PROVIDENCE Frank Montanaro s days at the State House have been numbered since former House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello was defeated at the polls in November.
After months of rumors about where he might land, the former state representative from Cranston - and namesake son of a once-powerful labor leader - put in his last day at the State House on Friday.
He left quietly, without fanfare in a state Capitol building still closed to the public.
Montanaro headed business operations for Rhode Island s $46 million a year General Assembly.
As the $167,948 a year executive director of the Joint Committee on Legislative Services (JCLS), he was in charge of hiring, firing and payroll for General Assembly employees and the legislature s army of contractors, from the ever-present construction crews to the redistricting whiz the lawmakers re-hired this year to crunch census numbers.
The membership ranks of the Friends of Mattiello Club have shrunk.
New House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi s emissaries spent the legislature s recess week delivering layoff notices to 18 legislative employees. Another four left before the purge, leaving 224 on the part-time General Assembly s payroll.
The majority of the laid-off employees were former House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello s hires and/or political allies at the State House. Nine of the 22 departing employees came from the defeated former speaker s home city of Cranston.
Aceto was a $67,641 senior analyst/legislative coordinator in the legislature’s year-round Law Revision Office, which is responsible for publishing the state’s laws each year after making sure none of the newest ones wipes out or conflicts with any other law, or contains fixable errors.