The legislative liaison for the Department of Health and Human Services who told Rep. Bill Stoltze to “shut the f#%k up” over what she thought was a mute phone has been removed from her position. Wilda Laughlin will no longer be the face of the department to the legislature. Her replacement has yet to be chosen, HSS Commissioner Bill Streur said.
She’s not leaving HSS, but because of the incident, she will be doing more behind the scenes work. “She’s been a good worker,” Streur said.
The “shut the f#%k up” snafu happened on July 24, during a particularly tense House Finance Committee hearing on HSS’s budget. Committee members were becoming increasingly frustrated as time went on with what they perceived as the department’s lack of preparation and inability to answer questions. This frustration reached a boiling point earlier on Wednesday during the topic of federal sequestration, when members were scolding department officials for their inability to answer even broad questions on its impact to state programs.
Laughlin was on the phone listening and assumed that the phone was on mute when she screamed, “shut the f#%k up” as Chugiak Republican Rep. Bill Stoltze was talking
Stoltze is co-chair of the House Finance Committee, which approves HSS’s budget.
Streur recently spoke to Stoltze about the incident. He described the representative as “amazingly gracious.”
(Update: Jason Hooley, who is the director of Boards and Commissions, will be taking Laughlin’s job).
Contact Amanda Coyne at amandamcoyne@yahoo.com
Alas, I must correct myself on my old and beloved student, Bill Stolze.
Evaluations of his personality and treatment of the less powerful from his days as assistant to Rick Halford to the present are not good.The Bill Stoltze I taught long ago is no longer the nice guy depicted by Amanda Coyne and her unique sources. Here’a how my source put it:
“The man is the king of the nasty, cutting comment, the demeaning joke, and when his temper gets up, the barely veiled threat. At the end of session a few years ago (his first year as House Finance co-chair, I think) he punched the pebbled glass of the men’s room door outside the House chambers.
He could afford to be ‘gracious’ about Wilda because getting canned for crossing him is a given – no follow up required”.
Sounds like the male witch I dealt with down there, Bill Ray, in his prime. Find your old self, Bill. I apologize for being overly sentimental in my last post.
@Steve. Thanks for reading. I’m a big fan, as always.
Bill Stoltze was one of hundreds of my students whom I did not indoctrinate (because I never tried), but did work to ask good questions and to think. That he is not a bully in his present position of authority is no surprise at all. Of course I wish him well as I do all my former students, even those in prison or released to make new lives.