What did we get for the settlement money?

To the Editor:
    An article was written on Feb. 20, 2015, in the local section of the Bangor Daily News. The article was about the settlement of a “whistleblower” lawsuit settled out of court by the Department of Health and Human Services. They settled it for approximately $570,000, to make it go away.

    The reason for the lawsuit was that the once-director for the Maine Centers for Disease Control sued the DHHS, and her boss, for harassment when they retaliated against her for refusing to shred public documents. I assume it is illegal to shred public documents. If it was not illegal, I am sure that no settlement would have been awarded.
    I cannot comprehend where the money came from, if it was not the taxpayers’ money. I was taught to believe that if someone was responsible for breaking the law, then it becomes their responsibility, not the taxpayers’. It is my understanding that this money was spent with no finding of “wrongdoing.”
    We all remember when the governor commissioned the Alexander Group to come up with a document to recommend ways to cut public spending on welfare and other services. This report was found to be redundant and copied from previous “boilerplate” and was declared useless. The governor had agreed to pay the group $1 million for useful information; even though it was useless the governor still paid the group around one-half million dollars. This, I assume, was also “taxpayer dollars.”
    In adding the aforementioned figures together, they total at least $1 million. We are the second poorest county in the state, and a million dollars is a lot of money up here. It could have been well spent for a lot of different problems.
    What I want to know is, what did we get for the money? Why was no one held accountable? Perhaps the self-proclaimed “commonsense” senator could drop by my residence and give me a logical explanation. He only lives a couple of miles away.

Ron Nickerson
Guilford