Connecticut’s habit of legislating first and thinking later has again revealed its cost. Within days of the General Assembly’s passage of HB8002 — a sweeping assertion of bureaucratic housing supervision over 169 municipalities — the state’s utilities regulator issued a decision that exposes a broader pattern: Hartford creates problems faster than towns can clean them up. The Public Utilities Regulatory Authority’s unanimous rejection of the proposed sale of Aquarion Water Company was a rebuke not only to the transaction but to the improvised legislative maneuvering that enabled it.
PURA found that the legislative structure forced upon towns produced a governance scheme riddled with incompatible fiduciary duties, an erosion of local representation, an underpowered consumer-advocacy system, and financial designs that would have burdened ratepayers with years of steady increases. In the record, town officials, including those from New Canaan, Ridgefield, Fairfield and Westport, demonstrated how the law that created the Aquarion Water Authority was crafted in haste, folded into an omnibus bill, and sent through a special session without public scrutiny. The result was a structure abundant in lofty rhetoric and deficient in workable oversight.
The pattern matters. For years, Hartford has deployed its supermajority not to refine governance but to accelerate it, rushing through complex mandates whose defects are left to municipalities to litigate, reinterpret, or simply endure. PURA’s decision details how the enabling legislation created a representative board in which more than half the affected municipalities would have held no effective votes at all, replaced the independent Office of Consumer Counsel with an entity lacking staff and independence, and installed an interlocking board of directors unable to resolve conflicting loyalties. PURA concluded that these flaws were so elemental that they rendered the entire structure unfit for public stewardship.
Towns know this pattern well. When the legislature enacts sweeping directives — whether in utilities, zoning, education mandates or municipal reporting — the state announces ambition while municipalities absorb the consequences. Millions of dollars and thousands of work hours are diverted from local needs to unwinding the state’s missteps. Towns hire counsel, commission studies, file testimony, and attend hearings simply to correct errors produced by legislating without deliberation.
House Bill 8002 follows the same script. It requires every municipality to produce state-compliant housing growth plans or join regional ones. It binds zoning commissions to a series of incentives and penalties, dictates parking and density rules, and conditions relief from developer appeals on adherence to Hartford’s framework. Its aspirations are tidy; its mechanisms are indifferent to local knowledge. The bill was advanced as if uniformity were a virtue rather than an imposition, and as if a central authority were better positioned to adjudicate the differences between towns than the residents who live in them.
The PURA proceeding demonstrated the cost of such presumptions. Towns emphasized that Aquarion is among their largest taxpayers, and that the proposed PILOT structure would cause declining municipal revenue over time. They noted that RWA’s rates exceed Aquarion’s by wide margins and that the acquisition premium and debt structure would have produced steady rate increases. PURA agreed, finding the transaction contrary to the public interest and inconsistent with the statutory requirement to promote local control.
The lesson is that governance by supermajority can drift into governance by velocity: bills drafted quickly, passed quickly, and corrected slowly at great public expense. When the legislature treats towns as administrative branches rather than equal participants in the state’s civic order, it sets in motion the very conflicts PURA was forced to resolve.
New England’s strength has never been centralization. It has been the steadiness of local judgment exercised at human scale. The state should resist its impulse to manufacture solutions from above and then leave towns to repair the debris. Authority is not wisdom, and speed is not competence. The public interest is best served not by legislative improvisation but by restraint, clarity, and respect for local government.
