Sitting on a bench in the middle of the sprawling grounds of the Connecticut Department of Veteran Affairs, Deputy Commissioner Joseph Danao describes a commute home a couple Fridays ago that took over five hours. Part of the reason the drive took so long was because of weather; the other part was because his home is in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, a more than three-hour drive from Rocky Hill, even on a good day.
It is also not a drive he makes every day. Danao, a career military man from a military family, had been working for the CT DVA since 2015, and when his daughter and son-in-law were stationed in Japan, leaving him and his wife with an empty nest, he thought it might be time to retire.
They put their Oakdale home on the market in 2023, and it sold immediately, something they weren’t prepared for. Unsure of what to do so quickly, they moved everything to their home in Moultonborough, just north of Concord, which they have owned since 2002. At the same time, a new commissioner was brought on to lead the DVA and Danao no longer felt it was the right time to leave – there was just too much going on.
“It’s all about the veterans, for me. Without them, I wouldn’t be doing any of this,” he said.
Although Danao could likely do some of his work from home, employees within the DVA say he is there in the office every single day. He keeps an apartment in Connecticut where he stays during the week and makes the run home to New Hampshire on the weekends.
Danao is not alone in working for a state he doesn’t technically reside in. Inside Investigator submitted a Freedom of Information request to the state Comptroller’s office for all full-time executive branch employees with mailing addresses outside the state of Connecticut and received back 505 names, with town and state data. The information did not include actual street addresses, nor did it include employees in the higher education system, where professors and graduate students can often cycle in and out of teaching posts at different institutions.
By far, most of those employees live in Connecticut’s next door neighbor states, New York (79 employees), Massachusetts (275 employees), and Rhode Island (88 employees). Danao was one of twelve employees with mailing addresses in New Hampshire.
Some other employee addresses were much farther away, however, and yet they still maintain their job duties under Connecticut’s telework policy, which allows department heads to determine how often an employee actually needs to be in the office.
Christopher Martin, Division Director for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), for instance, lists his residence as Morrill, Maine, a roughly five-hour drive from Hartford. Martin sold his home in Ellington, CT, in 2022, according to property records.
Reached for comment, Will Healy, communications director for DEEP, indicated that, “Christopher Martin, like other managers at DEEP, works under an approved telework schedule in accordance with the State’s telework policy,” and said that no special accommodations were made for Martin’s work schedule.
A fiscal supervisor for the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) lives in Clark, New Jersey, a more than 2.5-hour drive from Hartford, yet, according to department spokesman Chris McClure, the employee “commutes to Hartford twice a week at minimum and is able and willing to adjust as business needs or exigent circumstances arrive.”
“She supervises three employees (with the unit maintaining the same telework/in office schedule) and the unit’s work is largely billing data analysis,” McClure wrote in an emailed response.
But there were others for whom a commute of any kind seems largely impossible.
A case manager for the Connecticut Department of Disability Services (DDS) sold her home in Wethersfield in 2021 and relocated to Clinton, North Carolina. According to DDS Spokesman Kevin Bronson, the state’s telework agreement “does not require minimum in-office presence,” and the employee “has maintained an appropriate level of in-person presence and has continued to fulfill their job duties satisfactorily.”
“Per the statewide telework agreement, DDS reviews each telework request and analyzes based on each employee’s specific job duties,” Bronson wrote in an emailed response to Inside Investigator’s questions. “Many DDS employees, including case managers, are approved for some amount of telework. Specific to case managers’ duties, much of their work is computer based and can be completed remotely. They are typically required to maintain some in-person presence, in particular to complete field work.”
An IT manager for the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) sold her home in Tolland in 2023 and relocated to Palm Bay, FL with her husband where she is registered to vote and maintains an online business selling crystals, while continuing to work for DAS and receiving over $150,000 per year, according to state records.
She is one of several DAS employees, generally in the field of IT, who list out of state addresses that include New Hampshire and South Carolina. Reached for comment, DAS spokesman Leigh Appleby said he “cannot speak to individual circumstances, but there is no prohibition on employees living out of state as long as they can report to their duty as required within a reasonable amount of time based on the needs of the agency they work for.”
“Generally speaking, managers are given discretion to allow employees to telework at a level that makes business sense for their agency,” Appleby wrote.
Working from home when one lives in Clark, NJ, Moultonborough, NH, or Morrill, ME, can mean a long commute; working from home when one lives in Florida or South Carolina, however, is a different story. But the raw data requires some caution – it is messy and not necessarily indicative of where someone actually resides or how often they may or may not be in the office, or whether they need to be in the office at all.
In looking at the Comptroller’s data, Inside Investigator eliminated employees whose listed address was Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and most of New York, as those commutes can easily be made, especially if they only need to be in the office once or twice per week.
For the remaining employees, we compared addresses with property records, voter registration, online state records, and, in some cases, social media accounts to determine whether they actually lived in those states, and then reached out to their employer to confirm.
In some cases, the data was just wrong or lagging: at least one manager who lived in Florida had actually retired and was no longer an active state employee. Others had retired, purchased homes in other states, but have since returned to state service as a temporary worker/retiree and maintain residence in-state. Others were seasonal employees or substitute teachers who only worked occasionally, yet were still included in the data.
Because employees must actually go into the state system to change their mailing address, and because the state hires people from all over the country who then relocate to Connecticut, we also eliminated any employee who was hired within the last year – more likely than not their address simply hasn’t been updated. In some instances, we found employees whose mailing address was out of state but who clearly lived in Connecticut because their jobs meant they couldn’t work from home.
In some cases, the employees living in states like Georgia and Tennessee were durational project managers, who are generally hired by a state agency for a period of up to three years when there is limited funding tied to a grant, or a there is a particular project that requires additional staff but the agency doesn’t have the budget to take on a permanent employee. While they function like full-time state employees, once their term is over, they move on to other jobs.
One employee whose listed address is in Georgia after selling their Connecticut home in 2023, was an IT manager for DAS for nearly seven years, before becoming a durational project employee for the Department of Social Services in 2025.
In other cases, the fact that the employee lived far out of state made perfect sense. As Senior Advisor for Federal and State Affairs, Daniel DeSimone has been Connecticut’s eyes and ears in Washington D.C. and has been head of Connecticut’s D.C. office since he was promoted in 2011 by Gov. Dannel Malloy. He lived in D.C. back then, too.
For the remaining full-time, active employees who had out of state mailing addresses – of which there were thirteen – they were nearly all long-time employees, making over six figures, and working in IT or a similarly computer-based role. DAS employs several IT experts with out of state addresses, as does Connecticut’s Paid Family and Medical Leave Authority (CT PFMLA).
Reached for comment, Jessica Vargas, chief experience officer for CT PFMLA, said the four individuals employed by the quasi-public agency — who range in location from Maine to Florida to Texas — were necessary because they possessed specific technical expertise that the agency had difficulty finding in Connecticut.
The CT PFMLA, however, is somewhat remarkable in another way, when it comes to telework for its employees: the quasi-public agency is a child of the COVID-19 pandemic that sparked the mass work from home movement in both the private and public sectors. The paid leave authority has never had a central office for anyone to go to.
“Our board of directors has discussed the question of hiring out-of-state employees in the past and determined that it is permissible to hire out-of-state employees if necessary to meet hiring needs, particularly for IT roles for which specific technical expertise is required and efforts to recruit local workers have not been successful,” Vargas wrote in an email. “Additionally, the Authority, as an agency that was created during the pandemic, has never had a traditional central office to which all of its employees report daily.”
While the IT professionals for CT PFMLA were hired from outside the state and continue to reside in their home states, other employees have lived in Connecticut and worked for the state for a long time before moving and maintaining their jobs. Of the moves that were traceable, most have happened in the last five years, and involved long-time employees who are likely on the verge of retirement.
Living in other states – or getting a head start on retirement by moving to other states – can convey certain tax advantages. Connecticut is known for its high cost of living and high taxes and is generally ranked quite low on the list of ideal retirement states. States like Florida, the Carolinas, and New Hampshire have lower taxes and a lower cost of living, which is why they’ve long been viewed as retirement destinations.
According to the state’s open data website, most Connecticut state employees retire in Connecticut. The runners up, however, are Florida, Massachusetts, the Carolinas, Georgia, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine – the same states that took up the majority of out-of-state address listings.
“All of our employees know and abide by the expectation that if their physical presence is needed at a particular location for a particular reason, they will do so,” Vargas continued. “But in general, much of the work done by the staff of the Authority is done via telework.”
Marc E. Fitch is Senior Investigative Reporter of CII. Marc was a 2014 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow and formerly worked as an investigative reporter for Yankee Institute. He previously worked in the field of mental health and is the author of several books and novels, along with numerous freelance reporting jobs and publications. Marc has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Western Connecticut State University.