Superior Court Judge Matthew J. Budzik ruled Wednesday that the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) must produce all documents “within its possession and control…that concern the drafting or authorship of the December 19, 2024 op-ed.” That’s the controversial pungent opinion piece that appeared in the CT Mirror and purported to be written by Senator Norm Needleman and Representative Jonathan Steinberg.

The op-ed alleged that Eversource, the state’s largest utility, had connived to have financial ratings agencies downgrade its rating as proof PURA was damaging Eversource’s ability to do business in Connecticut. The op-ed also criticized the media coverage of the complex issues of energy generation, distribution, and regulation in Connecticut. The criticism appeared to be aimed at the state’s leading reporter on energy issues, The Courant’s Ed Mahony.

Questions about the authorship of the op-ed began to be posed upon its publication. It sounded like it was a page out of PURA chair Marissa Gillett’s manual on how to criticize utilities.

PURA has 15 days to comply with Judge Budzik’s order. If the plaintiff utilities are not satisfied with what PURA turns over, it has 30 days from today to seek additional discovery in the contentious case over how PURA has been conducting its business.

As to the op-ed itself, Judge Budzik concludes, “the court has reviewed the December 19, 2024 op-ed appearing in the Connecticut Mirror that is the basis of CNG ‘s and SCG’s allegations. The Court concludes that a disinterested observer could conclude that the author of the op-ed in question could have in some measure adjudged the facts of CNG’s and SCG’s applications before hearing the case, which is to say, prejudged whether the requested rate increases [before PURA] were appropriate.”

It is an extraordinary development in the ongoing drama of the high cost of power in Connecticut.

Gillett, it should be noted, has stated under oath she had nothing to do with the incendiary opinion piece. Needleman and Steinberg have insisted they are its authors.

Updates as they occur–and they will.

Published April 16, 2025.

David Hogg, a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, brings his campaign to clear out senior, older legislators from Congress to New Haven on April 25th. This may make some Connecticut Democrats uneasy, but two added their names to the event host committee.

Hogg, according to a Tuesday New York Times story, “said his party must squelch a pervasive ‘culture of seniority politics’ that has allowed older and less effective lawmakers to continue to hold office at a moment of crisis.” Hogg is president of Leaders We Deserve, an organization that hopes to spend $20 million ousting older Democrats. Hogg will not support challenges to every alter kocker among House Democrats. He has generously given his blessing to 85 year old former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and 80 year old Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois.

New Haven’s own Rosa DeLauro is on the event host committee. In her 34th year in the House, DeLauro turned 82 years old in March. John Larson will celebrate his 77th birthday this summer. Richard Blumenthal, serving his third term in the Senate, will mark his 80th birthday in February, the oldest person to serve Connecticut in the Senate.

Perhaps Hogg, who believes all drugs should be legal and no one should have more than $1 billion, will use the April 25th event to give DeLauro and Larson his blessing to continue to seek to serve the people who elect them to office. Or maybe he will collect names of potential Leaders We Deserve donors and weaponize them in Connecticut.

Leaders Will Deserve, The Times reports, looks for candidates for Congress who are 35 years old or young and 30 or younger for state legislative offices.

Published April 16, 2025.

State Senator John Fonfara (D-Hartford) has endured some serious buffeting by detractors determined to do him down since late last year. Forty years in Hartford politics requires adaptability and resilience. Fonfara showed it Tuesday afternoon.

The 25-member Senate Democratic caucus met to hear Fonfara present his energy plan and wow what can be a tough audience, especially to each other. Personal warmth is not a primary characteristic among members is not a characteristic of the caucus. Members protect their subject matter silos. Some members have been elected in the years since Fonfara left the spot he’d occupied for more than a decade as co-chair of the energy committee to become Senate co-chair of the legislature’s finance committee. They were not aware that Fonfara has long been the most conversant senator on energy issues.

Fonfara’s bill was a revelation for Democratic senators anxious to see something make progress during this long session that will redeem their campaign promises to provide electricity ratepayers relief.

Fonfara appears to have produced the goods. The Courant has the details in Ed Mahony’s story.

The Fonfara proposal takes some momentum into Thursday’s public hearing on it. His Wednesday unveiling will have left little time for the energy overmasters at regulator PURA to issue marching orders to mount a search and destroy mission on anything related to Fonfara.

The strange power ghostwriters at PURA exercise at the LOB may be thwarted by a plan that does something to placate unhappy ratepayers.

Published April 16, 2025.

When will they learn? If you are not Mel Brooks, nix the Nazi allusions. Even in this coarse, ugly age, most politicians must still be careful about comparing adversaries to Herr Schicklgruber and his jackbooted Nazis. Secretary of the State Stephanie Thomas compared President Donald Trump to the brutal Germans who slaughtered millions and subdued Europe from 1933 until he killed himself 80 years ago this month, defeated at last.

Thomas was addressing the semiannual meeting of the association of the state’s registrars of voters, ROVAC. On Monday, Thomas sent a long email to the registrars assuring them that her Nazi reference was not intended to offend nor was it aimed at anyone in the audience. Thomas in her hundreds of words does not include what she said, so it must have been bad. But she is sorry. House Republicans posted a brief clip including her offending comments on their YouTube channel.

The message is a bit of a ramble through the Norwalk Democrat’s philosophy of life, a host of election-related issues, and a diversion into a trip to Germany that made an impression on her. It is not an easy missive to summarize. One wag pointed out, if Thomas had read it aloud it would sounded like a hostage tape.

Decide for yourself:

Dear Registrars,

I have heard from many of you since the ROVAC conference!  Although most of the notes I’ve received have been positive – from both sides of the aisle – I have heard from three people who found my remarks “disappointing,” “unprofessional,” and “partisan.”  If three people reached out, that means others are thinking it. I do not like to let things fester and would rather address them head-on.  So here goes:

I understand if my comments made you feel something that was not my intent.  Because it wasn’t my intent, you have my apologies if you felt personally attacked.  That could not be further from my goal.  I do not look at this group as Republican and Democrat, I look at the group as election administrators.  I can see how some Republicans thought my comments aimed at them, but they were not. They were aimed at policies.

So what was my goal?  Two very simple things: 

1. If I think something is wrong, I speak up.  That is a life choice, not a political one.  You’ve seen this many times and never called it political before – when I said I would rather have no early voting than have it unfunded, when I fought for a shorter early voting period,  when I got the bonding released for new tabulators after being told we needed to wait, when I asked you all to sign on to a document about your integrity last cycle when there were many doubting it.  I think the SAVE Act and the EO are bad policy so I am educating people about both in case they haven’t read the bill or order in detail.

2. Since the SAVE Act is still in the legislative process and the EO is facing so many legal challenges and far from settled, I wanted to talk abouthow it would impact Connecticut so you could do what you want about it.  Write the White House and say you love or hate it.  Write Congress and say it should pass or shouldn’t or provide ideas to make it better policy.  I don’t tell people what to think (I tell them what I think and ask them to make their own conclusions) or what to do, but I really, really hope that they WILL think and they WILL engage in civic engagement regardless of what side of the aisle. 

Those were my only goals.  Below, I would like to address some of the common themes of concern from the three writers because they are likely shared by others:

• My statements were characterized as “…a calculated, political act.”  The most political thing for me to do would be to keep my mouth shut.  Why on earth would I purposely try to alienate half the room? Especially a closed room with only registrars?  That does me the very opposite of political good.  

• It was stated that ROVAC is an “Inappropriate place for a campaign style speech.”  I’m not actually sure what that means.  Passionate?  I’m always passionate about #1 above, but perhaps this group just hasn’t been on the receiving end before.  If you thought that was passionate, you should have been on the other side of the table during the conversation about town referenda being subject to early voting!  Or with those who said we had to have 14 days of early voting.

• It was questioned, “How do we work side by side with people who sat idly by while we were likened to the SS?”  Let me be very, very clear here. I was NOT likening any person to members of the SS and agree that I should have not said that.  It was hyperbolic.  I was not working from notes and the first thing that popped into my mind was something I’ve carried with me since taking a road trip through Germany several years ago.  I visited many WWII and Stasi museums, concentration camps, Berlin Wall, etc.  I was always struck by something I read there – about the large percentage of the population that were informal informants who passed along tips to the Gestapo with no evidence.  The language in the EO which requires the passing along of “suspects” to the DOJ sounded similar to me.  

• It was suggested that I have ruined years of registrars being able to work together on a bi-partisan basis.  I don’t think I have that much power and hope that isn’t true.  As I mentioned above, my remarks were about election administrators vs. sloppy policy writers and not Republicans vs. Democrats. 

• Someone who wasn’t present told me they heard that I was, “naming names.”  I’m not sure what that means, but I named no names.

• It was suggested, “The only appropriate comments on the laws should have been you giving us the resources to follow them as they are written. Your opinions on the laws were not relevant. Just like with EV, it didn’t matter how we felt about the process, once it becomes law/statute/policy etc. our job is to preform our duties in compliance with that law/statute/policy.”  This couldn’t be further from what I see as my role or yours.  If that were true, I wouldn’t still be trying to get money for the towns for early voting or reducing the days or switching to tabulators instead of envelopes.  And I hope you are doing the same.  What I’ve said again and again is that it would do nothing to tell ME of your complaints once the law passed.  I all but begged every one of you to testify before the law passed and to work with your own delegations since it passed to try to get the law changed.   Laws are not fixed for all time, but constantly being amended or tweaked.

My question at the conference was an honest one: if we have to enact this executive order by the end of the month, and the other provisions set for 90 and 120 days, I’m not sure how the towns would do it.  So far, our office has been cut $750,000 at the state level and last week the feds reduced HAVA funding so we’ve been cut another $738,000.  I will continue to push back on additional election reforms at this time due to the bandwidth issues of our office and your workload, whether it is Ranked Choice Voting or the SAVE Act.

Apologies for such a long email and I am sorry if some of you saw my comments as a personal attack.  I aim to be non-partisan in my work, but obviously failed in that last week.  I am human and will continue onward, doing my best.

Best,

Stephanie Thomas

Connecticut Secretary of the State

Published April 15, 2025.

The April 22nd special election has become something other than a contest between Republican Amy Romano and Democrat Mike Duncan. It is another round in the long struggle between Mayor Mark Lauretti and state Senator Jason Perillo for supremacy in the hothouse of Shelton politics.

Amy Romano holds significant advantages as the Republican candidate in the April 22nd special election for state representative in the 113th House District. The district, which includes most of Shelton, has not elected a Democrat in more than 50 years. The late beloved Dick Belden represented Shelton in the House for more than 30 years, from 1975 until his death in 2007. Perillo won a special election to succeed Belden and served in the seat until February’s special election for the Senate seat Republican Kevin Kelly gave up to become a judge.

Lauretti is serving his 17th two-year term. Shelton may like an incumbent, but no mayor lasts more than 30 uninterrupted years in power without a honed sense of potential rivals. Romano, chair of the local Board of Education, is a Perillo person. She defeated Lauretti’s choice for Perillo’s seat. Lauretti seems to like Duncan.

A successful local real estate agent married to a developer, Romano can probably speak for herself. She chose (or maybe her lines were written out) to remain silent in a strange 30-second ad with Perillo. He won his special election in February, but seems not to want to cede the center ring to Romano for even a short time. Overbearing man, silent woman candidate does not seem in sync with our times.

Romano has won an election in Shelton and would have to be a terrible candidate to lose this one. She may be hoping that no one will notice that her pledge to do something about electricity costs in Connecticut does not square with her endorsement by Perillo–who provided a crucial 2017 vote for the Millstone electricity deal that cost ratepayers so much last summer. Or it could be that issues that matter to Shelton voters must cede their place to the consuming Lauretti-Perillo rivalry.

Mark Lauretti is enjoying his 17th consecutive term as mayor of Shelton. He knows Shelton and Shelton knows him. So when his smiling face appeared in a photograph included in a mailer to voters from Democrat Mike Duncan for the April 22nd special election for the House of Representatives seat vacated by Jason Perillo after he advanced to the State Senate in a February special election, Republicans waited for Lauretti to claim the upbeat picture was used without his permission. They will continue to wait.

Duncan sounds like the type of reassuring sensible Democrat his party hopes will lead them out of the wilderness in other parts of the country. The former college varsity football player emphasizes our freedom to prosper in the oversized postcard. Duncan, a marketing professional, “serves as a Commissioner for the Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) for the City of Shelton, CT, working to ensure responsible infrastructure development, environmental stewardship, and efficient municipal services,” according to his campaign website.

Republicans chose Perillo’s candidate, school board chair and veteran book banner Amy Romano, as their nominee. Lauretti favored Win Oppel for the nomination.

Lauretti and Duncan enjoy a cordial relationship in the fraught and fractured politics of Shelton, likely an advantage to the genial Duncan in a low turnout special election.

Published on April 11, 2025.

Erin Stewart told members of the Republican State Central Committee Thursday night, “We are going to get endorsed by President Trump,” according to a recording obtained by Daily Ructions. The announcement came two-thirds through the New Britain mayor’s 14 minute speech. Stewart immediately struck a defensive note after announcing the Trump endorsement “is going to be great.” She added she will not “allow the left into thinking, believing that is a bad thing for us. That that is going to lead to us not being able to be successful.”

The Republican frontrunner, Stewart is exploring a candidacy for the party’s nomination for governor. It’s been a big month for the six-term mayor, though not one of uninterrupted high points. She announced earlier this week that she has raised $130,000 in her first fundraising report. That puts Stewart more than a third of the way to the $350,000 she will need to qualify for the state’s public campaign financing bonanza.

In pursuit of that Trump endorsement, Stewart defended and hailed the Republican president’s calamitous and incoherent mess of tariff increases. She will struggle to explain how supporting inflationary tariffs advances her to-be-formulated plan to reduce the cost of living in Connecticut, a state that imports parts and exports complex finished products.

Stewart highlighted her trip to the White House this week to witness and add her endorsement to Trump’s executive order making it easier to mine and burn coal, a head-scratcher of a plan in a state that spent decades getting rid of coal to make the air cleaner. Any feint toward “clean coal” will quickly crumble in a rendezvous with reality. Stewart’s trip to the White House this week was not without a disappointment. She told the party committee that she had spent Valentine’s Day in 2018 at the White House with Trump, bringing along her Make America Great Again hat with her for the president to sign. She left Washington five years ago without her hat and hoped to retrieve it this week with a signature, but Trump “didn’t give a shit.”

“Winning is everything,” Stewart said Thursday as she set out her stall for 2026. “You do what you have to do to win.” She witnessed in the summer of 2022 the power of Trump endorsement to upend a Republican primary race. With a late Trump endorsement, Greenwich Republican Leora Levy surged ahead of party endorsed U.S. Senate candidate Themis Klarides. Levy coasted to a 10 point win over Klarides, the former House Republican leader, a few days after Trump endorsed Levy by phone at a local party event.

Stewart allies have spent an unusual amount of time trying to push longtime veteran Trump supporters Matthew Corey and Peter Lumaj out of the early going in the Republican competition for governor.

“Our state is stagnant because stagnant because our leaders are stagnant,” Stewart said, pairing the claim the belief that Governor Ned Lamont’s popularity is declining. The incumbent Democrat has yet to announce if he will seek another third term. He would be a heavy favorite for re-election against a Republican who tries to explain why she supports Trump’s tariffs on our allies but not on the murderous Putin regime. Sorting through issues, aspirations and records are what proper campaigns do, and that is a good thing.

Posted April 11, 2025.

The State Bond Commission gathers for its monthly meeting today to approve $680,737,480 million in General Obligation bonds. Included on the agenda is $30 million for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) for deferred maintenance.

The allocation comes at a tricky time for the 85,000-student system. The Board of Regents has, in its often obscure way, expressed its dissatisfaction with Chancellor Terrence Cheng, particularly his misuse of expenses funds. The regents, which too often conduct the people’s business out of public view, are said to be in negotiations with Cheng for a separation agreement. Members of the Bond Commission ought to know Friday who will be overseeing that $30 million for the sprawling system of 17 campuses.

Commission meetings usually involve little discussion of agenda items, but if Cheng is negotiating his parachute, Governor Ned Lamont, who chairs the bond meetings, will know. It is a simple question that requires a candid reply.

The CSCU bond allocation prompted a letter to Lamont last week. Four of the Senate Republican’s 11 members asked Lamont why his administration is providing $30 million to CSCU when it has more than $600 million in reserves.

Here is their letter:

Published April 11, 2025.

Arizona’s Family News (3TV and CBS 5 News) report that Avelo Airlines has entered into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to begin providing deportation flights to assist the Trump administration’s often chaotic and lawless mass deportation program.

Connecticut officials enacted a two-year aviation fuel tax moratorium in a deal with Avelo to expand its operations at Bradley and Tweed airports. The tax holiday ends on June 30th, six weeks after Avelo begins running deportation flights from Arizona.

Top Connecticut officials, particularly Governor Ned Lamont and Speaker of the House Matthew Ritter, have been eager to accommodate Avelo’s expansion to Bradley, including with flights to and from Jamaica.

Avelo’s founder and boss explained the airline’s deal with the government with the maximum use of euphemisms. “Having a portion of our company dedicated to charter flying, without exposure to fluctuating fuel prices or risk from macroeconomic factors, provides us with the stability to grow our core business, which is scheduled passenger travel,” said airline founder and CEO Andrew Levy.

Translation: Those DHS deportation flights with who knows who filling the seats provide us with a steady flow of dough in these uncertain times.

Published April 6, 2025.

Governor Ned Lamont appeared on the popular Meidas Touch Network Thursday for the first time. In a week of dizzying hyperbole, Lamont was a calming presence after a clip featuring Secretary of Commerce Howard (“Let Trump Run the Global economy”) Lutnick. The Greenwich Democrat made a case for the federal government to inform states what its plans are and providing some runway to adjust.

Lamont said his “deal” with the state legislature is “no surprises.” He pointed out that the state is required to have a balanced budget. The governor took a few moments to shine a light on the daycare support program he proposed in his February budget proposal.

“Why are we picking fights with our friends?” he asked of Donald Trump’s ruinous tariff proposals launched at Americans Wednesday afternoon.

Ben Meidas concluded by Lamont will be back on the growing YouTube channel with more than 4 million subscribers.

Published April 4, 2025.