By CHRIS POWELL
Just hours after she was caught lying to state legislators, the chairwoman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa P. Gillett, resigned last week, blaming her vindicated critics for making her life harder than she could bear.
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For weeks Gillett and her office had been denying that other members of the authority had been instructed by e-mail to avoid contacting authority staff directly to get information about the authority’s work. Gillett and her office insisted that extensive searches had found no evidence of the e-mail, though witnesses insisted such e-mail had been sent.
The underlying suspicion was that the chairwoman had commandeered the authority and was trying to freeze out its other members.
With questions and doubts intensifying, especially among members of the Republican minority in the General Assembly, and with lawsuits by the utility companies progressing, increasing the chance that any concealment would be undone, last Wednesday the authority announced that it had found the disputed e-mail after all and it indeed had come from Gillett’s chief of staff.
So on Friday Gillett resigned, presumably hoping to foreclose the investigation of her lying that the legislature might have been obliged to undertake if it had any self-respect.
Gillett and the authority long have been feuding with Connecticut’s two major electric utilities, Eversource and United Illuminating, over their rates and performance. The companies didn’t like the greater scrutiny they were getting under Gillett’s regime.
But then the companies long have been scapegoated for state government’s own deceitful inflation of Connecticut’s electricity prices, which are nearly the highest in the country in part because state government, through the regulatory authority, was stuffing electric bills with hidden taxes, now infamous as “public benefits charges.”
The deceitfulness of the “public benefits charges” has always impugned utility regulation, especially since regulation’s pose of seeking efficiency from the electric companies contrasts so laughably with state government’s extravagance, negligence, and indifference with its own operations.
Who has been more justified in the feud between the regulatory agency and the companies? Maybe a more honest and collegial agency under a new leader can regain credibility and find out.
In her letter of resignation to Governor Lamont, Gillett wrote that her conflict with the electric companies was distracting from the regulatory authority’s work “and has exacted a real emotional toll both for me personally, as well as my family, and for my team. … There is only so much that one individual can reasonably endure, or ask of their family, while doing their best to serve our state.”
But the electric companies didn’t make Gillett lie, and if she hadn’t been caught lying, she would have continued to build her empire and wouldn’t have resigned so fast.
MAYORS CAN’T STOP CRIME: Having become a one-party city — Democratic, of course — New Haven is fortunate to have a vigorous Republican challenger to Mayor Justin Elicker in this year’s election: Steve Orosco.
It’s Orosco’s job to find fault with Elicker’s administration, and the other day he did so by raising the issue of crime in the city. “Pain and fear remain on every block,” Orosco said.
But violent crime in New Haven, as in Connecticut’s other impoverished cities, goes up and down, sometimes with the weather, and its level in New Haven this year isn’t so different from the average. Further, no mayor of New Haven or other impoverished city in the state could affect crime very much without something like President Trump’s placing an armed National Guard soldier on every corner, as he did in Washington, D.C. Connecticut’s policy isn’t to reduce crime as much as to confine it to the cities.
Urban crime is a matter of demographics created by long-failing state and national policies that have turned cities into poverty factories. No city mayor can bring the fathers home to help raise the children they abandoned. The most a mayor can do is try to restrain the looting done by the government employee unions, and politically the unions are more fearsome than the criminals.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 