Another missing email haunts the Public Utilities Regulation Authority and the pursuit of truth.
This time we have a reliable witness.
The latest email controversy at PURA involves one purportedly from agency chief of staff Theresa Govert that tells two of the three commissioners they cannot have direct access to agency staff. The email to PURA commissioners Jack Betkowski (now retired) and Michael Caron (still a member) either never existed or has gone missing.
It would be a serious breach to tell commissioners appointed by the governor and confirmed by the legislature that their ability to confer with the professionals who help the commissioners grapple with complex information would be limited. The commissioners often count on staff members who possess technical expertise to explain the details of proposals and their consequences. We don’t want them flying blind into the future, especially in a state with among the highest electricity rates in the nation.
A spokesperson for PURA said there is no such email–and insisted that they have looked for it.
It is odd and disturbing, then, that Caron is thought to possess a printed copy of the email in question. He has been cagey about providing it, though under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, it is a public document. Withholding information has been a disturbing feature of PURA in this contentious year.
Enter House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, with a story to tell and a document to confirm it. Candelora told me Wednesday that a year ago Caron and Betkowski asked to meet with him to tell him their disturbing story of being demoted to second class members of PURA by limiting their contact with the agency’s experts.
House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford
Candelora remembers this because several months after he heard the two commissioners’ story the veteran legislator had his staff include a solution in a proposed energy bill that he introduced last fall for consideration this year. The bill required “the chairperson of [PURA] provide for administrative support for each member of said authority….” Candelora said he did not pluck that idea out of the sky. No, he was told by Betkowski and Caron that PURA chair Marissa Gillett was making it impossible for them to do their job in the manner intended. She had relegated them to mere spectators.
During her confirmation hearing for another term last spring, Gillett denied that she had replaced any restrictions on other commissioners’ access to the staff. This is not a matter that lends itself to one of Gillett’s tiresome excuses or convoluted explanations. Either there were restrictions or there were not. Let’s see the email. Whatever it says, many questions will flow from its contents.
While the PURA mess festers, so does another possible scandal involving a prominent state legislator, demonstrating that not every question about government in Connecticut involves energy supply, cost and regulation. Federal criminal investigators are making inquiries, some backed by the force of subpoenas, about public funds directed by state Sen. Douglas McCrory, D-Bloomfield, to non-profit organizations run by Sonserae Cicero Hamlin.
It is unusual for millions in state money to find its way to non-profit organizations that are only a couple of years old and have thin or no records of providing useful services to people who need them. Cicero Hamlin, who has enjoyed a close relationship with McCrory, was able to get the money flowing into her primary organization, Society of Human Engagement and Business Alignment.
One curious allocation that The Courant’s Edmond H. Mahony recently shed some light on involved a $100,000 appropriation for Youth Summer Workforce in 2023. The money was initially to have gone to the town of Bloomfield for it to collaborate with Goodwin University on the second summer of the program. And then suddenly it was not.
State Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, is the influential and ambitious co-chair of the legislature’s budget committee. Much of the spending on these programs that legislators like to bring home goes through her. When asked about the $100,000 in summer workforce money that went to SHEBA, Osten seemed to know little about it and deflected attention to legislative staff members.
In an undated letter that appears to have been written in 2023, Osten told the commissioner of education the $100,000 for Youth Summer Workforce was to pay SHEBA “to accomplish this programming.” That letter was sent to Commissioner Charlene M. Russell-Tucker as an attachment to an email from Osten’s Senate aide. The same aide sent the letter again as an attachment to an email on August 25 at 11:50 a.m. A third email, again with Osten’s letter attached, was sent by her aide four hours and 10 minutes later.
The number of emails from Osten’s aide suggest she was paying attention to the appropriation and may have been hearing complaints that the money had not yet reached SHEBA.
Legislative staff members will need to consider their own interests as the federal criminal investigation continues. Federal agents and prosecutors are always astonished at how state government operates. Staff members should answer their questions with candor and in the presence of their own lawyer. You will not be punished for telling the truth. And don’t be clever by trying to provide artfully evasive or vague answers to clear questions.
A federal criminal investigation can include ruinous collateral damage. There is no better shield than honest answers.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at kfrennie@yahoo.com
