Undo corrupt deal on PURA; and UConn’s bigger scandal

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont and the leaders of the Democratic majority in the General Assembly have just made state government look pretty sleazy. 

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They made a deal to reappoint the controversial chairwoman of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission, Marissa Gillett, fill two vacancies on the commission the governor had not wanted to fill, reclassify the commission as a “quasi-public” agency, and give one of the vacant positions to veteran state Sen. John Fonfara, D-Hartford, who would be constitutionally disqualified from the position if the commission remained a regular state agency.

While the deal will do nothing to reduce Connecticut’s high electricity prices —  that can be achieved only by increasing the state’s supply of natural gas and removing the “public benefits” charges from electric bills — it apparently will make the Democrats feel better about high prices.

But the deal is doubly an outrage. 

It’s an outrage first because it would evade the constitutional rule preventing legislators from serving simultaneously in the executive branch of government, thereby giving Fonfara a huge raise on top of his $40,000 annual salary as a senator. As a PURA commissioner he would be paid an additional salary of between $152,000 and $207,000, which would qualify him for a big state pension.

The deal is secondly an outrage because, as Connecticut’s Hearst newspapers reported last weekend, Fonfara has a longstanding personal conflict with the utilities commission. An electric company he founded, now defunct, is facing more than a million dollars in fines and penalties levied by the commission arising from the company’s failure to pay a $57,000 fee in 2023.

Fonfara plausibly disputes the fee and fine. The fee was imposed just before the senator’s company went out of business, and he says it never should have been charged because it was meant to cover costs of a billing system his company hadn’t used and couldn’t use. 

Nevertheless, the dispute creates a conflict of interest for Fonfara’s prospective service on the commission, and he should have made it public it before seeking a commissionership. 

Fonfara has some expertise in utility regulation and the electricity business but that’s not what his prospective appointment is about. It’s about lucrative patronage that would come at the expense of integrity in government. If the governor and Democratic legislative leaders knew about but concealed their knowledge of Fonfara’s conflict of interest when they decided to put him on the commission, this affair would be triply outrageous.

The PURA deal should be repudiated by its participants and different arrangements made, this time to serve the public, not the politicians.

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Corruption isn’t the big issue in the larceny charge brought last week against a University of Connecticut professor who is alleged to have used more than $50,000 in university money to take as many as a dozen personal and vacation trips while she was supposed to be teaching. A university investigation concluded that to justify the trips she also provided misleading or false information.

Corruption happens everywhere. Instead the big issue in this latest case of misconduct in Connecticut’s higher education system is the continuing lack of financial controls. Just as nobody at the State Board of Regents for Higher Education noticed the many self-serving expense claims submitted by the board’s chief executive officer, Chancellor Terrence Cheng, until the state auditors discovered them, the UConn professor had to take many improper trips at UConn’s expense, missing classes, before the university questioned them, and then, apparently, only because of an anonymous tip.

Of course the professor has not yet been convicted of anything. But given the attitude of state government, here is a plausible scenario: The professor will be put on paid leave for a year or two during which her prosecution will crawl through court, whereupon she will be offered and accept a plea bargain in which she pleads guilty to a reduced charge — maybe littering — and repays misappropriated money out of the income from her paid leave. 

Meanwhile nothing will be done about higher education’s lack of financial controls.

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net) 

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