Politics & Government
Honig wants to lower electric costs, create more housing
First-term state senator says fiscal guard rails 'make perfect sense,' but there may be room 'for modest adjustments'
By Scott Benjamin
It took the Democrats 58 years to elect a state senator from the Eighth District.
The winner did it by bicycling for months through that swath of the Farmington Valley and Litchfield County.
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He won in a photo-finish – with 50.2 percent of vote to be precise – but has landed some plum committee assignments.
Paul Honig of Harwinton is now chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee and vice chairman of the Banking Committee. He also serves as a member of the powerful Finance Revenue & Bonding Committee, which has jurisdiction over tax and debt issues.
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However, Honig says he was disappointed that he also didn’t garner a seat on the Energy & Technology Committee.
He lives in a solar house and has been driving a plug-in Chevy Volt since 2017.
Jamil Ragland of CT News Junkie has reported that Gov. Ned Lamont (D-Greenwich) recently told a Connecticut Business & Industry Association forum “that the biggest driver of Connecticut’s high cost of living is electricity.”
Hartford Courant columnist Kevin Rennie recently stated that, “Connecticut remains one of the top three most expensive states in the nation for electricity consumers.”
In a phone interview with Patch.com, Honig said he has some proposals to address those soaring costs.
“One is to use the state's ability to borrow money in the tax-free municipal bond market to reduce the interest rates paid on financing improvements to the grid compared to utility company corporate debt,” he said. “Since ratepayers pay the interest on debt used to finance grid enhancements through electric rates, this could potentially save rate payers money.”
“The second idea is to move the Millstone [nuclear facility] PPA [Power Purchase Agreement] to the supply side of bill,” he added. “Since the state requires that utilities buy 50% of Millstone's electricity at $0.0499 / kWh and this represents approximately 20% of the electricity used in the state, 20% of everyone's supply rates would be based on the rate in this PPA. This way, supply rates would be more stable and so would delivery rates because Millstone PPA catch up profit and lost payments would no longer be necessary as part of the public benefit charge that appears on the delivery side.”
The Hartford Business Journal has reported that the net-zero solar home that Honig and his wife, Diane -a personal fitness instructor and chairwoman of the Harwinton Democratic Town Committee - built won “Connecticut’s third Zero Energy Challenge for creating a high-efficiency home in 2013.
“I would like to encourage more buildings to be built this way,” commented Honig. “I don’t have any energy bills, except for the monthly charge to be on the grid.”
Lamont also had advocated getting fully gas-powered cars off the road, that is, until Donald Trump was elected last November. The governor apparently has opted to change course. Unlike President Joe Biden, Trump has not been an advocate for building more charging stations.
“They are a much better product than gas-powered vehicles,” remarked Honig. He said over less than eight years he has driven his Chevy Volt 140,000 miles and only spent $2,000 on maintenance – part of that being $1,000 for changing the brakes at 100,000 miles.
“I think that they’re inevitable” he commented. “I think they’re going to catch on by themselves.”
Regardless, Honig said Connecticut needs “more charging stations and the infrastructure to handle that.”
On another topic, he said that the biggest concern he heard from voters during the 2024 campaign was “affordability.”
“I’m not particularly surprised about that, with the cost of housing, the cost of electricity, the cost of health care, child care,” he remarked. “It is all very expensive.”
“I’ve heard that from a lot of people talking about landlords raising rents 20, 30 percent, and these people have no other place to go to find a cheaper rent,” Honig commented.
He has proposed providing incentives to make more housing available.
Honig said he wants to stimulate interest in renovating existing rental units that are not in good enough condition to be on the market. “In exchange for receiving a grant, the landlord would have to agree to a five- to 10-year affordability restitution program.”
“That has been successfully implemented in Vermont,” he remarked. “I would like to see it replicated in Connecticut.”
“I think this would be a perfect program for a town like Torrington, which is one of the bigger towns in my district,” Honig explained.
Honig has bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school, in computer science and in finance.
He went to work at J.P. Morgan, where he rose to become a managing director wrote software for bond traders and salesmen for 12 years and then spent another 10 years working on an interest rate trading desk.
Jeff Lawson, the former CEO of technology giant Twilio, wrote in his 2021 book, “Ask Your Developer” that software developers have become a prized resource in a digital world.
Said Honig, “There’s a methodical way of thinking you develop when writing software that I hope to carry forward. I always strived to make the software I wrote as robust and efficient as possible. I’ll try to do the same with legislation I write.”
He said his college education and work experience also have been, “Very, very helpful in looking at Connecticut’s budget issues, particularly on retiree unfunded liabilities. The discipline of fixed-based income finance ties in perfectly with understand those types of issues and coming up with solutions to them.”
The phrase “fiscal guard rails” has been spoken in recent months more frequently than the numbers at the Friday night bingo contest. The fiscal guard rails were established in the 2017 budget vote. They include a spending cap and a volatility cap that have helped produce successive budget surpluses since then.
State Rep. Bob Godfrey (D-110) of Danbury, the deputy House Speaker Pro Tempore, told Patch.com in December that he expects a vote on the two-year state budget to include a provision to alter the guard rails and allow for more spending for education and social programs.
“I’m happy to revisit the guard rails,” Honig commented. “But I will say this: These guard rails – the revenue cap, the spending cap, the volatility cap, the funding cap – they all make perfect sense.”
“Is there room for some modest adjustments to them? Maybe,” he added. “The framework, in general, is a very good framework.”
“We have a 25-year mortgage payment schedule that currently has payments of about $3.1 billion a year” toward the unfunded liabilities. “That $3.1 billion grows to $3.4 billion over the next couple of years and then it remains active there for the next 25 years,” he said.
State Comptroller Sean Scanlon (D-Guilford) is calling for legislators to enact zero-based budgeting.
He told CT Mirror’s John Dankosky that “the current budgeting process as a system in which legislators review existing spending levels, account for inflation, then “tinker on the margins and add a few other things.” That approach, Scanlon argued, needs to change.”
“I believe that the best thing we can do is blow up the way we do our budget, start from zero, figure out whether the things that we’re spending money on are actually getting the ROI that we think they are, and as a result of that, free up tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars to actually meet the needs,” Scanlon said. “There’s a way to meet in the middle. Nobody is addressing it from that perspective. They’re just saying, ‘Well, let’s just get rid of the guardrails, and then we’ll be able to solve all our problems.’ I think that that’s a little short-sighted.”
Honig said that under zero-based budgeting you “start from zero. We basically don’t have any spending. [Then the next step is:] let’s see what we want to spend the money on. That doesn’t sound terribly realistic to me. But I would have to investigate it more before I would have an opinion on it.”
On a separate subject, Connecticut’s minimum wage has increased from $10.10 per hour to $16.35 per hour over the last eight years.
Honig said he supports the higher figure.
“When you have a state that is a very expensive place to live you would hope that the people in the state could earn a living wage,” he commented.” I think it is a good thing that lower-wage workers are earning more money.”
The Eighth District had only elected Republican senators since it was created in 1966.
Three of those Republicans – Wally Barnes of Bristol, Lew Rome of Bloomfield and Russell Post of Canton - were candidates for their party’s nomination for governor. Rome got the nomination in 1982 and lost in the general election to incumbent Democrat Bill O’Neill.
When 14-year state Sen. Kevin Witkos, a Republican from Canton, didn’t seek re-election in 2022, Republican Lisa Seminara of Avon, a social worker, annexed 50.14 percent of the vote against Honig.
In a 2024 rematch against Seminara, Honig prevailed in one of the closest legislative races in Connecticut.
Audrey Blondin of Goshen, the longtime Democratic State Central Committee member from the 30th District, said the Route 44 corridor of the Eighth District has become more Democratic over the recent years
She said that unlike the 30th District, there is no large block of Republican-leaning town, as is the case there with New Milford and Brookfield – for Democrats to overcome. A Democrat has not prevailed in the 30th District since 1978.
What elected officials does Honig most admire?
He said state Reps. Eleni Kavros DeGraw (D-17) of Avon and Maria Horn (D-64) of Salisbury, who both helped him during the recent campaign and the transition period before he took office on January 8.
Honig also gives high grades to Lamont, who reportedly is one of the most popular governors in the country.
“The situation in this state has rebounded markedly from the time he took office,” he commented.
He said that Lamont should be applauded for “coming up with balanced budgets every year and additional payments into the pension fund. The rainy-day fund has been built up; we’ve had the biggest tax cut in the history of Connecticut” with the reduction in 2023 of income tax rates for the middle income and the lower income.
Honig indicated that Lamont has not only mastered the duties of head of government, but also of head of state.
“Ned is a very personable guy,” he remarked. “I appreciate that he does reach across the aisle and talk to people and has an open-door policy. He’s willing to talk to anyone with an idea.”
Resources:
Phone interview with Paul Honig, Patch.com, on Sunday, January 12, 2025.
E-mail interview with Paul Honig, Patch.com, on Wednesday, January 12, 2025.
Phone interview with Audrey Blondin, Patch.com, on Friday, December 20, 2024.
https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/harwinton-couple-wins-ct-zero-energy-challenge
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/biographer-ella-state-organizer-kamala
https://ctmirror.org/2025/01/0...
https://patch.com/connecticut/brookfield/too-few-traffic-lights-too-much-high-density-housing
https://ctmirror.org/2024/12/05/sean-scanlon-in-the-room/
https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2025/01/15/lamont-defends-guardrails-calls-spending-cap-sacrosanct/
https://patch.com/connecticut/...
Jeff Lawson, “Ask Your Developer,” Harper Business, 2021
