The Green Bank enters school construction financing with bill to create $425 million bond fund. Legislation provides vehicle for legitimate audits.

Legislation authorizing the Connecticut Green Bank to create and administer the Public Schools Solar Power Systems and Energy Efficiency Financing Fund advanced through the Senate Wednesday. The Office of Fiscal Analysis concluded in a fiscal note that the new program will have a significant impact on state finances. The legislation includes a $425 million bond authorization to finance energy efficiency projects.

The Green Bank was created to finance projects the private sector declined. The private sector has not been ignoring financing energy efficiency projects. The Green Bank is showing the traditional inclinations of government bureaucrats the world over: grasp, grow and intrude.

The bill provides an opportunity to address the woeful oversight of the state’s school construction grant program. The General Assembly’s loose rules for amending legislation ought to be engaged to force some sunshine on the Department of Administrative Services’s (DAS) expensive dodging of proper oversight.

After much secrecy and many delays, DAS revealed its audit of the school construction program last year. DAS’s terms of the Office of School Construction Grants & Review audit conducted by Marcum, LLP, precluded the auditors from speaking to municipalities and contractors who dealt with the program that has spent billions on financing the renovation and construction of public schools. It was a farcical exercise intended to shroud in secrecy the scandals that came to light during Governor Ned Lamont’s first term. It was, like the trial in “Bananas”, “It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham!” 

The Green Bank bill creates, in legislative parlance, a vehicle to right some wrongs. The legislation ought to be amended in the House to withhold all funds until an independent audit of the school construction grant program is conducted by a firm chosen by the legislature’s State Auditors of Public Accounts.

The audit of the DAS hazardous materials program was worse. The CT Mirror reported last month that “that more than a year’s worth of documentation was unavailable to auditors.” The DAS and Office of Policy and Management’s version of Rosemary Wood’s 18 1/2 minute gap on a White House tape recording. While federal criminal investigators may still be looking into the two programs, the legislature ought not shrug at these woulds inflicted on public confidence. Legislators should hand the hazardous material investigation to the state auditors and fund an investigation that is independent and is given a wide brief.

A collective crossing of fingers to conceal mismanagement is a betrayal of the public’s trust at a time when confidence in our institutions remains under constant attack. This is a moment to redress mistakes in school construction and related programs before authorizing hundreds of millions for a new program with no proper oversight and no urgent purpose.

Published May 25, 2023.