Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Complexity has been added to complexity in the unfolding PURA mess. And we all know, do we not, that political fraud of every kind nests comfortably in complexity, awaiting a resolution that resolves little?   PURA is Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Until the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the commission’s top position, PURA was, according to statute forming it, a (six) member commission whose mission was the regulation of public utilities.   The commission was from its inception imperfectly formed. There are presently three members serving on the PURA board. Gillett, Governor Ned Lamont’s handpicked chairman is, most political watchers will agree, a disturber of the peace, but she has the unqualified support of Lamont and gatekeepers in the Democrat dominated General Assembly, chief among them Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff of Norwalk. When these three work in concert, alternative voice...

Tong No one – least of all Connecticut Attorney General Willim Tong – should be surprised at Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik’s ruling in a long-delayed case before his court. In his ruling, according to the Hartford Courant, “Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik upheld every allegation two Avangrid gas subsidiaries made in lawsuits seeking to overturn year-old PURA rate decisions that not only denied the companies rate increases, but slashed then existing rates.”   Budzik’s ruling, tight and unequivocal, should be taught to prospective lawyers as a pristine example of what good lawyers may and may not do in defense of their clients. Hint: Remember, you are an officer of the court. At all costs, avoid misleading the court. If you fail to do so, you will do your client, your boss and your case irreparable harm on those occasions when the case is presented to a judge uncorrupted by political considerations.   Not only did Budzik decide the case rightly on its merits, h...

Tong Republican leader in a General Assembly disproportionally controlled by Democrats, State  Senator Stephen Harding of Brookfield, and six other Republicans have signed a letter addressed to Governor Ned Lamont demanding the resignation of associates of former Chairwoman of Connecticut’s  Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) Marissa Gillett, who recently surrendered her office.   The six Republican senators, the Hartford Courant tells us, “are asking if two of her [Gillett’s] subordinates will also leave their jobs, along with an assistant attorney general who represented the agency.   “In light of the recent stories regarding public confessions of the intentional misleading of a Connecticut Superior Court judge, have the following individuals been asked to turn in their resignations?” the senators asked Gov. Ned Lamont and Attorney General William Tong in a letter. Those mentioned thus far were “PURA’s General Counsel and Legal Director Scott Mus...

Marissa  Gillett Credit Yehyun Kim  ctmirror.org A Hartford paper on Wednesday led with a story titled “ A grim outlook for more utilities .” The utilities in Connecticut are energy distributors, not energy producers. Their operations are overseen by PURA, the Connecticut Public Utility Regulation Authority.   “Overseen” certainly is too weak a word. PURA exercises life and death powers over Connecticut utilities because the oversight agency, under the direction of PURA Chairman Marisa Gillett, is able to deny energy distributers   cost increases that, like all business taxes, are passed along to its customers – virtually everyone in Connecticut.   Three principal rating agencies have downgraded Connecticut’s energy distributors and, as the paper headline suggests, this news is “grim” for both energy consumers and energy distributors.   A rating downgrade increases prices because it increases the cost of borrowing money. Companies borrow money t...

Lamont and Gillett A Hartford paper reports, “UI’s [United Illuminating’s] continuing, harsh criticism of [PURA chairwoman Marissa] Gillett at the hearing and an energetic defense by Attorney General William Tong’s office suggest the contention between PURA and the utility industry that has grown during Gillett’s five years in office did not disappear with her decision a week ago to resign.”   Gillett’s resignation from her post on September 19 likely will not put a period to an ongoing suit between Connecticut’s energy suppliers and PURA because the legal claims at issue are beyond the reach Governor Ned Lamont, a supporter of Gillett, and other advocates of price controls – which, we all know, have never worked in the long run to reduce prices.   The contested issues can only be settled by a court. Gillett has magnanimously agreed to abstain from any decision made by PURA affecting the as yet unresolved suit until she leaves office on October 10.   Gillett’s “d...

Lamont and Gillett PURA, Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, was instituted to regulate the state’s energy sector, principally two companies – Eversource and United Illuminating – neither of which are energy producers.   The head of PURA, Marissa Gillett, has secured her reappointment, but her job specs have been changed.   We were told in a recent Hartford Courant story, “Gillett has been at the center of a firestorm as the utilities have filed lawsuits in a contentious atmosphere for an agency that in the past was known for being low key and not making headlines… Eversource and United Illuminating filed a lawsuit against PURA, saying that Gillett was deciding issues unilaterally by freezing her two fellow commissioners out of the decision-making process, an allegation PURA and Gillett’s political supporters deny.”   Some Gillett supporters in the General Assembly had inadvertently dotted the “i” and crossed the “t” of the suit’s claim by pr...

  Lamont and Gillett In proving foresight may be vain/The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley – Robert Burns   At a minimum, the Connecticut Freedom of Information (FOI) law and its Commission, responsible for enforcing the FOI law, have been entrusted by the state legislature to assure an open political process and to guard against insufferable political effronteries to the law.   In brief, the law stipulates that politicians and administrators of the public’s business cannot do anything they like all the time; there are limits to the nearly limitless arrogance of Connecticut’s one-party state, always verging, as is common in one-party states the world over, on the razor’s   edge of imperious arrogance.   In an age in which politicians wish to conduct the public’s business privately and off the record, the internet and legal propinquity threaten to spoil the best laid plans of mice and men.   That is exactly what happened whe...

The trouble at PURA and the two energy companies it oversees began – ages ago, it now seems – with the elevation of Marissa Gillett to the chairpersonship of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulation Authority.   Connecticut Commentary has previously weighed in on the controversy: PURA Pulls The Plug on November 20, 2019; The High Cost of Energy, Three Strikes and You’re Out? on December 21, 2024; PURA Head Butts the Economic Marketplace on January 3, 2025; Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA on February 3, 2025; and Lamont’s Pillow Talk on February 22, 2025:   The melodrama full of pratfalls continues to unfold awkwardly.   It should come as no surprise that Gillett has changed the nature and practice of the state agency. She has targeted two of Connecticut’s energy facilitators – Eversource and Avangrid -- as having in the past overcharged the state for services rendered. Thanks to the Democrat controlled General Assembly, Connecticut is no l...

Juliana Simone Voltaire, one of Thomas Jefferson’s heroes who was driven from country to country by the victims of his stinging wit, thought that if states wanted to take a proper measure of freedom of expression, they should ask what cannot be said. Many are the ways of clipping freedom of speech. The modern world offers unique possibilities. Connecticut's  Public Utilities Regulatory Authority  (PURA) does not paste gags over the mouths of its victims or lay them on racks, pre-enlightenment methods much too crude for modern, refined sensibilities. But there is a small, valiant number of contrarians in Connecticut who believe that PURA has not been responsive to their justifiable pleas. One of them is Chairman of the Barkhamsted Republican Town Committee Juliana Simone – obviously a Republican and as obviously conservative-leaning. Simone has been the Host/Producer of "Conservative Chat", operating undisturbed out of a studio in Winsted, Connecticut for 14...

Tong The bottom line is this: Once a political matter moves from the political to the judicial arena, political pretentions crumble because Connecticut’s court system is not supposed to be a creature at the beck and call of a one-party state executive department. Even in a one-party authoritarian apparat, Connecticut’s independent and separate judiciary serves constitutionally as a buffer that blunts executive overreach. The judiciary operates according to judicial rules, not executive fiat, and its constitutional independence depends wholly upon the just judgment of judges.   In Judge Matthew J. Budzik’s New Britain Superior Court, prior claims made by PURA collided with a judicial stone wall.   According to a Hartford Courant report, “CT judge learns ex-state official [Gillett] misled court on records that were erased,” a Gillett defense lawyer from Attorney General William Tong’s office admitted in court, following the resignation of Marisa Gillett as the chairman o...

Marrisa Gillett With an appreciative nod from Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, Marissa Gillett , has now challenged energy providers in Connecticut to accept what she regards as a fait accompli : swallow losses without raising your prices. Gillett , the head of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) , might very well be the point of a neo-progressive spear in the northeast should she remain untethered to economic reality.     PURA was instituted to oversee energy prices in Connecticut . Gillett and other price control advocates in the state believe the regulatory agency has in the past operated as a r egulation umpire standing between energy producers and energy consumers calling balls and strikes on price increases.     An early interview with Gillett featured in Voltz may seem to the average energy consumer unfamiliar with regulatory jargon unnecessarily obtuse, but here and there Gillett ’s program lifts its head above the d...