So who are your commissioners, Gov. Malloy? Are they the new, inexperienced department heads you described in explaining why your budget director had to remind them to keep their opinions and ideas about running their departments to themselves?

Or are they “the top notch talent” you said you quietly gave 12 percent raises the day before Christmas Eve in order to keep them working for state government and not be lured away by a private sector willing to pay them much more?

When budget director Ben Barnes (Christmas raise from $186,999 to $209,439) issued his reminder/gag order telling these managers not to share their ideas and opinions with legislators considering the governor’s budget and its impact on their departments, he didn’t actually prohibit them from having an idea or opinion. Mr. Barnes’ memo generously told them they could share their views with his Office of Policy and Management.

But some legislators in both parties, enjoying their constitutionally guaranteed right to express their views, spoke out against the order, as did some commissioners decidedly not in the new and inexperienced category.

According to Gov. Malloy, the Barnes memorandum represents nothing more than business as usual, a reminder that, in Mr. Barnes’ rather dictatorial tone, “Agencies are expected to support the Governor’s budget rather than providing alternatives to that budget.” He might have sought the editing assistance of one of the administration’s many public relations experts.

Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, a former comptroller and legislator, quickly agreed that past governors followed the same procedure. The Office of Policy and Management, headed by Mr. Barnes, produced memos from his predecessors in the Rowland and Weicker administrations that appeared to be following a somewhat similar line. The Hartford Courant reported the Rowland era memo asked commissioners to express their views to the OPM in writing and the Weicker OPM appeared to be telling legislators to stop going to commissioners for information.

But even if this sort of thing was common in past administrations, the Barnes diktat did not sit well with current members of the legislative branch, including Democrat Toni Harp, who is the House chair of the important Appropriations Committee.

Rep. Harp reminded Mr. Barnes that the legislature’s job is “to negotiate and evaluate and build the best budget possible for the 3.5 million people of Connecticut. Denying us the ability to do that is denying us our responsibility and our authority as the legislature,” the Connecticut Mirror reported.

Nor did it impress some of the administration’s veteran commissioners, the kind Gov. Malloy presumably had in mind when lauding their topnotch status to justify their raises.

Kevin Sullivan, who was both a lieutenant governor and president of the Senate before becoming Gov. Malloy’s commissioner of revenue services, told a Courant reporter he feels free to talk to legislators about his budget and Melody Currey of the Department of Administrative Services may have been saying something about competence when she speculated that she hadn’t seen the memo because it might have been emailed to her former office at the Motor Vehicles Department.

Also joking was Comptroller Kevin Lembo, who told the New Haven Chamber of Commerce he was glad to be speaking there "since I am prohibited from speaking in Hartford until the end of the fiscal year."

Unfortunately for Mr. Barnes, his memorandum cannot silence Mr. Lembo and his consistently higher and more accurate predictions concerning the state's ever increasing deficit. His outspokeness has made him one of the more  unpopular figures with the administration, something he readily admits.

He used the freedom of the city of New Haven, and the fact he is an independently elected official who does not have to answer to the governor, to again call upon lawmakers to support a new model for developing budgets that "should be based on predictable growth, not on revenue bursts." It's an approach this newspaper has endorsed. Lawmakers could ask the governor's commissioners what they think of the Lembo proposal, but they probably wouldn't get an answer.