A Windswept Lamont

Lamont and Kooris

Governor Ned Lamont, as expected, has placed himself on the Green side of the “destroy fossil fuel production” revolution.

President Joe Biden gave the revolution a leg-up when, immediately upon assuming office, he “revoked the permit his predecessor granted to Keystone XL, and also moved to re-enter the United States in the Paris climate agreement,” according to a CNN report. Biden also restricted fossil fuel energy production on federal lands, increased regulations and bussed the cheek of U.S. Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s dystopian mission to eliminate fossil fuel production in the United States by 2035.

The remodeled State Pier in New London, we are told in a recent story, “is to be ‘transformative’, but the price tag for the project will swell once again.”

Touring New London’s State Pier, “Governor Ned Lamont… praised the ‘transformative’ potential of the future hub for offshore wind development — shortly before the announcement of an additional price hike for the project, which has long struggled with delays and rising costs.”

Wearing a hard hat but maskless -- a portent of things to come? -- the eupeptic Lamont praised the project during his appearance in New London: “This is going to be one of the most major ports in the country, just like New London was 100 years ago. This is an enormous project and sometimes there are some unforeseen things ... But you’ve got to keep the perspective. I think this is transformative for our state and this region.”

A hundred years ago, New London was a prosperous fishing port, an industry that in the modern period has suffered from excessive federal regulation.

Progressive Democrats are big on transforming big things: U.S. energy output from fossil fuel to environmentally friendly wind power, the way people in the United States vote, the Electoral College – why don’t we get rid of it? Is the Republican Party opposed to inflation, open borders, crime in the streets, outrageous spending? Why don’t we get rid of the Republican Party?

Predictably, the transformation of the New London Pier is suffering from cost overruns, which cast a temporary dark shadow over Lamont's upbeat messaging. The downdraft came almost immediately after Lamont’s upbeat message when David Kooris, chairman of the board of directors of the Connecticut Port Authority, announced a cost overrun charge of about $13 million, added to which was a $6.8 million due to “various delays” owing to – wait for it! – the byzantine process of obtaining federal permits.

“It is not the grand escalation that some people have speculated,” Kooris told reporters prior to the board meeting. “It is a reasonable number given about a half a year of delay.”

But the real cost overrun, wholly unreasonable, is considerably larger than that announced soothingly by Kooris. Scheduled for completion by March 2022, the project was sold to Lamont at $93 million. The As yet incomplete, its current cost is $235 million, a difference of $142 million, a considerable escalation that many people might agree is unreasonable.

Either the project was initially underpriced when sold to politicians willing to look the other way and blissfully unconcerned with cost -- likely because they expected some of the tab to be picked up by spendthrifts cheering on Biden’s massive post-Covid spending proposals -- or the Democrat ruling party in Connecticut knew the project, at $93 million,  would be an easier sell to a public recovering from Covid business shutdowns and a slew of programs that have eroded their personal  assets.

A persistent critic of the New London pier project, Kevin Blacker of Noank , “told the board during the public comment portion of the meeting, “Anybody that trusts your word or judgment is a fool. You’ve told us before, three times, ‘Oh, this is the maximum [cost].’”

And then there is the FBI corruption investigation now underway, a publicity thorn in the side of the Lamont administration.  The pier project, reporters tell us, “surfaced earlier this year in a federal investigation into spending projects overseen by Konstantinos Diamantis, the former deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, whom Lamont fired last year. Diamantis served as the Lamont administration’s ‘point person’ for the project, overseeing procurement and construction.”

But, not to worry, “Kooris emphasized Tuesday that, to his knowledge, the Port Authority has ‘nothing to do with the investigation.’”

Lamont’s hard hat will not protect him from cost overruns or meandering FBI corruption investigations. Some Republicans suspect that the FBI investigation is little more than a cynical attempt to protect the reigning power from legislative scrutiny close to an election. Judicial delays are every bit as costly to right reason as the unnervingly wrong cost projections of the New London pier job.