Haskell insists EverSource should face financial penalty

By Scott Benjamin

WILTON – Lou Holtz – who in the mid-1960s held a clipboard and whistle at Memorial Field as an assistant football coach for the Fighting Huskies of Storrs, before he led the Fighting Irish of South Bend to a national title more than 20 years later – has said that in life 10 percent is what happens and 90 percent is how you react to it.

Connecticut state officials are reacting to considerable challenges.

What do you do in the land of steady habits when there is a worldwide pandemic, Congress quibbles over the next steps for financial stimulus and you are already struggling with an underfunded state employee pension system?

What steps to you take when you have the worst maintained road network in the country and the tolls plan that the governor spent a year investing political capital in ends up off the table and you have to call the Bond Commission?

What is the answer when your largest college system, which was reorganized nearly a decade ago, has left the faculty and the central office administrators at the point of “no confidence”?

What is your response when a tropical storm leaves parts of the state without power for more than a week?

“Some financial penalty is needed,” state Sen. Will Haskell (D-26) of New Canaan said regarding the performance of energy supplier EverSource Energy during tropical storm Isaias.

“This storm did not come out of nowhere,” he said. “They knew five days in advance.”

“It is incumbent on the General Assembly to create greater regulations,” the senator said in an interview.

On another topic, Haskell praised Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) for his response to the pandemic.

“I give him a lot of credit for acting quickly,” he said of his ability to keep the transmission rates low. “The numbers speak for themselves.”

But what about the economic impact in a state which, according to a 2018 report, has a state employee pension system that is only 29 percent funded?

Each of at least the seven governors immediately preceding Lamont have increased taxes at some point and none of them experienced a state unemployment rate that climbed as high as 17 percent.

“I certainly don’t anticipate that,” Haskell said when asked about a tax increase for the fiscal cycle that will start next July.

He said his goal will be “to continue to fight for lower taxes in Connecticut” as he has since he was elected in 2018 just months after graduating from Georgetown University. He was the first Democrat to be elected in the district since 1970.

During the 2018 campaign he described himself to CT Mirror as being a “fiscal moderate.”

“We fought really hard to protect the Connecticut rainy day fund,” Haskell said of that rainy day fund, which rose to roughly $2.5 billion shortly before the pandemic.

He said that the governor and some Democratic legislators strongly resisted efforts to use money from the rainy day fund for transportation improvements or other programs

“I am confident that the rainy day fund will continue to be our lifeline,” remarked Haskell, who will face Republican Kim Healy, a certified public accountant from Wilton, in the November 3 election.

However, on June 24, CT Mirror reported that the “administration projects revenues will be down at least $2 billion in each fiscal year starting in July 2021, a daunting prospect made even more challenging since Connecticut’s reserves will be gone by then.”

Donald Klepper –Smith of Data Core Partners, who was the chairman of former Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s (R-Brookfield) economic team, told Patch.com this spring that, "The rainy day fund wasn't designed to absorb this kind of shock" after the state lost a combined 288,400 jobs in March and April combined.

Klepper –Smith said, in comparison, there were 120,000 jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008 and 156,000 job losses during the recession of 1989 to 1992.

Haskell acknowledged that more federal assistance is needed.

He said the bipartisan $2.2 trillion Cares Act, which was approved in March, “has been really critical,” noting that, among other things it provided drop-off ballot boxes for the August 11 primaries in Connecticut.

After congressional and White House negotiators couldn’t reach an agreement by early August, Republican President Donald Trump installed a payroll tax suspension through executive order.

In May, the U.S. House had approved the $3 trillion Heroes Act, which was never considered in the U.S. Senate.

Haskell declared, “We have to talk about the fact that Mitch McConnell [R-Ky., the U.S. Senate Majority Leader] and others want to paint local and state aid as a blue state bailout. Connecticut is slightly better off than Kentucky. The Congress needs to provide crucial state and municipal aid for red states and blue states.”

On state operations, he said “our Department of Labor has serious questions to answer” about its slow response to the unemployment claims submitted during the recession.

“Our job as a Legislature is to find out what went wrong and how can we prevent this from again happening,” Haskell declared. “This is not going to be the last recession. We need to make sure that our state is ready to support people.”

He said the obstacles were partly related to the department's antiquated computer system.

Regarding tolls, Haskell supported Lamont’s CT 2030 plan, which would have imposed electronic tolls on the tractor-trailers. He even co-hosted a forum on the plan in Westport in January.

After the General Assembly postponed votes on the plan, Lamont announced in February that he would try to allocate about $200 million via bond appropriations – the same amount that reportedly would have been generated through tolls.

CT Mirror has reported that Lamont wanted to redirect $200 million of general obligation bonding to complement the $1.55 billion already earmarked for transportation. It added that, “even with those funds, a $1.75 billion annual investment in transportation work would fall short of the $2 billion annual target” that state Department of Transportation officials have set.

Said Haskell, “It’s not going to be enough,” noting that there are, for example, “350 structurally-deficient bridges in Connecticut.”

The senator said that other than Vermont, Connecticut is the only state on the eastern seaboard that doesn’t impose tolls. He said that option would have been better than putting the costs “on the state’s credit card.”

“I’ve never seen a counterproposal [to tolls] that is responsible,” Haskell exclaimed, noting that a tolls plan would have reaped considerable revenue from out-of-state motorists.

Haskell is the Senate co-chairman of the General Assembly’s Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee.

Over the recent years there has been much static between the faculty and the Board of Regents, which oversees 12 community colleges, Charter Oak College and the four, four-year universities.

There have been multiple votes of “no confidence” regarding the performance of Mark Ojakian, who recently announced that he was retiring after five years as the president of the Board of Regents, and before that Gregory Gray, his immediate predecessor, as they have tried to consolidate operations. There also have been votes of “no confidence” on the Board of Regents.

However, there has been little public criticism from students on the CSCU 2020 and Students First consolidation plans that have been proposed by the Board of Regents.

Did former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) and the General Assembly make the best decision in 2011 to establish the Board of Regents?

Haskell said, “I’ve tried really hard in my first term not to litigate the last 20 years but to focus on the next 20 years.”

He acknowledged that by moving from separate boards of trustees for the two-year and for the four-year campuses to a Board of Regents there have been “centralized savings, pool purchasing and consolidation of back-office functions so money is spent in the classroom on students. I think there is a lot of validity to that.”

Ojakian has sought through the Regents’ Students First proposal to move high-level administrative functions from the community colleges to the central office in Hartford in an effort to generate cost savings. The plan has the support of Lamont and is awaiting approval from the New England accreditation board.

However, CT Mirror reported last December that a statement from the unions said the consolidation “will not realize the projected savings, will be disruptive for students, will have negative consequences on critical student outcomes, and will erode the value of the community colleges for students and for the state of Connecticut for years to come.”

Haskell stopped short of endorsing the proposal, but noted that he sees “that the potential for the cost savings in the Students First plan are not minor.”

Yet, he added that he has a grandfather who taught at a community college who “regularly supplies me with the other side of the argument” regarding Students First.

Added Haskell, “If you asked everyone on our [Higher Education] committee, on the Students First plan you would get a dozen different answers. That is alright, because the Legislature is going to ask those difficult, critical questions of both sides to figure out the best path forward.”

The Hartford Courant reported seven years ago that Gray, shortly after becoming president of the Board of Regents, said that online learning, largely through Charter Oak College, would become the most transformative part of his reform plan. Several faculty members criticized that proposal.

Earlier this year, former state Rep. Dan Carter (R-2), who is seeking his former state House seat, told Patch.com that more online learning is needed in the system.

“I don’t disagree with Dan,” Haskell said. “I think we could use Charter Oak more.”

He said he already has taken steps to “lower the barrier of affordability” for students, noting that it has reached the point that some potential students could not pay to attend a community college.

“We have the highest student debt per capita in the country,” said Haskell.

He helped write the PACT program (Pledge To Advance Connecticut) – which according to a news release is “last-dollar funding, meaning it covers the gap between the federal and state grants” that students receive “and the cost of attending community college (tuition and mandatory fees). Students are required to take at least 12 credits.

Haskell also helped develop a program for employees who are full-time workers who have lived in Connecticut and been employed full-time for at least five years after graduation. Starting in 2022, each employer who makes loan payments directly to state loan authorities can claim a credit equal to half of the payments they make during any given year. The program allows them to receive these tax credits for no more than five years. The maximum payment available in a given year is $5,200, according to a news release.

Haskell said CT Realtors “is excited” about the plan, since it believes it will facilitate more young people buying their first home sooner.

He said some legislators wonder why he is interested in community colleges since there are none in his district, which travels from New Canaan to Bethel.

The senator explained that most community college graduates live in Connecticut and stay in Connecticut after graduation. For example, he said advanced manufacturing companies can’t find enough qualified community college graduates in that field. Lamont told Patch.com in 2018 that a student with a degree in advanced manufacturing from a community college could get a job at a higher starting salary upon graduation than someone who had just graduated from Yale with a degree in Sociology.

Remarked Haskell, “If you want to invest in Connecticut’s 21st century work force, then you need to invest in our community colleges.”