OPINION: Size of growing State Pier cost overruns is still a secret
Mar. 8—The notion that the quasi-public Connecticut Port Authority, the subject of a wide-ranging federal criminal probe, is managed by a competent board is absurd.
It's full of Gov. Ned Lamont administration lackeys and a gaggle of yes people who have stayed on beyond their original terms. Many board seats are vacant, left empty by the governor and Democrats in charge of the legislature, where they seem to love to sweep corruption under the rug.
Almost comically, if it were not so pathetic, Board Member John Johnson has stayed on the board well beyond his original term and continues to routinely vote on matters related to the State Pier project, despite a ruling from the Connecticut Office of State Ethics that he shouldn't because he has a conflict due to property he owns nearby.
The governor, who has known about these ethical lapses for two years, could replace Johnson tomorrow, but he won't for some strange reason.
Why expect more, or any ethical behavior at all, from an agency that had an ethics officer — someone who was hired as an administrator, despite a lack of any relevant experience, because he was a pal of the former chairman — himself cited for an ethics violation.
Still, at the Feb. 21 authority board meeting, David Pohorylo, a member first appointed by the Republican House minority leader, managed to get in a few hard questions about the enormous and still-climbing cost overruns of the State Pier project before he was shut down without getting answers.
Pohorylo simply wanted to know a ballpark — are we talking $1 million or $50 million more — for the latest cost of the project, which has soared from $93 million to more than $250 million.
He was asking the question of Executive Director Ulysses Hammond, who you would think would be obligated to answer a relevant query from a board member. But he didn't.
Of course Hammond knows the ballpark figure that the board member was asking about. But he refused to say.
He actually laughed at Pohorylo's question before not answering.
Hammond also, in his February report to the board, neglected to mention that the port authority, which is broke, running a deficit, is the subject of a lawsuit by a pier subcontractor which claims it hasn't been paid $800,000 for work it has done.
Hammond and Board Chairman David Kooris, who is also not publicly forthcoming about the latest cost increases, actually have begun to say now that the first phase of the project is substantially complete, never mind the logistical mess and continuing delays for later phases.
They sound to me like car dealers, saying their slick new baby is ready to roll off the lot, but they are not prepared to say how much it will cost. The final cost is actually a secret.
Imagine being this far along in such an enormous undertaking and not be willing to say how much — even a range — the whole thing will cost. Indeed, the director actually laughed at the question, when it was posed by a board member, and then didn't answer.
Certainly Kooris and Hammond know generally how much more it is going to cost because they say they are in negotiations with the end users of the remodeled pier, utilities Eversource and Orsted, to get them to pay more money.
You may remember that the governor, in signing the pier deal with the utilities, agreed that taxpayers would cover all the cost overruns. He said — I am not making this up — that he was accepting responsibility for all overruns because he was a smart businessman who knew what he was doing.
So far we have been hearing for months about the negotiations with the utilities to ask/beg them to pay more, even though our business-savvy governor long ago promised them they wouldn't have to.
But we haven't heard that they have agreed to let the governor and taxpayers off the hook.
My guess is that the answer is a big no.
This is the opinion of David Collins
