One year after the state’s college system was reorganized in an effort to reduce administrative costs, the executive vice president was given 27 percent pay raise.

Mike Meotti’s annual salary was boosted in October from $183,339 to $232,244, according to the Office of the State Comptroller.

Meotti, Robert Kennedy, the Board of Regents President, and Lewis Robinson Jr., the board chairman, were not immediately available Friday to comment on the increase.

Three weeks after Meotti’s pay increase went into effect, the Board of Regents sent out a press release boasting about the 47 new faculty positions they were able to fund through the reorganization and reduced administrative costs.

“From the very beginning, the higher education consolidation was predicated on the fact that we were spending too much money on the operation of our separate governance structures and not enough money in our classrooms,” Lewis Robinson said in the release.

The college system has been in the media spolight this week following news that the 12 community college presidents are being offered an “expedite[d]” dismissal from their post.

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Jacqueline Rabe Thomas

Jacqueline was CT Mirror’s Education and Housing Reporter, and an original member of the CT Mirror staff, joining shortly before our January 2010 launch. Her awards include the best-of-show Theodore A. Driscoll Investigative Award from the Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists in 2019 for reporting on inadequate inmate health care, first-place for investigative reporting from the New England Newspaper and Press Association in 2020 for reporting on housing segregation, and two first-place awards from the National Education Writers Association in 2012. She was selected for a prestigious, year-long Propublica Local Reporting Network grant in 2019, exploring a range of affordable and low-income housing issues. Before joining CT Mirror, Jacqueline was a reporter, online editor and website developer for The Washington Post Co.’s Maryland newspaper chains. Jacqueline received an undergraduate degree in journalism from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in public policy from Trinity College.

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