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Top lawyer quitting post in human services agency
BILL SIMMONS
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The top lawyer in state government's biggest department handed in her resignation Friday, effective Dec. 1.
Jonann Coniglio, whose actions helped spur Gov. Mike Huckabee to take action to cure problems in the Youth Services Division, said she's proud of the changes since she came aboard but has done all that she can for now.
"Really cleaning up [the department] will take time," she said in a resignation letter.
Coniglio, 33, of Little Rock, became the $75,000-a-year chief counsel of the Department of Human Services on Feb. 2.
Within two months she learned from Mary Hargrove, associate editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, about problems Hargrove had found in the division. The newspaper published a six-part series about those problems in June.
Coniglio investigated the division, ordered changes and passed the information along to Huckabee aides.
Days later, Huckabee took action to correct problems. He had been told the previous August about the division's difficulties. But he mistakenly trusted state employees' assurances that the problems had been corrected, he said later.
Coniglio also requested last summer's Arkansas State Police investigation into when state officials knew about the division's problems and what they did about them.
She also testified at state legislative committee hearings into the youth abuses.
As chief counsel Coniglio supervised 35 attorneys dealing with financial audits, fraud investigations and internal investigations for the 11 divisions of the 7,800-employee department.
Her letter of resignation was delivered Friday to the governor's office. She told Huckabee in a meeting on Tuesday that she planned to leave the job.
Interim department Director Richard Weiss learned about her decision on Thursday. He succeeded former director Lee Frazier, who hired Coniglio but resigned last summer.
"The time has come ... for me to draw to a close this civics-lesson-of-a-lifetime," Coniglio's letter told Huckabee.
She thanked him for his support and said it was a pleasure to work for and with him.
In an interview she said her departure isn't due to problems with the job or the department.
Her decision is the latest upheaval in department management. Another was Frazier's resignation. A recent one was Paul Doramus' decision this month to quit as director of the department's Youth Services Division after six months on the job. Doramus cited family and health concerns.
Doramus resigned after two youths in the division's custody escaped from the Alexander Youth Services Center. One was accused of capital murder. They were recaptured in Mississippi.
Numerous joint state and federal investigations started late last year and this year into state government, including some of the department's operations.
The department's Office of Long Term Care, which handles the federal-state programs that help provide nursing-home services, remains under federal investigation.
Coniglio said the department has set up measures to ensure accountability for public money and programs, to collect money owed to the state and to reshape policies to "exclude from DHS programs those providers who fail to observer program rules or to deliver services as promised."
In her letter she said "there is no quick fix" for cleaning up the department.
"There are no simple answers. Human services has been used as a political football for far too long. I was amazed to see how much money goes through DHS and how little real accountability sometimes is attached to the spending of that money."
She said accountability will protect the state from misspending and will spare the state from repaying federal money because the state misspent it.
"Willful blindness should not be accepted as an excuse from providers or bureaucrats for the loss of money or the failure to provide services," she wrote.
Coniglio stressed that management improvement would protect the needy, who rely on the department's services.
"A serious lapse [in management] can translate into immense human suffering," she said.
Her letter also said that despite the staff's best efforts "there will be tragedies. The abuse and neglect that some human beings are capable of visiting upon others can be incomprehensible.
"DHS cannot take the place of a loving family, a caring friend, a good neighbor, an interested community, an active church, or a responsible citizenry," Coniglio wrote. "As long as society expects DHS to fill all of those roles, DHS will fail -- no matter how it is organized or reorganized, no matter how much money is thrown at it. All of the contracts, grants and state employees in the world cannot fill a void created by a general abdication of responsibility for oneself or one's fellow man."
In the letter she advised Huckabee that whoever succeeds her as chief counsel needs to "be strong and remain independent. A weak chief counsel is useless, if not potentially dangerous. There is a written code of ethics that governs a lawyer's conduct. I believe it and not the whims of the day's politics should predominate."
Coniglio also praised Bill Hardin, a retired FBI agent who has spearheaded some of Huckabee's scrutiny of state government ethics, and Olan "Butch" Reeves, one of the governor's lawyers.
In the interview Coniglio said that after her resignation takes effect, she plans to take a month or two off to "decompress" and decide her next move.
She replaced Holly Lodge Meyer, who announced Sept. 30, 1997, that she would join the Little Rock office of attorney Chuck Banks of the law firm of Armstrong Allen Prewitt Gentry Johnston and Holmes of Memphis.
Before becoming chief counsel, Coniglio was with the law firm of Friday, Eldredge & Clark in Little Rock, which she joined in 1994. She had worked for the attorney general's office investigating allegations of abuse of the elderly and the mentally ill.
A 1989 graduate of Southern Methodist University School of Law in Dallas, Coniglio also holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Texas in Austin.
Weiss said the chief counsel serves at the pleasure of the department director. He did not ask for her resignation, he said.

This article was published on Saturday, November 21, 1998

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