I was making my way through a news story about an expensive, new feel-good program aimed at making Connecticut more innovative — tall order, right? — when I hit on a shocking fact.

It turns out Innovation Places — a program that is described with so much jargon, I still can't understand how it would accomplish its goals — is partly the creation of and now run by the former deputy commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development who kept funding Amistad America long after it had lost its IRS nonprofit status and stopped filing required tax returns with the state.

Christopher "Kip" Bergstrom was the state employee most responsible for the Amistad fiasco, giving a green light to continuing state operating subsidies after it became clear the organization was largely defunct and had moved the ship out of state.

Even as the news of the renegade Amistad America unfolded, Bergstrom, we later learned in emails obtained through a Freedom of Information request, tried to develop a "joint messaging" strategy with the director of Amistad America, who should have been the target of his wrath, and railed about news coverage of the unfolding scandal.

Bergstrom even suggested in an email to DECD Commissioner Catherine Smith that information about Amistad America finances be withheld from a legislator demanding it.

"Contrary to some reporting on Amistad America in The Day, and now the Courant, our findings paint a positive picture," Bergstrom wrote to a state economic development coordinator, after it was clear even to a casual newspaper reader that the state had been duped.

And so imagine my surprise when I saw that Bergstrom has been put in charge of a pot of $29 million in budgeted bond money, expected to be paid out over the next five years, in a program that remains largely defined, or not defined, by what he says it should be.

Wow.

Innovation Places is part of a larger remake of CTNext, a former division of Connecticut Innovations, the state's venture capital agency.

In a measure that was rushed through the General Assembly in its last session, part of the budget implementer, CTNext was broken out to become a separate entity with its own board. Its five-year budget outlook anticipates using $67.2 million in bond money, including $29 million for Innovation Places, $7.7 million for administrative expenses, $17 million for "strategic deployment" and $10 million for grants to universities for entrepreneurial programs.

State Sen. John Fonfara of Hartford is credited as the architect of the initiative, which he told The New York Times he created to foster a better environment for entrepreneurs, to replicate success stories in places like Boston, Austin and Pittsburgh.

"Connecticut has the ingredients that make for a good environment for entrepreneurs," he told The Times. "We just have never taken the ingredients, put them together and put them in the oven."

Helping Fonfara put everything in the oven was Bergstrom, then a Senate staff member, after leaving his deputy commissioner post and a subsequent part-time job at Office of Policy and Management. Bergstrom originally was recruited to state government in 2011 by Gov. Dannel Malloy, who employed him as an economic development coordinator for Stamford when he was mayor there.

Bergstrom is now leading the fledgling Innovation Places program, directing the grant awards, as a $60-an-hour private consultant, according to a spokesperson for the agency.

I totally understand the goal of creating CTNext. It is built on the understanding that Connecticut is losing out to more dynamic places, generally cities, with mass transportation, cultural opportunities and universities. General Electric moving from its suburban campus in Connecticut to Boston is a good example.

But in all my conversations with people involved in this new program, none could tell me specifically how this transformation would be accomplished, exactly how $67 million will be spent to make it happen.

They aren't going to be able to bring MIT or Harvard or Boston's subway system here.

What seems disheartening is that specific things that might help the economy, like funding tourism districts, have been abandoned in the fiscal crisis. How about train service to Westerly instead of vague innovation cooking? Millennials like trains.

I would give Hannah Gant of Spark Makerspace of New London high marks for enthusiasm in helping direct a successful application for a $50,000 planning grant for a proposed Thames River Innovation Place.

She articulates well the goal of making the region a more vibrant place to encourage entrepreneurs to settle in and create.

And yet there is no specific plan for how that might happen or even how the next Innovation Places grant, which, if awarded from a winning application, could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, would be spent.

To that end, the local effort has raised another $30,000 from local municipalities and institutions to hire the Regenesis Group of New Mexico to help plan. The consultants will generate a local report — estimated to cost about $75,000 — from its program "Story of Place — not only how a place works, but also what it has to offer."

Honestly, there is more jargon on the Regenesis website than you could shake an incubator lease at.

I am sympathetic to the idea that Connecticut is at a disadvantage in a world that is growing more partial to vibrant cities. But I am not sure that throwing $29 million — managed by someone with a proven record of failure in accountability for state spending — is the way to address it.

It is also troubling, too, that there is no way to say how the money eventually will be spent.

I thought Matthew McCooe, chief executive officer of Connecticut Innovations, put it best after CI approved the plan by the General Assembly and Gov. Malloy to spin off CTNext and put it in charge of making Connecticut more entrepreneurial, at a cost of close to $70 million.

"It's a big roll of the dice," McCooe told the Hartford Courant.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com