Public Safety Secretary Andrea Cabral’s written work schedule is far lighter than other top Patrick cabinet appointees, showing days with only a meeting or two, long daily gaps, weeks totaling less than 25 scheduled hours and light Fridays, according to documents obtained by the Herald.
Cabral — who kept a low profile in the days following the Boston Marathon bombings — stood out in a Herald review of the calendars of Gov. Deval Patrick’s four new Cabinet secretaries. Highlights include:
• Cabral totaled 292 hours of work between Feb. 1 and May 21, during her first months on the job. Other new cabinet secretaries scheduled more than 500 hours each in the same period.
• Cabral never scheduled more than 25 hours a week during the 15 weeks analyzed by the Herald.
• Her scheduled day usually starts after 10 a.m. Some days show as few as two hours committed.
• On May 13, she had just a single one-hour entry noted as “Office furniture.”
• Three days during the week of April 8, Cabral listed only one event — a one-hour meeting at 2 p.m. on Monday, a half-hour meeting on Thursday and a 90-minute cabinet meeting on Friday.
• Cabral never scheduled more than four hours on any of the 16 Fridays in the time period reviewed.
• In the days after the Boston Marathon bombings, Cabral’s schedule was also light. The next day her schedule included just a half-hour meeting with House Speaker Robert DeLeo. On Friday, the day of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, only 90 minutes of her schedule was blocked off, including a one-hour conference call. It’s unclear whether she participated in the events as planned.
Cabral refused to be interviewed for this story. Spokesman Terrel Harris said, “Events or postings on a calendar don’t indicate someone’s presence in an office. They only indicate the important events they’re committed to keeping.”
Harris said Cabral works days of 10 hours “or more” that begin by 9:15 a.m., adding, “The state is getting their money’s worth.”
Her scheduling raised eyebrows among others who have held the post. Weld administration public safety chief James B. Roche said his typical 10-hour days, starting at 7:30 a.m., were fully booked.
“We had the whole day filled out, whether you were in the office or out of the office. That’s how we ran our calendar,” Roche said. “We listed everything.”
Former Public Safety Secretary James Jajuga, a Democrat appointed by former acting Gov. Jane Swift, said he worked 12 to 14 hour days in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, and expressed surprise that Cabral’s calendar after the marathon bombings remained light.
“I’ll be honest with you, I would have liked to see more of her,” Jajuga said about Cabral’s post-marathon appearances. Of the job in general, he added, “There were very few gaps in my day during my year and a half there. I was constantly meeting, whether it was with police or fire or EMS. It didn’t matter. I was meeting with people constantly.”
Harris disputed the idea that Cabral had a low profile after the marathon bombings, noting she attended all eight press conferences and was on stage for six, but didn’t speak because Gov. Deval Patrick was the state’s chief spokesman.
Undersecretary of Public Safety Kurt Schwartz — not Cabral — testified before a House committee in Washington, D.C., last month, but Harris said Schwartz is the state’s director of homeland security. He added, “We sent who Congress asked to testify.”
When she took over as secretary in January, Cabral collected $11,847 in unused vacation time from her previous post as Suffolk sheriff — even though her actual time off was never documented, the Herald reported.