It was an accomplishment this year what has long been thought impossible.
But the Public Utilities Regulatory Agency and Attorney General William Tong did it.
They have made the state’s two largest utilities, Eversource and Avangrid, sympathetic figures. I’m as surprised as you are.
The revelations of what has gone on inside PURA for the past several years, but especially this year, caused its powerful former chair, Marissa Gillett, to resign months after she won a contentious confirmation fight for another term.
The PURA employee designated to comply with requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act, Jeff Gaudiosi, claimed in an email that his supervisor had pressured him to withhold public documents. The supervisor, PURA lawyer Scott Muska claims he has been defamed by what Gaudiosi wrote and sent a cease-and-desist letter to his subordinate and the recipients of the email. The attorney general’s office, which has deployed its own army of lawyers in PURA’s fight with the two utilities, hired an outside law firm to handle that internal PURA dispute.
Because the utilities have the money to press a fight when many litigants would have folded, PURA was forced to admit in June after weeks of wrangling that its failure to produce text messages was not because the messages did not exit, as it had previously claimed. No, no, no. Any text messages that Gillett sent or received were automatically deleted because that was the setting she chose to use on her phone.
More astonishing revelations came recently from outgoing PURA commissioner Michael Caron’s testimony in a November 5 deposition conducted by utilities lawyer Thomas Murphy that delved into the internal workings of the agency while Gillett ruled over it. Though Caron has served as one of three PURA commissioners for 13 years, he seems to have spent the Gillett era as a generously paid $188,000 a year observer rather than a vigorous participant in the agency’s business.
Murphy asked about the missing texts. Caron testified that he and Gillett had discussed automatically deleting texts from their cellphones. Gillett did it, and so did Caron. Caron told Murphy he did not want anyone to see messages from his wife. When the attorney general’s office told Judge Budzik that there were no text messages to provide the utilities, Caron knew why but said nothing.
Caron also testified that Gillett sidelined him and his amiable colleague, former commissioner and vice chair Jack Betkowski, from participating in the panels that handle much of the agency’s business. Curiously, Caron never confronted Gillett to complain that he was being given little to do. When a directive came from Gillett through PURA chief of staff Teresa Govert, that Caron and Betkowski would no longer have direct access to the staff members vital to understanding the agency’s complicated business, Caron did not complain to Gillett about being iced. Instead, the former Republican legislator raised the issue with Gov. Ned Lamont and his chief of staff. Lamont agreed the change was not right, but nothing came of it.
When Gillett testified before the legislature in February on her renomination by Lamont, House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, asked her if she had imposed restrictions on her fellow commissioners’ access to PURA staff. She said she had not and added that she had statements from them to that effect. Caron and plenty of people at PURA, knew Gillett had not told the truth. And everyone said nothing. They chose silence. Gillett was confirmed. When the email containing the new policy appeared in September, Gillett resigned.
At the center of the utilities’ litigation is the claim that Gillett was not a fair arbitrator of the business before PURA. Instead, they contend, she was actively hostile to the utilities. Who wrote or edited an incendiary opinion piece excoriating the utilities that appeared in the CT Mirror continues as a mystery that would have sent Agatha Christie to her typewriter to solve.
State Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, and state Rep/ Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, say they wrote it and their names appeared last December as its authors. Text messages between Steinberg and Gillett on Steinberg’s phone uncovered by The Courant’s Ed Mahony suggest she had a hand in it.
Caron volunteered in his deposition that he doubted Needleman and Steinberg know enough about the intricacies of utility finance to have written the op-ed on their own. He called the piece, which accused international financial ratings agencies of conspiring with Connecticut utilities to lower their bond ratings “ridiculous” and “preposterous.”
The Caron deposition is so jarring that Tong wants the court to restrict the scope of questioning of other witnesses by the utilities. Tong also wants the court to prevent the utilities from deposing Needleman and Steinberg. As Tong seeks to gain a reputation by joining with other states in challenging the Trump administration’s frequent outrages, the Stamford Democrat diminishes his credibility in the search for truth on a national scale by becoming sunlight’s primary obstacle here in Connecticut.
This is not a story without a hero, you will be glad to know. State Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, the legislator who knows the most about energy, detected Gillett’s machinations to accrue power at the expense of the other commissioners long before others did. He was able to stop some of it, to the fury of some of his Democratic colleagues.
Sen. John Fonfara. (File photo)
In exchange for his interventions, Fonfara suffered considerable abuse, publicly and privately, from his Democratic colleagues. He carried on. Events have revealed that Fonfara’s critics were often wrong but never in doubt. While Fonfara has been looking for ways to make electricity less expensive, others devoted their energies to the loud, strange cult of personality that formed around Gillett. If they had only been wasting their time, we could recover that cost. They dealt blow after blow after blow to their own and state government’s credibility.
That damage is not easily repaired. Drawing a veil of silence over what came before impedes the way forward.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at [email protected]