet in some back room and he can get it taken care of. That’s not how we do it. It’s not fairness.”

Labor advocates say that the move sent a signal to other hearing officers to decide more cases in favor of the mill. Several union officials likened Goodnough’s removal to last year’s controversy over the governor’s intervention in the work of unemployment claims hearing officers, while another described the move as akin to allowing someone to pick their judge in a court case.

Patrick said, “Every injured worker wants a shot at justice. Well how can we when the whole justice system is run by one person?”

Sighinolfi said his decision was not without precedent. He said his predecessor, Paul Dionne, had shifted hearing officers on at least two occasions during his 18 years as director under the King and Baldacci administrations. But Dionne told the Portland Press Herald that he didn’t recall moving hearing officers, adding that both companies and workers frequently complained of bias when they lost claims disputes.

Patrick said the two instances of moving hearing officers that Sighinolfi has cited occurred before the executive director position was established. Both decisions, he said, were approved by the compensation board.

Sighinolfi’s decision was made shortly after the Rumford mill’s executives met with senior staff of the LePage administration in 2011 to discuss a variety of regulatory issues.

Tony Lyons, a spokesman for NewPage, told the Press Herald that company officials expressed concern about worker compensation claims. He said the mill in Rumford paid $5 million for worker compensation insurance in 2011, twice as much as any of the other eight mills in the NewPage Corp. He said the high costs make it difficult to lure capital investments from the company.

“We’re not just in competition with other paper mills, we’re competing against other NewPage mills,” he said.

Members of the union at the mill say the company is a “bad actor” and attempting to use its influence as a major employer to wipe away justified injury claims.

Ron Hemingway, head of Local 900, said during the March 11 meeting with Sighinolfi that NewPage was trying to deny claims for injured workers to drive down its premiums.

“If our company would just do the right thing and pay the claim, they wouldn’t be losing all those cases,” he said.

Adrienne Bennett, a spokeswoman for the LePage administration, said neither senior staff nor LePage instructed Sighinolfi to establish the hearing officer rotation. She said the director told staff that he had taken the action. Bennett said the administration had no objections to the move.

Matt Schlobohm, a lobbyist for the Maine AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions, told the Press Herald that the administration was once again picking companies over workers.

“It’s just another example of a company saying ‘jump’ and this administration saying, ‘how high?’ ” he said.

The number of workers compensation claims for a specific company is confidential information under state law.

According to an annual report by the Maine Workers Compensation Board, there were 13,187 cases involving injuries that caused workers to lose one or more days of work in 2012, down by 349 cases from 2011. The report doesn’t identify companies. However, each county is assigned “a disabling rate” for such cases. Oxford County has the fourth-highest rate in the state, slightly above the state average.

NewPage is the largest employer in Oxford County, according to 2012 Maine Department of Labor rankings.

It took nearly three years for labor advocates to discover that Goodnough had been moved. Sen. Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, the assistant majority leader, said Monday that Sighinolfi could have informed the board of his decision and still had the votes to ratify it. The executive director is the tie-breaker vote on the board, which is evenly divided between management and labor interests.

“If this wasn’t supposed to be a secret then why didn’t he just tell the board?” Jackson said.

Patrick said that the letter to Sighinolfi will be sent Monday. He hoped the director would appear before the Labor, Commerce, Research and Economic Development Committee within the next seven to 10 days.