CL&P is Run by Greedy Incompetents

To the Editor,

Northeast Utilities is up to more games, and the citizens of CT need to pay attention. Two articles in this week’s New York Times make it very clear that this utility is run by greedy incompetents.

From today’s NYT we have this:

• “ Throughout Connecticut, residents and elected officials are demanding to know why it has taken at least 11 days to restore power to the last of 830,000 customers who lost it when an unusually early but not particularly heavy snowstorm swept up the East Coast on Oct. 29. (By Wednesday evening, fewer than 2,000 customers remained in the dark.)  State and federal investigations have been ordered, and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has gone so far as to say there may have been “malfeasance” on the part of Connecticut Light and Power, the state’s main electricity provider.”

The same article notes:

• “…Northeast Utilities, a publicly traded company, reported last week that it had made a profit of $281 million so far this year. In a filing with securities regulators, it said it would seek to recoup from its customers the costs of repairing the damage from the snowstorm. That amount would very likely exceed the $92 million in costs associated with Tropical Storm Irene that it also hopes to get back through future rate increases, the filing said.”

A few days before the above piece, the NYT had an article that made what little hair I have remaining stand on end.  The article describes how executives at NE Utilities and NStar (the Massachusetts Power company) are packaging up their proposed “merger” to make sure they get a big fat payday in which “…its top five executives could feast on as much as $50 million in severance and change-of-control payments despite labeling their deal one of mutual control for both sets of shareholders. As regulators investigate the merger more deeply, investors may want to do the same….." 

Now, the legal definition of “malfeasance” is “[t]he commission of an act that is unequivocally illegal or completely wrongful”. Every citizen of Connecticut should be outraged by the prospect of potentially criminally negligent (at the very least totally incompetent) NE Utility executives manipulating a deal so that they get a big payday – while at the same time they are poised to put their hands into our pockets (in the form of rate increases) to cover (a) their big payday and (b) the “extra” costs for repairing storm damage that was largely (if not entirely) avoidable had the NE Utilities properly planned for both Irene and the snow event. To quote from one of the articles, “…Other elected officials and union leaders said they suspected that the root of the problem was a reluctance by the company to spend money. They pointed to the company’s policy of refusing to pay outside crews to ‘stand by’ in case they are needed after a storm, although some other utilities, including Consolidated Edison in New York, have the same policy….” 

In my humble opinion, incompetent executives should be fired and replaced with competent folk – and NE Utilities and its investors should be required to pay out of its nifty profits ($281 million so far this year) the cost for storm-related damages that could have been avoided had the utility’s management been planning for these events instead of worrying about how to enrich themselves and squeeze more money from their customers.

I want to know what our elected officials have done and are going to do about this outrage. 

-Steve Symonds

Managing Director and Partner

Symonds Associates, LLC