THE POWER OUTAGE BLOG

• Fuel cells get new attention from DEEP:  How about the fuel cell proposal that Weston had made?  CL&P opposed it fiercely?  Can or should Weston revive this?
• Reading angry letters in online publications makes me wonder:  Will the Westonites angry at the prolonged power outage bother to vote?  And how would they vote?  If people are still without power on Election Day, don't you think there would be a 100% turnout?  At least it should be warm at the Middle School Gym! 

• The Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) must review the emergency preparedness of each electric and gas utility and phone company. The review covers damage and outage estimate procedures, restoration management, planning for vulnerable customers, communications with state and local officials and customers, mutual aid agreements, infrastructure adequacy, coordination with other utilities, and tree trimming policies.
• PURA must establish minimum performance standards for utilities’ preparation and restoration practices. These will include minimum staffing and equipment levels, communications, mutual aid agreements, tree trimming and removal, and call center and internet operations. PURA will set restoration targets for outages that affect 10%, 30%, 50%, and 70% of each utility’s customers.
• Utilities must submit to PURA their plans for implementing the performance standards. They must also submit annual emergency response plans, along with reports on compliance with the standards.·         PURA may issue civil penalties for noncompliance with standards. Electric or gas companies may be fined up to 2.5% of their annual distribution revenue. The maximum for phone companies is $20 million. Utilities may not recover fines from ratepayers.
• Land line and cellular phone companies must report annually on their backup power capabilities.
• The Department of Transportation (DOT) and municipalities must notify PURA of road work plans so it can evaluate opportunities for installing or improving utility lines.
• The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) must establish a $15 million micro-grid pilot program to award grants or loans to support local distributed energy generation without a connection to the main grid for critical facilities like hospitals, police and fire stations, and shelters. Municipalities of all sizes will be chosen for the pilot.
• Several government agencies must work together with utilities and towns to establish procedures to expedite road-clearing during emergencies.
• Under certain conditions, phone companies must provide bill credits to customers for service outages that last more than 24 hours.
• PURA must study the feasibility of reimbursing customers for food and medication spoilage.

• 27 Fired, 10 Retirements, 5 Resignations In Food Stamp Fraud Scandal
  By Christopher Keating, Hartford Courant On March 12, 2012
  
  The food stamp fraud scandal has now led to the firings of 27 state employees and the retirements of 10 others, the Malloy administration announced Monday afternoon.
  
  In addition, five state employees have resigned their positions instead of going through the long process of hearings and arbitration in order to try to save their jobs. All 42 employees who have left state service are potentially subject to criminal sanctions, but no arrests have been announced.
  
  “When we announced this investigation, we said that allegations of fraud by state employees would not be tolerated,”  Malloy said in a statement.  “While this is certainly not something anyone should take joy in, the people of Connecticut should know we are serious about running a government that honestly serves them.”
  
   He added, “We’ve said all along that we were working with our partners at the state and federal level, and now we’re seeing positive results for our taxpayers. We will continue with this investigation until we have taken appropriate action against any employee that knowingly defrauded this federal program.”
  

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• CL&P Will Credit $140 To 192,000 Households For Power Outages After October Storm
  The Hartford Courant
  By JANICE PODSADA, jpodsada@courant.com
  February 01, 2012
  
  Connecticut Light & Power will give a credit totaling $140.22 to customers who were still out of power a full week after the Oct. 29 snowstorm, the company announced Wednesday, one day after the deadline for customers to apply for the rebates.
  
  More than 192,000 CL&P residential customers applied and were qualified because they were without power as of noon, Nov. 5. They will receive the credit in their February bills as part of the utility's $30 million storm compensation fund, Northeast Utilities, the parent company of CL&P, said Wednesday.
  
  The utility had pledged to provide eligible customers between $100 and $200, depending on the number of eligible ratepayers claiming the credit.
  
  About 225,000 customers were eligible to receive the credit, the company said, but many did not seek the credit.
  
  About 4,200 eligible customers declined the credit, and another 28,000 eligible ratepayers did not respond to phone calls and letters from the utility.
  
  Jim Muntz, president and chief operating officer of CL&P, said the company's goal was to reach every eligible customer. "We made a concerted 10-week effort to meet that commitment. Many heard from us multiple times through letters and phone calls – it was our way of demonstrating that their opportunity to apply was a priority for us, too."
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy described the reimbursements as "a good first step in compensating our residents for the long-term outages that occurred as a result of the October nor'easter," but added, "the real task at hand is making sure that our utility companies are better prepared to handle an event like this the next time it comes around."
  
  The storm knocked down trees and left more than 800,000 of CL&P's 1.2 million customers without power for as long as 11 days.
  
  "We've learned much since the two storms hit Connecticut last year, both from the Witt Report and the recommendations from the Two Storm Panel. Earlier this month, I announced a set of proposals that will help to put our utility companies and state and local governments in a better position to plan for and respond to an emergency," Malloy said in a prepared statement Wednesday.
  
  CL&P distributed $3 million of the $30 million fund in December, donating $1 million each to Connecticut Food Bank, Foodshare and Operation Fuel, which left $27 million for eligible customers.
  
  Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer who managed the victim compensation funds after the 9/11 attacks and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, acted as a pro bono advisor at Malloy's request. Working with state officials and CL&P, Feinberg helped devise a "meaningful" compensation amount and administer the fund.
  
  "The results of this campaign are extraordinary as signaled by over 80 percent of eligible customers responding," Feinberg said in a prepared statement Wednesday. "The claimants' response is proof positive of the effectiveness of the company's outreach. In my experience, claim fund response rates are typically around 20 percent. The credit program has been a victory for customers and CL&P."
  
  Eligible customers will see the "October snowstorm credit" in their "Your Account Summary" section on their utility bill in Febryary, CL&P said.
  

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• NU CEO hospitalized as execs take over temporarily
  DAY;  Associated Press
  Article published Jan 10, 2012
  
  BERLIN, Conn. (AP) — Northeast Utilities says its chief executive officer is recovering following an unspecified heart-related incident and three executives are temporarily running the company.
  
  The Berlin-based utility said in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that Charles W. Shivery, chairman of the board, president, and CEO, experienced the heart problem Sunday and is expected to be released from a hospital shortly.
  
  NU said he will return to work after his recovery.
  
  Chief Operating Officer Leon Olivier, Chief Financial Officer David McHale and the general counsel, Gregory Butler, will run the company in Shivery's absence.
  
  NU is the parent company of Connecticut Light & Power, Western Massachusetts Electric Co., Public Service of New Hampshire and Yankee Gas.
  
  A spokesman did not immediately return a call Tuesday morning seeking details.
  

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• Storm panel report renews debate on higher costs for electric service
  Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR
  January 9, 2012
  
  Selective burying of electric wires to protect critical public services, dramatically enhanced tree-trimming and new performance standards that can affect utility company earnings topped a list of recommendations issued Monday by the panel studying Connecticut's readiness for future major storms.
  
  Now consumers must let state officials know how much more they will pay for this system, said Joseph McGee, the chairman of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's Two Storm Panel.
  
  The panel's final report also warned public- and private-sector emergency plans need to anticipate responses for more severe weather and called for improved communication between utilities, state and local governments, labor unions and private social services.
  
  Though the panel stopped short of recommending any specific increase in residential and business electric bills, McGee said that a portion of any added burden would fall on consumers.
  
  "That's the great public debate," McGee said. "It needs to be transparent and that's where we need to begin this conversation.
  
  Malloy said his office would issue a response to the report later this week, and that it could include state policy changes to be made immediately through an executive order, as well as recommendations for the General Assembly to consider during the regular 2012 session, which begins in February.
  
  Malloy charged the panel with assessing both public- and private-sector readiness for weather-related disasters in the wakes of Tropical Storm Irene and an Oct. 29 nor'easter. The former state left more than 671,000 customers without electrical service while the latter eliminated power for more than 850,000 residences and businesses.
  
  "We did many things right in the wake of these two storms, but when the margin of error is zero -- like it was for these two storms -- we have to do better," Malloy said.
  
  Connecticut Light & Power Co., the state's largest electric utility serving about 1.2 million customers in 149 cities and towns, issued a brief written response.
  
  "We share the objective of the Two-Storm Panel and the Governor to ensure Connecticut is better prepared for the next emergency, recognizing that weather-related events offer unique and extreme challenges for our communities," the statement read. "The report of the panel is extensive and we have begun our review of the findings and recommendations that pertain to CL&P.  In the meantime, we have already taken a number of steps to strengthen our own preparedness and to engage with state and municipal leaders to improve our collective response to adverse events."
  

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• Storm panel adopts 82 recommendations
  Ken Dixon, Staff Writer, CT POST
  Updated 10:44 a.m., Monday, January 9, 2012
  
  HARTFORD -- The governor's Two Storm Panel adopted a list of 82 recommendations Monday morning aimed at preparing the state for the next big storm.
  
  The top suggestion calls for "reasonable performance standards" for utility recovery and restoration.
  
  The recommendations, in eight chapters, also call for revisions to state engineering standards to anticipate higher sea levels due to climate changes.
  
  It took the eight-member panel less than 10 minutes to adopt the recommendations prior to a news conference held by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
  
  The report "strongly" recommends better communications between utility workers and management.
  
  Also suggested: Better standards for backup power requirements and communication infrastructure.
  
  The report was prepared after eight meetings that began in September.
  
  "It really moved the state forward in preparing for the next storm," said Joseph McGee, co-chairman of the panel, which disbanded after the session.
  
  "The fact is the sea is rising," said Joseph McGee, panel co-chairman.
  
  During a news conference with the panel after it's adjourment, Malloy said that with a $25 billion to $30 billion pricetag, it's unlikely that all electric lines will be buried away from trees.
  

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• Conn. review panel: Improve worst-case storm plans
  DAY
  Jan 9, 10:09 AM EST
  
  HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A review panel created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is calling on utilities to improve their worst-case planning and staffing for major storms such as the remnants of Hurricane Irene and last October's snow storm.
  
  Both storms left hundreds of thousands without power for days in Connecticut.
  
  The panel also says there's a need to develop performance standards for restoring electricity and other services and increase communication between municipalities and the utilities before a storm hits.
  
  The eight-member group, known as the Two Storm Panel, unanimously approved its report to Malloy on Monday morning. Leaders submitted 82 recommendations they believe will better prepare the state for the next major storm.
  
  Malloy says he'll announce later this week his administration's plans to implement the recommendations

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• So what the heck is “The Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP)”
  What? Wait! Jon Pelto blog
  December 30, 2011
  
  Today, a second state employee faces a dismissal hearing and again the evidence is that the state employee was given inaccurate information and the application may even have been modified by the DSS worker to ensure the state employee qualified.
  
  In all the rhetoric coming from the Malloy Administration about the clear and convincing evidence of widespread fraud by state employees using the D-SNAP program, as well as, the comments that there is a culture of corruption among state employees, I don’t recall seeing the Governor or his people provide any real details about the D-SNAP program.  When it comes to the type of accusations that have been leveled at state employees it would appear that ignorance is bliss.
  
  Below is a quick review of the program taken from official United States Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service documents.  This is the federal agency that oversees the  D-SNAP program.  In addition, it appears that in 2009 significant changes to the rules and regulations concerning D-SNAP were implemented.
  
  The mission of the D-SNAP program as defined by the USDA is that D-SNAP is there to ensure easy access to safe, nutritious foods for disaster survivors and that;
  
  D-SNAP benefits are loaded on Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards for use at most grocery stores.
  
  D-SNAP benefits are calculated to allow households to purchase a nutritious diet for 30 days.
  
  D-SNAP benefits are available quickly after a disaster – usually after grocery stores open for business.
  
  D-SNAP benefits are available to households who meet financial eligibility requirements and who have experienced a temporary loss of income, inaccessible resources or high disaster-related expenses – eligibility is not limited to households typically eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
  
  D-SNAP is implement following a Presidential disaster declaration
  
  D-SNAP is operated by State Departments of Human Services in coordination with USDA’s Food and Nutrition Services (FNS).
  
  States can design application and benefit delivery systems to respond to conditions on the ground. Application sites may be operated out of Department of Human Services offices, FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers, mass shelters, stadiums, or other large-capacity venues.
  
  Benefits may be redeemed for groceries and, in some cases, for hot or prepared foods.
  
  State Departments of Human Service can contract with non-profit organizations to outreach to the eligible public.
  
  Unfortunately in this situation the Connecticut Department of Social Services had never engaged in a full D-SNAP operation and expected approximately 3,000 applicants for the program.  In fact, there were 20,000 applicants over the course of a few days and DSS workers with no connection to food stamp issues, let alone D-SNAP, were pulled in to process the applications as people stood in long lines.
  
  The basic rules of Eligibility are as follows:
  
      The person must have lived in the disaster area at the time of the disaster. States may also choose to extend eligibility to those who worked in the disaster area at the time of the disaster.
  
      Recipients must plan on purchasing food during the benefit period
  
      Recipients must have experienced at least one of the following adverse effects:
  
      Food damaged by disaster event or spoiled due to power outage (A power outage lasting over 4 hours can cause food spoilage.)
  
      Damage to or destruction of the household’s home or self-employment business
  
      Disaster-related expenses not expected to be reimbursed during the benefit period (e.g., home or business repairs, temporary shelter expenses, evacuation expenses, home/business protection, disaster-related personal injury including funeral expenses)
  
      Lost or inaccessible income, including reduction or termination of income, or a delay in receipt of income for half the benefit period.
  
      Inaccessible liquid resources (e.g., the bank is closed due to the disaster).
  
      The income test for the program is as follows:
  
           Total net (take-home) income received during the benefit period, plus accessible liquid resources, minus certain disaster-related expenses (disaster related expenses actually paid or anticipated to be paid out-of-pocket during the disaster benefit period) shall not exceed the disaster gross income limit.
  
          Net income Includes the wages a household actually receives after taxes and all other payroll withholding, public assistance payments or other unearned income, and a net self-employment income.
  
          Disaster related expenses are those expenses that the household has paid or expects to pay during the disaster benefit period, however, If the household receives or anticipates receiving a reimbursement for these expenses during the disaster period, only the net expense is deductible. The period for which disaster benefits are issued (usually one month).
  
  The rules and regulations proceed from there – but that should give us all a basic sense of what the program is meant to cover.
  
  Now it is the responsibility of the state to prove that the state employees accused of fraud intended to steal these emergency food stamps and that the wide-spread misinformation provided by DSS did not play a role in the state employee having qualified.
  
  Oh and PS – applicants were never provided with these guidelines.  They were only given the application forms to fill out.
  

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  Latest Update: State’s First Case Against Food Stamp Robber Is A Farce
  What?  Wait! Jon Pelto blog
  December 29, 2011
  
  Lisa Prout, the state employee accused of stealing $524 in food stamp aid, awaits the decision from her dismissal hearing. But the state’s case has taken an extraordinary turn of events.
  
  The accusation is that she “fraudulently obtained benefits through the state of Connecticut’s Department of Social Services administration of the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-Snap) in violation of DHMAS work rule #2 and State of Connecticut Personnel Regulation 5-240-1a.”
  
  Considering that this was the first case going to a dismissal hearing, one would have assumed that the Malloy Administration was starting with one of their strongest cases.  In politics you simply don’t deliver the kind of harsh rhetoric that has been coming from the Governor and his people and then risk losing the case.
  
  But at today’s hearing, the state’s case against the state employee proved to be a farce:
  
  From CTNewsjunkie comes the following:
  
  “Lisa Prout, who has worked for 11 years at the hospital and is a single-mother of two, said she would have never lied about her income in order to qualify for $524 in benefits. She claims the Department of Social Services eligibility worker changed her application and failed to count the $1,200 she disclosed on the form as money she had in the bank to pay her expenses.”
  
  “An East Hampton resident Prout said she was without power for nine days and she applied for the food stamps on the very last day in September at which point she received a voucher. When she returned the next day she was given a debt card with $524 on it.
  
  She said she would happily return that money to the state if it meant she got to keep her job.
  
  “I was ushered through the application process like a piece of meat through a processing plant and the DSS worker provided me with guidance in completing the application,” Prout said. “I did nothing wrong; I have been treated unfairly; and my family is suffering.”
  
  Her story confirms the fact that the DSS workers who were responsible for processing 20,000 applications (when 2,000 were expected) had limited training and had never dealt with this particular program before.
  
  In this case, faulty information from a DSS worker appears to have led this single mom to believe that she and her children met the required standard to receive emergency food aid in the wake of Hurricane Irene when, in fact, she did not.
  
  Finally, after all the rhetoric and condemnation of state employees emanating from the Malloy Administration over the last few weeks, upon hearing the news about today’s developments, the  Malloy press team “declined to comment” on individual cases.
  

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  Woman “steals” $524 and is fired from her state position; Man “steals” $450 dollars and is ordered to pay it back but gets to keep his state job.
  What?  Wait! Jon Pelto blog
  December 29, 2011
  
  Stay tuned! 
  
  At 2pm today the first of the food stamp robbers will face a dismissal hearing.
  
  The accusation is that she “fraudulently obtained benefits through the state of Connecticut’s Department of Social Services administration of the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-Snap) in violation of DHMAS work rule #2 and State of Connecticut Personnel Regulation 5-240-1a.”
  
  Considering that this is the first case going to a dismissal hearing, the Malloy Administration is probably using one of their strongest cases.  In politics you simply don’t deliver the kind of harsh rhetoric that has been coming from the Governor and his people and then risk losing the case.
  
  For her part, the single-mom with an unblemished record of state service will undoubtedly respond by telling her story which, considering the information that has surfaced to date, will be to point out the fact that the DSS workers who were responsible for processing 20,000 applications (when 2,000 were expected) had limited training and had never dealt with this particular program before.
  
  In this case, faulty information from a DSS worker appears to have led the woman to believe that she and her children met the required standard to receive emergency food aid in the wake of Hurricane Irene when, in fact, she did not.
  
  One can assume that after today’s hearing she will be immediately terminated thereby laying the foundation for the next set of state employee food stamp cases.
  
  Now juxtaposition her story with what occurred last week to the male Human Resources Manager for Connecticut’s Military Department.
  
  In this case, the state employee who knew or should have known the law about using state resources for personal use had used a state-owned gymnasium “for his own (and his family’s) personal use on multiple occasions in 2008 and 2009 without paying the required rental fees.”
  
  The HR manager was ordered to pay $450 in penalties for his violation of Connecticut state law and will remain on the state payroll.
  
  Yesterday the Governor reiterated his commitment to the notion that these state employees are innocent until proven guilty saying “everyone is entitled to due process, but if these allegations prove true, it constitutes a serious violation of the public trust.”
  
  It appears that the definition of a “serious violation of public trust” here in Connecticut would be better described as a loose set of general guidelines rather than an exact rule.
  

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• Disaster relief probe extended to private sector
  Brian Lockhart, Staff Writer, Greenwich TIME
  Updated 01:40 a.m., Wednesday, December 28, 2011
  
  HARTFORD -- State officials Tuesday expanded their probe into alleged abuse of federal disaster relief beyond government employees to the general public.
  
  "The process of looking at non-state employees has begun," Andrew Doba, spokesman for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, said in an interview.
  
  Doba made his comments hours after the administration upped the number of state employees under investigation for receiving money intended for low-income victims of August's Tropical Storm Irene to 44. 
  He said the state Department of Social Services is beginning to select random pools of non-state workers for a wider audit.
  
  "If I filed an application and said I work at `Brand X Corporation' and have `x' amount in the bank, the DSS has statutory authority to send letters out (to employers) and get verification," Doba said. "This is all in the very beginning stages. This bigger pool will get moving."
  
  The federal government, through DSS, distributed $12.4 million in Disaster-Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP) benefits to affected low-income residents in September. About 24,000 households received an average of $700 for food losses after showing proof of identity and residence and filling out two pages worth of questions about income, assets and Irene damage.  Responding to reports about unexpectedly long lines at DSS offices and possible instances of fraud, Social Services Commissioner Roderick Bremby in a televised interview promised audits would protect taxpayer funds from abuse.
  
  "We will audit after the fact and if we find people who defrauded the system we will take appropriate action," Bremby said on "Face the State," a Sunday morning political talk show. "We've not been bashful at DSS about rooting out fraud, waste and abuse."
  
  Malloy on Dec. 4 announced a probe of "multiple incidents of possible fraud against the state by individuals, including state employees." But since then the administration has issued a handful of news releases announcing referrals of unidentified state workers to their department heads for possible disciplinary action.
  
  Tuesday the governor added another 10 suspects, bringing the total so far to 44 out of the 800 public employees who received D-SNAP aid. His office also said an additional 29 employees were cleared of wrongdoing.
  
  "We're approaching this as an employer," Doba said. "We have information that we just don't have for private-sector employees. But we're absolutely looking at the other large pool."
  
  There has been some question about when and if DSS was going to get around to auditing other D-SNAP applicants.  Last week, state Sen. Andrew Roraback, D-Goshen, a 5th District congressional candidate, urged the administration to do so.
  
  "We focus on the 800 state employees because we can find out at the drop of a hat what they really make," Roraback told reporters. "It's the 23,000 other people in that (D-SNAP) line who I think we should make every effort to determine whether they lied to get benefits."
  
  Depending on the results, the wider audit of non-state employees can be deepened beyond the initial samples, Doba said.
  

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• Some State Workers Face Extra Scrutiny In Food Stamp Probe
  The Hartford Courant
  By DAVE ALTIMARI, daltimar@courant.com
  December 28, 2011
  
  The state agency that administered the embattled food stamp program after Tropical Storm Irene is interviewing its employees who received benefits through the program, internal agency memos show.
  
  Fifty Department of Social Services employees received benefits, winning approval from their own agency. In an internal message to all DSS employees, Commissioner Rod Bremby said that those employees would "be subject to internal quality control measures which require an interview with each individual, over and above the record reviews being done for other state employee recipients."
  
  As of Tuesday, there were 44 state employees suspected of fraudulently acquiring money through the program out of 824 workers who had applied. Another 29 had been cleared of suspected fraud, and the remaining 751 applications were "in varying stages of review" by DSS, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Tuesday.
  
  "Since we first announced our investigation, we've uncovered dozens of cases where it appears that state employees may have deliberately lied on their federal disaster assistance applications to receive benefits," Malloy said in a statement. "Everyone is entitled to due process, but if these allegations prove true, it constitutes a serious violation of the public trust. We can and must demand better from public employees."
  
  The governor announced an investigation into possible fraud connected with the federal emergency food stamp program, known as D-SNAP, at a rare Sunday press conference in early December.
  
  DSS records show that the agency severely underestimated the number of residents who would apply for benefits. State officials expected fewer than 10,000 people to apply for the federal funds. DSS ultimately approved 19,391 applications over seven days, handing out more than $10.2 million.
  
  DSS submitted its application to operate a Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Sept. 9, requesting U.S. Department of Agriculture approval to run the program for five days. Mark Shok, who oversees the department's regular food stamp program, wrote that "we do not anticipate more than 10,000 applications for D-SNAP."
  
  DSS officials had initially revised that number downward to 3,000, based on the number of previous applications to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for more substantial disaster relief funds.
  
  In its application, DSS officials assured the USDA that its security at its regional offices, where individual applications would be accepted and benefits handed out, "would adequately address security needs for D-SNAP."
  
  "While the public response exceeded expectations (this was the first time Connecticut took the initiative to operate a D-SNAP program), the fact remains that DSS did our absolute best under difficult circumstances to administer federal disaster aid according to federal standards,'' Bremby wrote to his employees.
  
  DSS officials were forced to bring in people from their central offices to help process applications in a timely fashion. All of those workers received the proper training, DSS spokesman David Dearborn said.
  
  "Obviously, the demand grew steadily over several days to exceed the estimates,'' Dearborn said. "It may be tempting to criticize the program in hindsight but, at the time, Connecticut moved fast to secure federal approval for operating this time-limited disaster relief program, and we would submit that any current review of the program should be done in that context."
  
  The crowds were so large that state troopers and municipal police officers had to be called in to work overtime shifts to handle the overflow and keep lines moving in an orderly fashion. One of those troopers called in for an overtime shift at DSS's Norwich office was Noel Jimenez, who is now accused of filling out a fraudulent application that day.
  
  "Given the amount of confusion there seemed to be, I am not convinced they were ready to handle 10,000 applications, let alone 20,000,'' Sen. Joseph Markley, R-Southington, said Friday.
  
  Markley has asked the state auditors to review how DSS ran the program. Markley said he wasn't surprised that the original estimates were low, because it was the first time the state had used D-SNAP, but he said that underscored that there was inadequate planning.
  
  Malloy has said that if state employees defrauded the program, they would be fired. Malloy's staff has already turned some applications over to the U.S. Attorney's Office to investigate whether criminal charges are warranted.
  
  Some of the state employees under investigation have claimed that they were never asked to provide income verification and, in some cases, had their applications changed by DSS employees, allegations that the department has denied.
  
  Attorney Rich Rochlin, who is representing many of the state employees under investigation, has called for an independent review of how DSS ran the program and a moratorium on any disciplinary hearings involving state employees accused of filing fraudulent applications.
  
  The USDA had people from its regional disaster team on-site in Connecticut on four of the five days that the state was accepting applications, according to USDA spokesman Aaron Lavallee. USDA officials visited multiple sites, spoke to supervisors and staff, and sat in on some certification interviews, he said.
  
  Dearborn said it was important to note that federal officials did not have a problem with how DSS ran the program.
  
  "We tried to do something good — to access previously untapped federal aid to help Connecticut residents,'' Dearborn said. "This may be easy to criticize later, but when an agency is trying to do something different, to help people after a disaster by bringing in federal resources, you do the best you can at the time — under difficult circumstances. The bottom line is we worked with federal guidelines, and the federal government approved and monitored the program."
  
  Lavallee also pointed out that it was DSS investigators who originally noticed the possibly fraudulent applications when they were conducting post-disaster audits. Under the guidelines for the D-SNAP program, the state agency that administers the funds must audit every application submitted by a state employee. They also are required to randomly audit applications submitted by private citizens. The state must file a report within six months of the program's end.
  
  Connecticut was one of five states on the Eastern Seaboard that participated in the D-SNAP program following Irene. Lavallee said it was the only state where there have been reports of fraud so far.
  
  Copyright © 2011, The Hartford Courant
  

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• Malloy refers 10 more employees to agency heads in food stamps fraud probe
  By Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR
  December 27, 2011
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's administration announced today it has forwarded the names of another 10 state employees to agency heads for review in connection with the ongoing food stamps fraud investigation.
  
  This brings the total number of state workers still under close review to 44. An additional 29 employees already have been cleared of any wrongdoing.
  
  "Since we first announced our investigation, we've uncovered dozens of cases where it appears that state employees may have deliberately lied on their federal disaster assistance applications to receive benefits," Malloy said.  "Everyone is entitled to due process, but if these allegations prove true, it constitutes a serious violation of the public trust. We can and must demand better from public employees."
  
  A total of 824 state employees sought assistance following Tropical Storm Irene through the federal Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as D-SNAP. Funding was made available to low-income Connecticut residents who incurred disaster-related expenses including loss of income, health care expenses, temporary shelter costs and property repairs.
  
  Irene, which was at hurricane force when it struck the southeastern U.S. but had been downgraded to a tropical storm before reaching Connecticut Aug. 27, caused more than 670,000 power outages among residential and business customers, some of whom were without power nearly 10 days.
  
  The remaining 751 applications from state employees -- excluding those from workers already cleared or those submitted to agency heads for in-depth review -- still are being analyzed, according to the governor's office, which first announced an investigation Dec. 4.
  
  Malloy has said that based on reviews to date, in some instances "it appears clear that the abuses of public trust involved go beyond simply lying about income," and also involves false information related to assets or even a deceased relative. "Given the information known to us, these were not oversights or honest mistakes. This was outright fraud, and it will not stand."
  
  State auditors said earlier this month that a total 23,726 households with 74,230 people received the aid. Eligible households were to receive food aid ranging from $200 for a single adult to $1,202 for a family of eight.
  
  The maximum monthly "take-home income and liquid assets" an applicant could have for the covered 30-day period was $2,186 for a single adult; $2,847 for a household of two; $3,272 for three; $3,859 for four; $4,245 for five; $4,753 for six; $5,116 for seven; and $5,479 for eight.
  

  ---

  
  
• OP-ED | Why Would Malloy Administration Give Lawyer Center Stage?
  CTNEWSJUNKIE
  by Patrick Scully | Dec 21, 2011 10:29pm
  
  Up until this month, Rich Rochlin was just another lawyer seeking clients. He obviously realized he could get them by grabbing headlines. The Malloy administration inexplicably obliged. It is one of the few mistakes the Malloy operation has made.
  
  Gov. Dannel Malloy was wisely out in front of a potential scandal when he announced an investigation was under way into whether state workers fraudulently obtained emergency food stamps during Tropical Storm Irene this summer. He said those found guilty could be terminated and prosecuted.
  
  Enter attorney Rochlin, who up until this point made his living working on business and financial matters so boring as to put one to sleep. But he is also smart enough to know how to get himself some exposure. All he had to do was lay some bait for the sometimes arrogant Malloy administration.
  
  Rochlin claims he has many of the state workers under investigation as clients and they were not at fault in food stamp-gate because people taking the applications screwed up the process. This is where things went horribly wrong for Malloy and his peeps; not on the merits of the issues but rather on how they reacted to be being taunted.
  
  Malloy’s top adviser, Roy Occhiogrosso let Rochlin get under his skin and that’s an understatement. Occhiogrosso is constitutionally incapable of just letting something go. His “how dare you question or criticize us” approach gets him in trouble. Some lawyer surfaces from nowhere to say not nice things about the Malloy administration’s investigation. So what? Fly a little higher and ignore him. Simply stick with, “This investigation into possible fraud is being taken very seriously, we’ll do our due diligence, get it done right and get it done fairly.” Period. Don’t insult, reference, or even acknowledge the lawyer who is desperately trying to get you to do just that.
  
  After some petty—and not very clever—insults between Rochlin and Occhiogrosso, the gloves came off. “The guy is everybody’s worst impression of a lawyer,” Occhiogrosso said. “He’s like a cartoon character. Hopefully, this guy’s 15 minutes of fame are up soon. … There are several pieces of silverware missing from the drawer.” Ironically, it was Occhiogrosso who extended this guy’s 15 minutes and he keeps replacing the silverware only to have it pilfered by Rochlin again.
  
  Say this for Rochlin, he’s not far off with these comments: “Roy is on my marketing team. He keeps extending my 15 minutes by 10 minutes every night. I thought he was a pro, but he’s getting schooled by a novice, so I feel for him…This is amateur hour. It’s like he just came out of an online school for communications. How pathetic,” Rochin told the Hartford Courant. “If he needs advice on how to personally attack me, he has my number. He’s keeping me in the news. I thank him for that. … He’s making all the classic mistakes. My clients’ story is getting out,” he said. Ouch.
  
  Occhiogrosso compounded the situation by having the comment that Rochlin “may not be playing with a full deck” attributed to him. It very well may be true. But it is also true that saying so is beneath the governor’s office and it only throws gasoline on the fire that Rochlin started. In fact, Malloy himself walked back the “full deck” comment by saying, “I wouldn’t have used that terminology.” (Of course, that may have been the plan all along—keep Malloy above it all with a sly smile saying, “Gee whiz, guys, I wouldn’t have put it that way.” But if so, it would be unusual for the top adviser to be the “pit bull.” In fact, it’s kind of sad.)
  
  While it’s not really surprising that Occhiogrosso took the bait, it’s stunning that chief legal counsel Andrew McDonald engaged this screwball Rochlin. McDonald is a brilliant attorney. He is usually media savvy and always understands the political implications of commenting to the press—he almost never does it. But for some mystifying reason, he too, played right into Rochlin’s hands.
  
  McDonald actually wrote and released to news media a letter to Rochin challenging him to have his clients waive their constitutional rights so the administration could release the clients’ food stamp applications. McDonald then commented on the letter to at least one electronic news media outlet. It backed fired. McDonald was trying to call Rochlin’s bluff. However, to the average reader or viewer, it looked like McDonald wanted the possibly aggrieved to throw their rights away. When Malloy was asked about the back and forth with McDonald, the governor exacerbated things by saying he, as a lawyer, would advise a client to waive all his constitutional rights when “[T]hey actually didn’t do what they’re being accused of.” Yikes. He may be a successful governor but you don’t want him between you and the ultimate “flu shot.”
  
  The strange thing is these guys should know better. They took “My Cousin Vinnie” and turned him into Alan Dershowitz.
  

  ---

• Attorney In Food Stamp Case Becomes Chief Malloy Critic
  The Hartford Courant
  By CHRISTOPHER KEATING, ckeating@courant.com
  8:49 PM EST, December 15, 2011
  
  HARTFORD —Just minutes after Gov. Dannel P. Malloy finished a news conference Thursday morning, attorney Rich Rochlin stepped in front of three TV cameras and held court.
  
  He lambasted the administration — again — for its investigation of high-profile allegations that state employees misrepresented their finances in order to receive food stamp benefits following Tropical Storm Irene. As an attorney who says he represents 25 state employees fearful of losing their jobs, Rochlin has become a nuisance to the administration as its chief public critic on the food-stamp probe..
  
  This is a new arena for Rochlin.
  
  For the first 10 years of his legal career, he toiled out of the public eye — handling relatively obscure cases on financial and business transactions. But he burst into the spotlight this week by sharply criticizing Malloy over the fraud investigations, alleging that state employees had changed the financial forms to allow the applicants to qualify for aid. (Malloy says he has seen no evidence of that.)
  
  Thursday, Malloy added 10 more names to the list of state employees who have been referred for disciplinary hearings — bringing the total so far to 34. Rochlin said 15 of them have told their stories to him.
  
  Earlier in the week, Rochlin fired off e-mails to the governor's legal counsel, Andrew McDonald, to complain about how the food stamp controversy is being handled, and posted one of the letters on his web site.
  
  Rochlin, 36, is a pumped-up, hard-charging lawyer with an unorthodox style — typified by his showing up at Malloy's own press conference. After Malloy left, Rochlin announced the creation of a new web site at http://www.takethedsnapchallenge.com in which he challenges anyone — including Malloy — to fill out the state's emergency food stamp forms without making a mistake.
  
  The complete newcomer to politics is tangling with those who have been involved in the game for decades. Without mentioning Rochlin by name, Malloy called him a $250-per-hour lawyer who would say whatever was necessary to help his clients.
  
  "I'm taking on the head of the state government, and I'm just one guy with an iPhone and an office from very, very modest roots,'' Rochlin said in an interview Thursday. "To me, that's the beauty of living in this country. I don't seek out the spotlight. This was thrust upon me, and I felt the need to help.''
  
  While Rochlin is constantly criticized by Malloy and his staff, public records show that Rochlin once served briefly as the personal attorney for one of Malloy's most trusted aides, Roy Occhiogrosso. Rochlin handled the start of a civil lawsuit filed by Occhiogrosso last year involving a dispute with a home contractor. Rochlin declined to comment on his dealings with Occhiogrosso, citing attorney-client privilege and saying his work is a matter of public record.
  
  Occhiogrosso said he was referred to Rochlin by another lawyer, and he eventually received money from a special fund that is set up to compensate homeowners in disputes with contractors. But Occhiogrosso said that he handled the filings with the compensation fund, and Rochlin was out of the case at that point.
  
  "The guy is everybody's worst impression of a lawyer,'' Occhiogrosso said. "He's like a cartoon character. Hopefully, this guy's 15 minutes of fame are up soon. … There are several pieces of silverware missing from the drawer.''
  
  Regarding the future of the food-stamp controversy, Occhiogrosso said, "As to what happens to Rich Rochlin, hopefully he just goes away. … This has been a fairly unusual and odd marketing campaign. We're done dealing with him.''
  
  Rochlin responded: "Roy is on my marketing team. He keeps extending my 15 minutes by 10 minutes every night. I thought he was a pro, but he's getting schooled by a novice, so I feel for him. I thought this guy was a pro. This is amateur hour. It's like he just came out of an online school for communications.''
  
  UConn Law Graduate
  
  A Connecticut native who was reared by a single mother in Hamden, Rochlin graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., in 1997. He was an intern under U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman before attending the University of Connecticut Law School, where he became managing editor of the law review. From there, he went to work for two large law firms: Boston-based Bingham McCutchen, which has nearly 1,100 lawyers, and Dechert LLP, which has more than 800 lawyers. He later became a partner at the Hartford-based Shipman and Goodwin for one year before starting up his own firm more than two years ago.
  
  With no high-profile work in Connecticut politics, Rochlin became involved in the food stamp controversy through a client who had two friends who are state employees and received food-stamp benefits. Through word of mouth, employees told others to the point where Rochlin now represents 22 state employees.
  
  "This is a political investigation,'' Rochlin said. "If I didn't meet them in the political realm, my clients would be at a disadvantage. I'm one guy with some clients who has the governor responding to what I'm saying.''
  
  McDonald has publicly questioned whether Rochlin has any clients at all, based on a brief conversation last Saturday in which Rochlin refused to release their names. Since then, Rochlin says more clients have stepped forward, and he is representing them — so far — without charge on a pro bono basis.
  
  "Andrew McDonald says I'm a shill for clients. He's a shill for votes,'' Rochlin said. "I don't have purported clients. I'm not making up that I have clients.''
  
  While the Malloy administration says the U.S. Attorney's office is investigating, Rochlin says that FBI agents and federal prosecutors have such a full plate of investigations that they generally look for big-money scandals and widespread corruption. In the food-stamp case, the maximum amount that a person could receive was $1,202, but that was only if they claimed to have a family of eight. A family of four would receive a maximum of $668.
  
  "I haven't heard of any situation where the feds would prosecute $600 fraud,'' Rochlin said. "The feds rarely take on stuff this small. The feds don't have the resources to take on $600 issues.''
  

  ---

• Utility puts price tag on better safeguards against power outages
  Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR
  December 14, 2011
  
  The state's largest electric utility insisted Wednesday it could reduce outages by up to 40 percent a decade from now with a 10-year improvement plan that would gradualy add more than $13 to the average residential monthly bill.
  
  Connecticut Light & Power Co. unveiled a plan to invest an extra $2.2 billion in tree-trimming, line and pole replacement and other improvements designed to "harden" its grid against the elements.
  
  But the utility stopped short of recommending extensive burying of existing overhead lines, suggesting instead a study on the feasibility of limited, strategic use of underground lines to protect vital community centers.
  
  The plan also drew some preliminary compliments from the chairman of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's Two Storm Panel, though the group isn't expected to issue its final report until early next month.
  
  "Not to speak for the public, but that is actually pretty reasonable," Chairman Joseph McGee said after CL&P Vice President Dana Louth finished outlining the proposal. McGee added that the proposal could spark an interesting public debate over how much more reliable electric service should cost. "This could be a great fight."
  
  CL&P officials estimated that the improvements they proposed would add about 1 percent annually to the service cost, or about $1.30 to the typical monthly residential bill. By the time the proposed 10-year improvement plan is complete, an extra $13.02 would be added to that average bill.
  
  There is one big asterisk, however.
  
  Utility officials were quick to note that this $13.02 projection is based on current dollar values, and would certainly be higher 10 years from now after adjustments for inflation.
  
  The most cost-efficient segment of the plan, Louth said, centers on trees, which caused the "vast, vast, vast majority" of the more than 1.4 million outages that affected the state between Tropical Storm Irene in late August and the October nor'easter combined.
  
  CL&P would add $366 million to its tree-trimming budget in total over the next decade by: 
  
      - Dramatically expanding trim zones to cover not only overhanging branches but also trees farther away but still at risk of falling into lines.
      - Speeding up the cycle for trimming and clearing trees from power line buffer zones from five years to four. 
  
  The company's annual tree-trimming budget, which ranged from $23.7 million to $27.4 million over the past four years, would grow on average by more than $36 million per year.
  
  Another $413 million would be spent over the next decade replacing 50- and 60-year-old telephone poles that struggle to support heavy equipment, as well as improving bracing materials. About 200,000 of the company's poles were installed under earlier, less stringent national safety code standards, Louth said, but he added that not all need to be replaced.
  
  Both the enhanced tree-trimming and the pole replacement efforts would be limited to about 60 percent of the company's roughly 16,700 miles of wires, officials said. These changes would affect "backbone" lines and larger "lateral" lines serving larger populations.
  
  The single-largest expense, about $1.4 billion, involves replacing thinner, bare wires with thicker wires covered with a coating designed to resist pressure from tree limbs and extend overall life.
  
  The company explored two other alternatives, but recommended against them after noting they would double the projected cost over 10 years. 
  
      - Expanding tree-trimming efforts and pole replacement work throughout the entire system, including smaller "lateral" lines that generally serve the fewest numbers of customers. This would add another $1.2 billion to the cost over the next decade.
      - Burying overhead wires leading into vital community centers -- neighborhoods that include police and fire services, grocery stores, gasoline stations and shelters. It would cost another $1 billion to bury these lines in about 100 cities and towns.
  
  The challenge, Louth said, is to develop a plan in which "the improvement level is significant enough to notice" but the added cost isn't too significant given the relative infrequency of severe storms.
  
  CL&P officials estimate that had this system been in place by late summer, the 671,000 outages caused by Tropical Storm Irene would have been reduced to 430,000. And the October nor'easter's 871,000 outages would have been reduced to 590,000. CL&P serves 1.2 million residential and business customers in total spread across 149 cities and towns.
  
  A final perk of the electric grid "hardening" plan, Louth said, is that the company likely would have to double its current contingent of nearly 175 repair crews, providing a boost to the state's economy.
  
  The panel, which Malloy appointed to assess not only the utilities' readiness to handle severe storms, but also that of state and local governments and private, nonprofit social services, didn't formally endorse the CL&P plan Wednesday.
  
  But McGee said it offers significant value simply because it represents the first public estimate of the cost of an electric grid upgrade that offers a "very significant" upgrade in overall reliability.
  

  ---

  
  
• Malloy refuses lawyer's call to slow Irene disciplinary hearings
  Mark Pazniokas, CT MIRROR
  December 14, 2011
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy brushed aside a lawyer's complaint today that his administration was moving too quickly against 24 state employees suspected of fraudulently obtaining disaster aid after Tropical Storm Irene.
  
  "The reality about Connecticut's government is it routinely moved too slow, if at all, particularly in incidents like this," Malloy said. "I think what we're trying to do is send a very clear message to the citizens of Connecticut that we take this as seriously as they take it, and we're going to move in an expeditious fashion."
  
  Rich Rochlin, a lawyer who says he is representing some of the state employees facing administrative hearings and possible termination, told the administration by letter Monday that chaos surrounded the administration of the program, suggesting that some employees may have been misled into applying for aid.
  
  "Perhaps the administration is aware of these facts but has yet to report that it is conducting an internal investigation," Rochlin wrote in a letter to Andrew McDonald, the governor's general counsel. "Workers' jobs and lives can and will be impacted by how this investigation proceeds."
  
  Malloy, a former prosecutor, was dismissive of the letter.
  
  "If somebody is being paid $250 an hour to represent somebody, what do you think they're going to say?" Malloy said.
  
  Rochlin could not be reached for comment. The administration says it is unsure whom Rochlin is representing.
  
  "He refused to disclose who his clients were," said McDonald, who says he spoke to Rochlin on Saturday.
  
  Malloy said he had no evidence that the Department of Social Services mishandled the federally funded aid program.
  
  "I believe those procedures followed the federal guidelines," Malloy said.
  
  Malloy spoke to reporters at the state Capitol after his return from Minnesota, where he was on a 24-hour economic development trip. He declined to say whom he had met, or whether he was close to enticing an employer to move here.

  ---

• U.S. Attorney Probing Allegations Of Food Stamp Fraud
  Chief State's Attorney, USDA Also Investigating (see actual news articles below this commentary)
  Hartford Courant
  Rick Green
  11:25 PM EST, December 13, 2011
  
  Since his afternoon press conference on Dec. 4, we've listened to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy reveal bits and pieces of an "outrage" where state employees "may face criminal prosecution" for food stamp fraud.
  
  Now those accused employees — two dozen and growing — face an aggressive outside inquiry by the U.S. attorney's office, the chief state's attorney's office, and investigators from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
  
  On Dec. 2, two days before Malloy's dramatic Sunday press conference, Malloy wrote U.S. Attorney David B. Fein and Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane, saying that "some number of individuals have committed one or more crimes against the state," initiating a federal-state probe.
  
  While Malloy's internal investigation will continue, state and federal prosecutors will be conducting a far-ranging criminal inquiry.
  
  "They are not going to talk about it, but they are doing it,'' Andrew McDonald, Malloy's chief legal counsel told me Tuesday evening. "We are regularly being contacted by the prosecutors and we are sharing information with them on a regular basis."
  
  Names of suspected state employees have been referred to federal and state investigators, he said.
  
  "We are working with the United States Department of Agriculture, the chief state's attorney and the U.S. attorney's office on their portion of the investigation,'' McDonald said. "Our investigation is focused on the fact that we are the employer of individuals who may have defrauded us." Federal food stamps are a USDA program.
  
  While the state could have kept quiet during the criminal probe, McDonald said, Malloy was unwilling to wait. In a Dec. 1 letter to Department of Social Services Commissioner Roderick L. Bremby, Malloy told him to launch a "systemic audit" of the thousands of disaster relief applications submitted after Tropical Storm Irene, with an emphasis on the 800 state employees who received benefits.
  
  "The prosecutors will pursue their criminal investigations. [Malloy] will not delay pursuing remedies from an employment context. We would have had to pay these employees for probably a couple of years while we waited for prosecutors to finish their job,'' McDonald said. "We are not going to fire people because of close cases. If they come in with something plausible, that's fine."
  
  It is commonplace for the U.S. attorney and the chief state's attorney to probe food stamp abuse. In June, for example, a joint investigation into a $1.6 million food stamp fraud resulted in a Wethersfield man's being sent to federal prison. After Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. attorney's office successfully investigated numerous cases of individuals for stealing relief benefits.
  
  Tom Carson, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, declined to comment on the new food stamp probe. Kane did not return a call for comment.
  
  This week, a lawyer for a number of suspected employees, Rich Rochlin, went so far as to demand that the governor back off from his "political witch hunt" and bring in outside independent investigators to conduct an inquiry of the Department of Social Services and even Malloy's office.
  
  Rochlin wants an independent investigation by Witt Associates, the firm Malloy brought in to examine Connecticut Light & Power's response to the Halloween weekend snowstorm.
  
  McDonald "represents the governor. He is not a prosecutor,'' Rochlin said. "This smacks of politics. They are holding press conferences about this. Why do you need a press conference? [Malloy] is looking to get political cover. He is looking to get political points."
  
  There's no evidence that Malloy is looking for political cover, though he enjoys press conferences. We all share his outrage over the possibility that state employees, perhaps even ones earning six-figure salaries, would have the gall to apply for food stamps intended for low income residents struggling after a natural disaster.
  
  "The state of Connecticut is not only the party that administered this federal program, but we are the employer of hundreds of applicants who received these benefits," McDonald said. "If we have employees in state government who have lied and committed fraud then we as an employer have a responsibility to expose that and take corrective action."
  
  "My role is to ensure that our workforce is not populated by people prone to defrauding their employer," McDonald said.
  

  ---

  Sources Identify Another State Trooper Under Food Stamp Investigation
  The Hartford Courant
  By DAVE ALTIMARI, daltimar@courant.com
  11:00 PM EST, December 13, 2011
  
  A second state trooper who earns more than $100,000 annually is facing an internal affairs investigation to determine whether he fraudulently filled out an application for emergency food stamp benefits in September.
  
  Sources said that investigators were examining whether Trooper John Saucier failed to include his wife's income on the application for federal emergency funds available following Tropical Storm Irene through a program known as D-SNAP, or Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
  
  Saucier, an 11-year veteran, has earned slightly more than $100,000, including overtime, so far this year, records show. Sources said that Saucier and Trooper Noel Jimenez, who earned more than $124,000 last year, were both scheduled for internal affairs interviews this week.
  
  Jimenez was placed on administrative duty last Friday. It is unclear what Saucier's status was Tuesday. Jimenez was called in to work an overtime shift at the Norwich office of the Department of Social Services, which oversaw the program, because of the long lines.
  
  Andrew Matthews, president of the state police union, would not comment on the accusations against Saucier. He did say that two troopers named earlier Tuesday by The Courant were incorrect.
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced earlier this week that there were 24 state employees now under investigation on charges that they filed fraudulent applications. The first 15, whom Malloy described as "high-end" earners, have already been scheduled for disciplinary hearings.
  
  The state police internal affairs division is handling the trooper cases. Other cases involving state employees have been referred to the Labor Relations division at the Office of Policy and Management.
  
  The head of the state police union and a West Hartford attorney who is representing many of the state employees under investigation have criticized the speed of the investigation and what they claim is the nearly foregone conclusion that employees will be fired — even before they've had a chance to present their side.
  
  In his latest press release on the investigation, Malloy said: "In addition to losing their jobs, anyone caught defrauding our government will be referred immediately to the proper authorities."
  
  "Everyone has due process rights and the troopers are no exception. I'd ask the public to reserve judgment,'' Matthews said. "We don't know all of the facts yet. The process has never been expedited this quickly."
  
  The highest payment to any individual was $1,200, and the average was $684, officials said. Even though the dollar amounts are relatively small, employees could face charges of second-degree larceny, which is a felony, for defrauding a public community.
  
  The two-page application for the emergency benefits includes several warnings that if the information submitted is false, the individual could face criminal charges. The application asks for household income levels, bank account information and the number of dependents.
  
  The maximum monthly "take-home income and liquid assets" an applicant could have for the covered 30-day period was $2,186 for a single adult, $2,847 for a household of two, $3,272 for three, $3,859 for four, $4,245 for five, $4,753 for six, $5,116 for seven and $5,479 for eight.
  
  Overall, more than 23,000 people applied for assistance under the food stamp program following the August storm. Of those who applied and self-reported their income, about 800 were state employees.
  
  Matthews has said that state employees are being unfairly scrutinized because their salaries are publicly available, whereas with private citizens, investigators would need search warrants or grand jury subpoenas to get bank records.
  
  The state has not announced any plan to audit applications submitted by private individuals. The application does state that by signing it, applicants agree to possibly be audited at a later date, at which point they would have to provide documentation to back up their claims.

  ---

• Attorney: Delay Malloy Food Stamp Hearings
  Officer Put On Administrative Duty
  Do you think the troopers may have been thinking that they were going to be fired anyway?
  The Hartford Courant
  By CHRISTOPHER KEATING, ckeating@courant.com
  8:58 PM EST, December 12, 2011
  
  HARTFORD
  
  Insisting that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is rushing to judgment, an attorney is asking the state to declare a moratorium on all disciplinary hearings for state employees suspected of fraudulently receiving food stamp benefits after Tropical Storm Irene.
  
  Rich Rochlin, who said he represents more than 10 state employees, says the state needs to order a comprehensive, independent investigation because his clients told him that food stamp benefits were distributed without any verification. His clients are arguing that they should not be subject to losing their jobs because they were unaware of the income limits in the program, which were not listed on the two-page application.
  
  Malloy announced Monday that nine more state employees have been referred to their department supervisors for disciplinary hearings that could eventually lead to firings and the revocation of their pensions. That brings the total number of employees under suspicion to 24.
  
  Overall, 92 percent of those who filled out applications for food stamps were approved, according to state records. That does not include potential applicants who learned about the eligibility requirements and walked away without filling out an application.
  
  Rochlin said the state employees had "no intent to defraud anybody'' when they applied for benefits.
  
  Malloy's chief legal counsel, Andrew McDonald, said he would not respond to Rochlin's contention — made in a letter delivered to McDonald on Monday — that the state employees believe they are the subject of "a political witch-hunt."
  
  In an interview, McDonald said: "Within half an hour of him sending this letter to me, he's posted it on his website, and he's clearly trying to use the situation to develop clients. I'm not going to participate in his marketing efforts.''
  
  During a 10-minute phone conversation Saturday with Rochlin, McDonald said, Rochlin refused to identify his clients. But Rochlin said he had not spoken to McDonald since Saturday afternoon, and clients stepped forward Sunday and Monday.
  
  Rochlin is demanding an independent investigation by Witt Associates — the same consulting firm that was summoned by the Malloy administration to examine the actions of CL&P after the October snowstorm plunged much of the state into darkness.
  
  He said employees of the Department of Social Services, which oversees food stamps, did not ask applicants to verify their income for the crucial period during and after Irene — specifically from Aug. 27 to Sept. 25.
  
  "It was done hastily and without precision to a point where DSS workers were rushing people through the system like cattle and not asking people how much they made for the month of Aug. 27 to Sept. 25,'' Rochlin said Monday.
  
  "The state has been heavy on dispensing information on folks that are high paid and little about how Malloy's government was ill-trained, ill-equipped and inconsistent and pushed people through like cattle," Rochlin said. "Rather than holding a press conference on a Sunday before you leave for Beverly Hills, you should say we're going to take a hard look at how we handled this. It needs to be a comprehensive investigation. Take a look internally at your own administration. ... That requires some self-examination that politicians aren't always willing to do."
  
  Rochlin added, "This shouldn't be about who can get the most political traction on this. ... Open everything up to an independent consulting firm. Maybe it'll completely exonerate the Malloy administration. I challenge them to do that. Allow themselves to be scrutinized and examined like CL&P. Let's do the same thing for government."
  
  Officer Put On Administrative Duty
  
  Meanwhile, state police officials have placed an officer involved in the food stamp fraud investigation on administrative duty, meaning he cannot carry a gun but will be paid his regular salary. Sources said that Noel Jimenez, a 13-year veteran of the department, will have an internal affairs hearing this week.
  
  Sources have said that Jimenez is one of four state troopers who has been identified as possibly filling out fraudulent claims for the funds distributed after Irene through D-SNAP. Jimenez worked an overtime shift at the Norwich DSS office because of the large crowds that showed to try to get some of the benefits, which were capped at about $1,200.
  
  Jimenez earned more than $124,000 during the last fiscal year, including salary and overtime.
  
  State Police union President Andrew Matthews criticized the speed of the investigations and questioned whether Jimenez was being used as a scapegoat for political purposes.
  
  "Everyone has due process rights and the troopers are no exception. I'd ask the public to reserve judgment,'' Matthews said. "We don't know all of the facts yet. The process has never been expedited this quickly."
  
  Worried Workers Voice Concerns
  
  Nine state employees, gathered together by Rochlin, spoke to The Courant in a conference room in West Hartford on Sunday night about their fears of losing their jobs.
  
  The nine, including several single mothers with children, were concerned about their jobs. Two cried as they told their stories about the confusion, chaos and lack of information surrounding the process, saying they had been unsure of the rules. The official application form for emergency benefits never mentions the income guidelines.
  
  The employees would not give their full names to a reporter because they have not been publicly charged with anything and want to avoid potential retaliation by their supervisors, Rochlin said. By Monday, four had received written or verbal notices that they would be facing a disciplinary hearing.
  
  One employee. a single mother, said she waited in a line outside a state office for two hours before going inside to speak with a DSS employee — and was quickly approved.
  
  "I sat down with a DSS worker all of 40 seconds,'' the employee said. "She said, I don't need the overtime [for the income verification]. I was in there for like a minute."
  
  Soon after, she was walking out the door with a debit card with federal food stamp benefits.
  
  Like others, she questioned how many of more than 23,000 applicants will be scrutinized.
  
  "We're being railroaded as state employees," she said.
  
  Another state employee said she went to the DSS office in Middletown and was never asked for proof of her income. She said if she knew all the rules — as she does now — she would never have waited in line.
  
  "I offered the lady my pay stub, and she told me she didn't need that," the worker said. "All I need is the driver's license. I was in there less than 30 minutes."
  
  A third state employee said she waited in line starting at 4:30 a.m. — long before the doors opened at 7 a.m. — and was out shortly after 8 a.m. with her debit card.
  
  "I showed her a pay stub. She said that was not necessary," woman said, adding that she never heard anything about bank accounts being included in the totals for the income guidelines.
  
  She said she was unaware of the income guidelines, adding, "My understanding is that you had to be a working parent and not receiving food stamps."
  
  A fourth employee, who works at the Department of Children and Families, said that she and her fellow employees have access to vouchers and gas cards on a regular basis — and could have stolen money from the state in the past but did not.
  
  "Why would we want to defraud the state?" she asked.
  
  Concerning the employees who talked to a Courant reporter about concern for their jobs, McDonald said: "If they provided accurate, truthful information, they don't have anything to be worried about. We have clear evidence that people materially misrepresented their income and other assets on the forms that they signed under penalty of perjury. Some people should be very worried.''
  
  Former Gov. John G. Rowland, now a radio talk show host on WTIC-AM, has called upon Social Services Commissioner Roderick Bremby to resign because of his department's handling of the program. But despite his criticisms of the department, Rochlin did not call for Bremby's resignation.
  
  "We're not going to make any rush to judgment. We believe in due process,'' Rochlin said. "That's very, very premature. We don't know the facts yet.''
  
  Roy Occhiogrosso, a senior adviser and chief spokesman for Malloy, referred questions to McDonald, who is overseeing issues regarding food stamp fraud.
  
  Courant Staff Writer Dave Altimari contributed to this story.
  

  ---

• 9 More State Employees Suspected Of Fraud, Governor Says
  Courant Staff Report
  10:10 AM EST, December 12, 2011
  
  Nine more state employees are suspected of filing "false and misleading" applications for post-Irene food stamps, the governor's office announced Monday.
  
  This brings to 24 the total number of employees under suspicion of fraud in the emergency food stamp program known as D-SNAP.
  
  The 15 already announced have been notified of the dates of their individual disciplinary hearings, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in a statement.
  
  Sunday night, The Courant's Dave Altimari reported that a 13-year state trooper who earned more than $124,000 last year was four troopers under investigation for allegedly filing a fraudulent food stamp application after Tropical Storm Irene, which hit the state Aug. 28.
  
  In a statement Monday, Malloy reiterated his call for state employees to report fraud, which he said can be done anonymously.
  
  "Since we first announced the administration's investigation into the federal emergency food assistance program last week, my office has been contacted by state employees who want to report unethical practices but wish to do so anonymously," Malloy said. "The Office of the Auditors of Public Accounts, which is operated under the management of the state legislature, has a whistleblower unit designed to protect the identities of anyone who makes such a report.  I strongly urge any Connecticut resident who is aware of misuse or misappropriation of public funds and wants to remain anonymous to contact that office, understanding that their identities will be protected."
  
  He said tips can be submitted in writing or by phone to: State of Connecticut Auditors of Public Accounts, 210 Capitol Ave., Hartford, CT 06106, or by calling 800-797-1702 toll free, or locally at 860-240-5305. The appropriate website is http://www.cga.ct.gov/apa .
  

  ---

• Four state troopers at center of D-SNAP probe
  Stamford ADVOCATE
  Published 07:40 a.m., Monday, December 12, 2011
  
  HARTFORD (AP) -- The president of the state police union says four troopers are being investigated for possibly filing a fraudulent food aid application following Tropical Storm Irene.
  
  Andrew Matthews, president of the union, told The Hartford Courant (http://cour.at/u9JOZf ) that disciplinary cases are moving fast and he asked that people reserve judgment until the facts are known.
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced last week that 15 state employees will face disciplinary hearings over suspicions that they fraudulently applied for federal food assistance made available after the remnants of the hurricane struck Connecticut in late August.
  
  Matthews said that there is conflicting information about what applicants were told and who qualifies for funding.
  
  If the accusations are proven, state employees could face criminal charges that could impact their pensions.
  

  ---

• D-SNAP probe intensifies
  Ken Dixon, Staff Writer, CT POST
  Published 01:02 a.m., Sunday, December 11, 2011
  
  The point was to get the federal disaster relief into working people's pockets as quickly as possible.
  
  They'd already been waiting for more than two weeks after Tropical Storm Irene, which cut off power to hundreds of thousands of state residents at the height of the air-conditioning season.
  
  Forget the reservoirs of ice cream pooling in dark freezers from Milford to New Milford, from Greenwich to Bridgeport. Hamburger, chicken, milk -- you name it -- basic foodstuffs had gone bad in refrigerators and freezers throughout the state.
  
  When you're living paycheck to paycheck, even a few hundred dollars in losses is a big deal. So on Sept. 16, when the state Department of Social Services announced the $12.4 million Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for individual damage and expenses incurred in late August and September, they arrived in droves to collect one month of benefits.
  
  At Bridgeport's DSS office on Housatonic Avenue, people started lining up at midnight the night before, cat-napping in fold-out chairs, waiting for the start of the business day. Throughout the day, the line of applicants snaked around the building. Many wore the identification of hourly workers -- photos dangling on lanyards, signifying their jobs as nurse's aides, security guards, bus drivers.
  
  Similar scenes were played out in Hartford, Danbury and Stamford as thousands waited for the debit cards that were given to them, on the spot, loaded with an average of nearly $700, but for families of eight, as much as $1,200.
  
  Inside, DSS workers adopted a siege mentality and processed thousands of federal D-SNAP applications every day for a solid week. They queried applicants on their incomes and dependents; made sure the paperwork was correct. And gave out plastic cards loaded with money.
  
  Ten to 15 percent of applicants were rejected outright. They were either making too much money or were already enrolled in the food stamp program, which in recent years was renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
  
  The SNAP recipients -- about 220,000 households -- were getting their own disaster relief: an extra 25 percent of their monthly allotments to handle storm losses.
  
  Some D-SNAP applicants, though, tried to game the system of self-reporting. Now, they are low-hanging fruit for DSS investigators, a disappointed but determined governor and state and federal prosecutors who are awaiting referrals.
  
  About 800 state employees were among the 23,726 households accepted for D-SNAP. An unknown number, which DSS investigators are closing in on -- and which should be clarified this week -- misstated their income, assets and/or dependents. At least one claimed a dead relative was alive and hungry.
  
  For a few hundred dollars, these state workers have put their careers and families in jeopardy. They are in danger of losing their secure state jobs and facing criminal prosecution, with the possible loss of state pensions.
  
  It's the first real scandal of the nearly year-old administration of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. It emerged after the familiar name of a state employee jumped out at a DSS auditor late last month.
  
  But it's a sour echo of the bad old "Corrupticut" days, when former Bridgeport Mayor Joseph P. Ganim and Ernest E. Newton II, the now disgraced state legislator, were shaking down contractors in Bridgeport; when John G. Rowland accepted home improvements and free luxury flights to vacation destinations and ended up resigning in his third gubernatorial term.
  
  All three high-profile politicians, who used their offices as corrupt entitlements, landed in federal prison.
  
  Now, for a lot less money, state worker fraud has tainted and angered the governor, a former criminal prosecutor who, if anything, believes in government. A few hundred dollars here and there hardly amounts to vast corruption, and $12.4 million is relatively small, even by state standards, for a social services program
  
  But what the crooked applicants might not have known was that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funded the D-SNAP program, required the DSS to thoroughly review every state worker who applied.
  
  "We believe that a large number of people properly applied and properly qualified," Malloy said, noting that a long-standing DSS investigatory backlog "calls into question the seriousness of prior administrations." Still, the "vast majority" of those state employees who applied for D-SNAP did not lie, he said.
  
  In response to a series of questions last week on D-SNAP and SNAP oversight, a USDA spokesman said that by necessity, D-SNAP had a "streamlined" application process.
  
  "Who you are, where you live -- so that we know you were affected by the disaster, and income" were the main questions DSS intake workers focused upon.
  
  "In operating D-SNAP, federal guidelines require mandatory verification of identity and verification of residency and loss or inaccessibility of income where possible," said the spokesman, who did not want to be named. "State agencies must also verify household composition and food loss if questionable. Clients lacking verification documents or providing inconsistent information must be referred to investigators or senior staff for review."
  
  "It really hinges a lot on the integrity of the investigators to the extent to which the information stays intact," Roderick L. Bremby, commissioner of the DSS, said to reporters last week in support of keeping secret the names of the departments where the suspects work.
  
  "I can't speak for how this is impacting the rest of the employees around the enterprise, but I can tell you that there's great interest, considerable interest," Bremby said. "I think we've also had responses from many employees who are supportive of this action because it reflects badly on state government."
  
  Asked if there were SNAP recipients in those mid-September queues at the DSS offices, Bremby said he couldn't be sure, but that between signage warning SNAP families that they could not participate and computer review inside in the agency, through the 1989 Eligibility Maintenance System, he believes most D-SNAP card holders were not double-dipping.
  
  "We're going to be looking for everything," Bremby said. "We're beginning to look at the whole process of how we handle fraud, intake, investigations. In fact, we have started to do a top-to-bottom review of the entire agency as directed by the governor coming in."
  
  Maybe the luckiest of state employees were those who tried to apply for D-SNAP benefits, but under focused questioning from DSS screeners, admitted they made too much money and abandoned their attempts to gain the D-SNAP cards and walked out of the offices empty-handed.
  
  The screeners, doing their jobs as overworked state employees in stressful conditions, may have saved the jobs of the would-be applicants whom they rejected.
  

  ---

• 15 Suspected In Food Stamp Case Are Highly Paid, Malloy Says
  The Hartford Courant, ckeating@courant.com
  9:30 PM EST, December 8, 2011
  
  HARTFORD —
  Fifteen state employees who are suspected of food stamp fraud are highly paid workers earning beyond the limits for the low-income program, officials said Thursday.  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy did not say exactly how much the 15 employees were paid, but a source confirmed that at least some have earnings that exceed $100,000 a year.  The investigation began when an official recognized the name of a fellow state employee who had applied for assistance under the one-time, emergency benefits that were awarded under the food stamp program for those suffering losses from Tropical Storm Irene.  As part of the first batch of cases to be referred to disciplinary hearings, investigators sought the highest-paid employees to make their initial cases. The 15 identified so far were the "most obvious'' employees, Malloy said.
  The maximum benefit was $1,202, available only for households of eight people. All other benefits were below that level on a sliding scale. The maximum for a household of four was $668, and the maximum for a single person was $200.  The program is designed for lower-income citizens, and many of the state employees are not in that category.
  
  "They're all at the high end," Malloy said of their compensation. "It was easier to start at the highest end. ... If we know what someone is making, and it's greatly in excess of the maximum amount allowed for a family of eight, then it was easier to do.''
  
  Some state employees, however, earn wages that are low enough — based on their family size — and legitimately qualify for the program. For example, a family of eight might have a higher income and still qualify for the benefits when compared with a family of two.  A source familiar with the investigation said that one of the 15 employees listed the employee's mother as a dependent even though the mother was dead.  The source said that all 15 employees referred for disciplinary hearings so far work for the executive branch rather than the judicial or legislative branches — and that none is from higher education, including the University of Connecticut.  The 15 employees were from the first 60 or so forms reviewed, according to the source. Others could eventually be investigated in the case.  The employees are being informed that they are under investigation and will be subject to a disciplinary hearing — with some of those hearings starting soon. One possibility is that they will be offered a chance to pay back whatever they received and resign or face getting fired.
  
  Form Warns Applicants
  
  The two-page application for emergency benefits, known in federal short-hand as D-SNAP, has numerous caveats that warn the applicant against giving false information.
  
  Near the top of the first page, before the space asking for an applicant's name, the form has these words: "Complete this application truthfully and to the best of your knowledge. If your household refuses to give any requested information, [benefits] will not be granted.''
  
  In another part of the form, under Part D, applicants are cautioned: "Do not give false information or hide information to get or continue to get D-SNAP. Do not give or sell D-SNAP benefits or authorization documents to anyone not authorized to use them.''
  
  The application provides far more red flags about cheating than on the federal tax forms. As with the language on tax forms, the food stamp application says, "I certify, under penalty of perjury, that the information I have given is correct and complete to the best of my knowledge.''
  
  In addition, the program not only asks for income, but also counts money included in the applicant's bank account. For example, a family of four — which could be a single mother with three children — would be disqualified if it had $4,000 in the bank at the time of the storm.
  
  Following remarks by Malloy, Social Services Commissioner Roderick Bremby spoke with reporters Thursday about the investigation. He was asked whether the 15 employees ever stood in line at all or instead had an employee at the social services department type their names into a computer in an "inside job'' — while other citizens waited on line all day. Another question was whether state employees were getting paid their regular salaries while they were standing in line.
  
  "We don't have the time stamp on any of the applications,'' Bremby responded. "All of these applications came through the normal process.''
  
  Bremby added: "You asked me about the 15. I don't know whether they stood in line. I don't know whether they came by, picked up an application, completed it that day. That information is unknown to us. The pejorative comment about 'an inside job,' that did not happen.''
  
  It was also not immediately clear whether any of the 15 employees might be supervisors. Malloy's chief legal counsel, Andrew McDonald, said later that state and federal prosecutors had asked the Malloy administration not to release information on whether the workers were supervisors.
  
  "We're not at liberty to answer every question the way we like,'' McDonald said.
  
  He said he also did not know whether all 15 employees were union members.
  
  No names of the employees have been released yet, and their exact salaries were also not available Thursday. Bremby told reporters that the investigations were being treated confidentially. He said, though, that it was not difficult to investigate fellow state employees.
  
  "So, I can say, no, it wasn't difficult,'' Bremby said. "It's the only thing to do.''
  
  Under the emergency food stamp program, recipients need to disclose not only the amount of their salary but also the amount of liquid assets in bank accounts and in cash. The amount of money earned by some of these employees includes overtime and not just their regular wages.
  
  "Let's be careful about the word salary, and let's think about in terms of compensation,'' Malloy said. "I don't want to be limiting the issue to salary, as such, because it's total compensation.''
  

  ---

• Malloy Announces Tropical Storm Irene Fraud Probe
  The Hartford Courant
  By CHRISTOPHER KEATING, ckeating@courant.com
  4:24 PM EST, December 4, 2011
  
  HARTFORD—The state has launched an investigation into potential fraud by state workers involving a food-stamp program to help victims of Tropical Storm Irene, Gov. Malloy said Sunday afternoon.
  
  The probe centers on whether state workers falsified their own financial information in order to receive benefits stemming from Irene that were administered by the state Department of Social Services. The investigation involves only benefits received by state employees – not state workers acting on behalf of non-state employees.
  
  Overall, 23,000 citizens applied for assistance under the food-stamp program following the devastating storm that knocked out power and barreled through waterfront homes in East Haven. Of those who applied and self-reported their income, about 800 were state employees. Some of those employees are eligible for the program because of their income, but others are not.
  
  Numerous citizens were seeking assistance after the storm, and questions were raised immediately whether everyone seeking those benefits was actually eligible.
  
  "I will not tolerate fraud in any form, especially if the fraud is perpetrated against a public program by a public employee," Malloy told reporters at the state Capitol.
  
  "One of the fundamental responsibilities of government is to ensure proper and honest conduct by its own employees,'' Malloy said. "Unfortunately, we are finding examples of conduct that, if fully substantiated, could result in dismissal or even prosecution.''
  
  Malloy said he has asked the state's social services commissioner to determine how extensive the fraud might be and that employees identified as participating may face being fired.
  
  Malloy's chief legal counsel, Andrew McDonald, spoke to state and federal prosecutors Friday regarding the potential fraud. Since Malloy was attending a family funeral on Saturday, he said he wanted to make the announcement in person on Sunday afternoon – a highly unusual time when the state Capitol is normally dark and populated only by the Capitol police.
  
  The announcement was made Sunday because Malloy is traveling Monday to Beverly Hills for a two-day conference of the Democratic Governors Association at the sold-out Beverly Wilshire. The group's Christmas Party and annual meeting at the upscale hotel includes an opening-night reception on Rodeo Drive and presentations on technology, energy, and government efficiency at the conference headquarters. At least nine governors will be in attendance, including California's Jerry Brown, Montana's Brian Schweitzer, and Maryland's Martin O'Malley.
  
  In Connecticut, social services commissioner Roderick L. Bremby will be looking at cases of fraud in the program, which covered disaster-related expenses from August 27 to September 25 – both during and after the storm.
  
  "If state employees - or anyone else - defrauded the disaster funding program, the consequences will be immediate and severe," he said.
  
  Malloy said the program gave eligible individuals a debit card to purchase food that was lost in the storm and that some state employees may have falsified financial information to gain benefits.
  
  The highest payment to any individual for food was $1,200, and the average was $684, officials said.
  
  In a program based on the original food-stamp program, consumers would receive a debit card – but it would only work for food. In the same way that consumers could not purchase non-food items with the original stamps, they cannot purchase non-food items with the debit card. The program is currently known as D-SNAP, meaning Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It is funded by the federal government but administered by the state.
  
  "I can honestly say that if I look angry, I am,'' Malloy told reporters as he began an unusual news conference at the state Capitol on Sunday afternoon.
  
  "For state employees, that means termination and prosecution,'' Malloy said.
  
  Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, who stood next to Malloy during the news conference, said, "If any of these state employees are indeed guilty, I am disappointed beyond words. This is a program for people in need and for their children. To abuse this program is not only a crime, it is nothing less than a moral outrage.''
  

  ---

• Malloy to disclose irregularities in Irene disaster aid
  Mark Pazniokas, CT MIRROR
  December 4, 2011
  
  Ineligible state employees and others appear to have obtained disaster aid after Tropical Storm Irene, prompting Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to abruptly call a news conference for 3 p.m. Sunday.
  
  Malloy is expected to disclose details of what a source described as evidence of "irregularities" in the distribution of federal Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, known as "D-SNAP."
  
  At 9:41 a.m., the governor's press office distributed a terse notice of a news conference by email. It offered no details of the subject matter, saying only that Malloy will "make an announcement." A Malloy spokesman refused to comment.
  
  But a source familiar with the issue said Malloy will disclose the discovery of possible fraud in the federal program administered by the state Department of Social Services.
  
  The D-SNAP benefits became available in Connecticut for the first time after President Obama granted Malloy's request for disaster assistance in all eight counties.
  
  Benefits were issued through ATM-style debit cards for the purchase of approved food items at grocery stores. The program is designed to quickly distribute aid, getting the cards in the hands of recipients within 72 hours.
  
  Eligible households were to receive food aid ranging from $200 for a single adult to $952 for a family of six. Applicants had to identify uninsured disaster losses incurred from Aug. 27 to Sept. 25.
  
  Qualified losses included lost wages and expenses for temporary shelter, emergency repairs and health care due to the storm that destroyed or significantly damaged hundreds of homes.
  
  D-SNAP was intended for residents who were not already receiving regular benefits under SNAP, the federal program that provides an updated version of food stamps.
  
  The program was described as intended for low-income residents. But based on the eligible income ranges, it appears possible for some state employees to have legitimately qualified, depending on household size.
  
  According to a press release announcing the program Sept. 19, the maximum monthly "take-home income and liquid assets" for the covered 30-day period was $2,186 for a single adult, $2,847 for a household of two, $3,272 for three, $3,859 for four, $4,245 for five, $4,753 for six, $5,116 for seven and $5,479 for eight.
  
  "We need to be very clear up front about the federal requirements for this special form of assistance to residents impacted by Tropical Storm Irene," DSS Commissioner Roderick Bremby said in announcing the program in September.
  
  If fraud was detected, the episode will be an unwelcome milestone in the Malloy administration, which is closing out its first year in office.

  ---

• Malloy discloses irregularities in Irene disaster aid
  Mark Pazniokas, CT MIRROR
  December 4, 2011
  Updated 4:10 p.m.
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy disclosed Sunday that 800 state employees obtained federal disaster aid through the state after Tropical Storm Irene, with an undisclosed number suspected of gaining the assistance through fraud.  State and federal prosecutors were notified Friday, he said.
  
  At an abruptly called news conference at the Capitol, Malloy said that staff at the Department of Social Services spotted the names of "more than a few" state employees who appeared to obtain aid without fully disclosing their income.  Many, if not most, of the employees undoubtedly got the aid legitimately, Malloy said.  The suspected fraud was committed by employees who appear to have underreported their income in applications for the aid, not by any DSS workers directly involved in administering the program or approving applications, officials said.
  
  "I am making this announcement because we believe fraud has been perpetrated by a number of individuals," said Malloy, who was accompanied at the 10-minute press conference by Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and Roderick Bremby, the commissioner of social services.  Any findings of fraud by an employee will mean termination and prosecution, Malloy said.
  
  "If I look angry, it is because I am," Malloy said, stepping to a lectern outside his office at the state Capitol.
  
  Wyman said, "If any of these state employees are indeed guilty I am disappointed beyond words."
  
  The federal aid came through the federal Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as "D-SNAP."
  
  At 9:41 a.m., the governor's press office distributed a terse notice of a news conference by email. It offered no details of the subject matter, saying only that Malloy would"make an announcement." Based on a source, The Mirror reported the suspected fraud Sunday morning. Malloy said he held the rare Sunday press conference, because he is about to depart for a trip the Democratic Governors Association meeting in Los Angeles and he wanted to break the news.
  
  "If I didn't do that ...someone might say I am not personally taking this seriously. I have been taking this seriously since it came to my attention," Malloy said. "I decided to do it myself."
  
  Malloy said the apparent fraud was discovered by DSS staff.
  
  "Rod's team was doing their job, and doing the review they are required to do, they came across some names that looked familiar," Malloy said. "That gave rise to Rod doing more work on it."
  
  One source said DSS staff was stunned to see the names of some highly paid state managers on the list of recipients, prompting a more detailed review. The 800 employees who got the disaster aid appears to be a disproportionately high percentage of the 23,000 applicants.  The D-SNAP benefits became available in Connecticut for the first time after President Obama granted Malloy's request for disaster assistance in all eight counties.
  
  Benefits were issued through ATM-style debit cards for the purchase of approved food items at grocery stores. The program is designed to quickly distribute aid, getting the cards in the hands of recipients within 72 hours. Eligible households were to receive food aid ranging from $200 for a single adult to $1,202 for a family of eight. Applicants had to identify uninsured disaster losses incurred from Aug. 27 to Sept. 25.
  
  Qualified losses included lost wages and expenses for temporary shelter, emergency repairs and health care due to the storm that destroyed or significantly damaged hundreds of homes.  D-SNAP was intended for residents who were not already receiving regular benefits under SNAP, the federal program that provides an updated version of food stamps.  The program was described as intended for low-income residents. But based on the eligible income ranges, it appears possible for some state employees to have legitimately qualified, depending on household size.
  
  According to a press release announcing the program Sept. 19, the maximum monthly "take-home income and liquid assets" for the covered 30-day period was $2,186 for a single adult, $2,847 for a household of two, $3,272 for three, $3,859 for four, $4,245 for five, $4,753 for six, $5,116 for seven and $5,479 for eight.
  
  "We need to be very clear up front about the federal requirements for this special form of assistance to residents impacted by Tropical Storm Irene," Bremby said in announcing the program in September.  If fraud was detected, the episode will be an unwelcome milestone in the Malloy administration, which is closing out its first year in office.

  ---

• Witt Storm Report Slams CL&P, Also Faults Some Towns' Response
  The Hartford Courant
  By JON LENDER, jlender@courant.com
  10:52 AM EST, December 2, 2011
  
  HARTFORD - Connecticut Light & Power Co. was grossly unprepared for the freak Oct. 29 snowstorm that paralyzed Connecticut but cutting off electricity to 809,097 customers for as long as 10 days, a special report by a national emergency-preparedness consultant has concluded.
  
  "CL&P was not prepared for an event of this size. The worst-case scenario in the company's emergency response plan considered outages over 100,000 customers, or less than 10 percent of their total customer base. More than two-thirds of its customers lost power as a result of the October snowstorm," said the report, released Friday by Witt Associates of Washington, D.C., the firm that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy recruited to assess the utility company's performance and its problems in responding to the storm.
  
  The firm, which agreed to perform its investigation free of charge to the state, posted the report on its website Friday morning.
  
  Malloy briefing reporters on the report at 10 a.m. in the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.
  
  Other highlights of the report included findings that:
  
  -- Even though CL&P had days of advance warning of the approaching storm whose heavy snow would weigh down and break limbs still full with unfallen leaves, it did not make adequate advance arrangements to bring in power restoration crews from out of state. Said the report: "CL&P did not lean forward by pre-staging adequate restoration resources in advance of the October 29 snowstorm; this delayed the recovery effort in the first days."
  
  -- CL&P executives announced an unrealistic goal – in effect making it a commitment – that power would be restored to 99 percent of all customers by Sunday, Nov. 6, without "vetting [it] internally." That announcement, the report said, " unnecessarily contributed to increased customer frustration and challenges for municipal governments."
  
  -- Not all problems were CL&P's sole responsibility; some towns do not maintain adequate preparedness at the local government level. "Some local governments have well-defined structures and procedures for incident response and management," the report said. But "others, for varied reasons including staffing levels, resources, and personnel expertise, have minimal processes established for coordinating complex operations, such as designation of a clear point of contact for coordination with utility representatives in a major outage and procedures for damage assessment."
  
  Here are further findings, taken verbatim from the report on the website:
  
  - Preparedness, including planning, training, and exercise, for a widespread power outage and/or infrastructure damage event is inadequate across all sectors.
  
  - As is the case with most electric utilities, CL&P is dependent on contractors and mutual aid from other utilities to address a large-scale outage. Several factors contributed to initial delays in auxiliary staffing for this event. The company was able to almost fully restore power by Wednesday, November 9, by bringing in thousands of crews later in the event.
  
  - CL&P developed an internal stretch goal to restore power to 99 percent of all customers by Sunday, November 6. Without vetting internally, the company announced this date as a public performance commitment. This announcement, and a subsequent commitment to restore 99 percent of all customers in each of 149 municipalities by November 6, unnecessarily contributed to increased customer frustration and challenges for municipal governments.
  
  - Northeast Utilities (NU), CL&P's parent company, did not provide sufficient executive leadership during this restoration effort, allowing one individual [then-CL&P President Jeffrey D. Butler, who since has resigned] to oversee the restoration effort, serve as the primary liaison at the state Emergency Operations Center, and be the public spokesperson.
  
  - When power was restored for individual customers, CL&P's real-time situational awareness and ability to communicate restoration status to customers, was delayed by as much as 12 hours as data was not updated in the system until crews returned from their shifts. This hampered coordinated decision-making and accurate communication regarding power restoration activities.
  
  - Although a good idea in concept, CL&P's Town Liaison program had not been fully developed at the time of the snowstorm and was not consistently effective in providing a conduit for accurate information between the company and municipal governments, and, in some cases, undermined the company's credibility with local officials.
  
  - CL&P crews and public sector response and emergency management entities in Connecticut generally use radio systems for response communication in the field that are not compatible with each other.
  
  - While vital to provide needed capabilities, use of external mutual assistance and contract crews presents communication, reporting, and tracking challenges because they often do not have the same communications or field reporting technology as used by local crews.
  
  Overview Of Recommendations
  
  The 27 recommendations found in this report can be categorized in several broad themes:
  
  - CL&P should improve its planning, procedures, training, and pre-staging practices to adequately prepare its crews and resources for the scale of incidents it and its customers potentially face by significantly increasing the scale of planning scenarios.
  
  - CL&P needs to develop its management scalability for large-scale incidents by implementing an Incident Command System (ICS) structure that expands with the requirements of the incident.
  
  - CL&P needs to improve its processes for information management, including message vetting, communication, and coordination with local governments, and the dissemination of public information to its customers, external partners, stakeholders, and the media. During a large-scale outage, it can be as important to communicate the restoration plan and progress toward implementation of that plan, as it is to restore power itself.
  
  - CL&P should more closely coordinate and integrate preparedness activities with state and local governments to include ongoing planning, training, and exercise for utility disruption.
  
  - State and local government planning and preparedness should address major power disruption more comprehensively and inclusively, including coordination with utility providers and procedures for damage assessment teams in power and/or utility outage events.

  ---

• NU Raises Post-Storm Fund to $30M, Conceding $10M Was Too Low
  The Hartford Courant
  By JANICE PODSADA, jpodsada@courant.com
  2:50 PM EST, November 29, 2011
  
  Northeast Utilities increased its post-storm fund on Tuesday from $10 million to $30 million, saying the earlier amount was too low.
  
  NU, the Hartford-based parent company of Connecticut Light & Power, established the fund earlier this month in the wake of the Oct. 29 Nor'easter that felled trees and limbs throughout the state and caused more than 830,000 CL&P customers to lose power — some for up to 11 days.
  
  The money is meant to compensate residents, who can apply for credits on their electric bills. NU will also donate up to $5 million to three local charities.
  
  Residents, business owners and legislators have held CL&P accountable for the lengthy period of time it took to restore power, and several investigations are underway including one under the direction of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. The head of CL&P, Jeffrey Butler, resigned after the storm.
  
  "As we heard from our customers and had discussions with Governor Malloy and his staff, it became clear that the original sum we proposed, $10 million, was insufficient," Charles Shivery, NU's president and chief executive officer, said Tuesday in a prepared statement.
  
  "While this storm was unprecedented, we set very high expectations for the performance of Connecticut Light and Power. Clearly, we did not meet a number of those expectations.
  
  "Today's announcement demonstrates our sincere desire to keep faith with our CL&P customers by assisting those who were without power the longest, as well as organizations that provide food and warmth to those most in need," Shivery added.
  
  "The unprecedented storm created substantial hardships for many people, despite the extraordinary efforts of our employees and contractors. Having the confidence of our customers is important to us and, in addition to establishing this fund, we have taken a series of steps to improve performance at CL&P."
  
  The fund, which will be administered by the company, will be open for application beginning Wed. Dec. 7. On that date, CL&P will begin contacting qualified residential customers to inform them of their eligibility to apply for the credit.Qualified customers can also apply at http://www.cl-p.com or by calling 888-566-9257. All applications must be received by 5 p.m. January 31, 2012.  Any residential customer without power after noon on Saturday, Nov. 5, as a result of the storm, would be eligible for credit applied to their CL&P bill – a minimum of $100 to a maximum of $200 depending on how many eligible customers apply for the credit.

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• DEEP: State Lacks Clear Tree Trimming Standards
  CTNEWSJUNKIE
  by Hugh McQuaid | Nov 18, 2011 12:42pm
  
  The governor’s Two Storm Panel asked for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s help Friday in drawing up clear tree trimming standards to strengthen the state’s utility infrastructure.
  
  DEEP’s Urban Forestry Coordinator Chris Donnelly spoke to the panel, commissioned by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to examine the state’s response to Tropical Storm Irene and a freak October snowstorm. Both storms left hundreds of thousands of Connecticut residents without power, some for more than a week.
  
  The panel has been considering how the state, municipalities, and utility companies trim trees located close to power lines and what changes can be made to the process to reduce outages from downed trees and branches.
  
  Donnelly said that the state already has very high quality tree care and has two of the best tree care laws in the nation. In 1901, the legislature showed great foresight when it passed a tree warden law establishing one individual in each town who is responsible for caring for its trees, he said.
  
  Later in 1919, the General Assembly passed an arborist law requiring that anyone managing trees on a commercial basis be licensed by the state, he said. Testing for that license is rigorous, he said, adding that only about half the people who take the test pass it.
  
  But there are few specific industry standards to direct tree wardens and utility crews, he said.
  
  “We the people of Connecticut have yet to define the overall goal or purpose of the roadside forest in terms that are clearly understood and accepted by most people,” he said.
  
  What standards do exist don’t focus on planning and preparation, he said. Joseph McGee, chairman of the panel, said it was clear from speaking to the state’s mayors and selectmen that aging trees putting the utility infrastructure at risk.
  
  Town tree wardens and utility tree trimming programs need to be more integrated, he said and suggested the state could take the lead and make that happen.
  
  The DEEP could issue clear standards, collaborating with town tree wardens and the Connecticut Tree Protective Association, he said. It could also establish a five-year commitment to collaborative budgets, he said.
  
  Donnelly agreed.
  
  “The municipalities, the professional communities and so on, they do look to state agencies for leadership and for guidance,” he said.
  
  However, he cautioned against the state imposing unfunded tree trimming mandates on the municipalities since it would make the department “little more than cheerleaders.”
  
  McGee said there may be a way to improve tree trimming without necessarily forcing towns to increase their budgets. Towns could use their current budgets more effectively, he said. McGee used Fairfield as an example. The town spends $750,000 a year on trimming but the tree warden sees his role as the health of the trees, he said. The warden said the tree’s relationship to power lines was not his business, he said.
  
  “It just seems this is a whole silo. And if we’re facing an issue of tree trimming, wouldn’t it makes sense to coordinate this?” he asked.
  
  Donnelly said cooperation was the best place to start.
  
  “If there is a sense of priority and a sense of what is the right way to be doing this among the professional community I think that would go a great way towards what action should be taken,” he said.
  
  McGee asked Donnelly to come up with some recommendations for the committee about how state agencies could work with utility companies and towns to better communicate.
  
  Currently, how much towns spend on tree trimming and what their tree programs consist of varies widely throughout the state.
  
  Donnelly explained some of the difference, citing an informal survey the department did in 2004.  That year the town of Greenwich spent the most on trimming, at $900,000, he said. Meanwhile the town of Sprague spent only $217, he said. The average in the state was around $60,000 a year, he said.
  
  “This of course becomes relevant to this discussion because we are dealing with a diversity of municipalities and each have their own challenges but they also are very, very different,” he said.
  
  The vast majority of towns spend under $2 per capita on tree programs, he said. Donnelly estimated the total municipal expenditures on trees in the state was around $10.5 million.
  

  ---

• CL&P Chief Jeffrey Butler Resigns
  The Hartford Courant
  By JON LENDER, jlender@courant.com
  1:53 PM EST, November 17, 2011
  
  HARTFORD — Jeffrey D. Butler, president of Connecticut Light & Power Co., resigned Thursday after a brutal series of weeks in which he became the focus of outrage and the public face of failures by his utility company in the wake of two paralyzing storms, Aug. 28 and Oct. 29, that left hundreds of thousands of state residents in the dark for periods as long as 11 days.
  
  The resignation of the heavily criticized Butler was announced by parent company Northeast Utilities at 1:10 p.m. Thursday, along with other changes that CL&P said will improve its preparedness and performance in the future.
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's senior adviser, Roy Occhiogrosso, released a statement shortly after the announcement: "Gov. Malloy made clear that he thought Northeast Utilities needed to address CL&P's management issues, and it's clear that process has begun. It's also likely that there will be other changes on other fronts as a result of CL&P's performance in the lead-up to and aftermath of the storm."
  
  Butler's departure came amid investigations by several state and federal authorities of the utility company after Tropical Storm Irene in late August and the freak pre-Halloween snowstorm. One of those probes continues Friday at 9:30 a.m. in the Legislative Office Building in Hartford, as Malloy's Two Storm Panel will hear testimony from "first responders" including municipal police and fire officials. It also will hear from labor union representatives who have blasted inadequate utility company staffing.
  
  Butler absorbed criticism from citizens, officials and news editorial writers. A police department threatened to hold him responsible for fires made worse by blocked roads, and someone even set up a derisive Twitter account under the name "FakeJeffButler" with needling posts including this one: "The rumors that my gold-plated residential backup generator runs on the refined tears of orphan children are totally unfounded."
  
  He became a familiar figure on television and in newspaper pages because of his continual news briefings in the Emergency Operations Center at the State Armory in Hartford, wearily facing skeptical questions from reporters.
  
  Butler, son of a utility company lineman, was graduated from the California State University at Chico in 1979 with a degree in electrical and electronic engineering. He was hired by Pacific Gas and Electric, working various hydroelectric jobs before moving into management. He left PG&E in a management shake-up, then worked for a European energy consulting firm for less than a year CL&P offered him its presidency in 2009. He replaced Raymond P. Necci.
  
  CL&P is a Northeast Utilities company.
  
  Following is CL&P's press release, in its entirety:
  
  Northeast Utilities Announces CL&P Organization Changes
  Additional Steps Taken To Improve Emergency Preparedness
  
  HARTFORD, Connecticut, November 17, 2011 – Northeast Utilities' (NYSE: NU) Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Charles W. Shivery today announced changes in senior leadership and in the emergency preparedness organization of its Connecticut Light & Power (CL&P) operating company.
  
  Shivery announced the company has accepted the resignation of Jeffrey D. Butler, president and chief operating officer (COO) of CL&P, effective immediately. The company will undertake a national search for his successor.
  
  "We reluctantly accepted Jeff's resignation," Shivery said. "His commitment and dedication on behalf of our company, employees and customers have been exceptional. We thank him for his important contribution to NU, CL&P and the community. We wish him all the best."
  
  James A. Muntz, NU president – Transmission, will serve as president and chief operating officer of CL&P. Muntz currently has overall leadership and management responsibility for NU's Transmission business. He joined CL&P as vice president – Customer Operations, responsible for the operation and maintenance of CL&P's electric power distribution system. Muntz will report to Lee Olivier, executive vice president and chief operating officer for NU and chief executive officer of CL&P.
  
  Shivery also announced actions he has taken to enhance CL&P's emergency preparedness.
  
  The company has retained Davies Consulting, Inc., an internationally recognized consulting firm, to perform a thorough evaluation of CL&P's preparedness and response to recent unprecedented storms. Mr. Shivery stated that by the first week of January preliminary findings will be delivered to him and the NU Board of Trustees, with a final report completed in early February.
  
  In addition, Shivery announced the creation of a new CL&P position to lead emergency preparedness, which will be filled by William J. Quinlan. As CL&P senior vice president - Emergency Preparedness, Quinlan will lead the consolidation and integration of all CL&P emergency preparedness. He will work with state and town officials to put protocols in place to allow CL&P to partner effectively in any type of emergency.
  
  Quinlan will also coordinate the company's participation in the various post-storm reviews being conducted, including the Governor's review of utility restoration by Witt Associates.
  
  Quinlan has more than 25 years of operational, legal, regulatory, technology and business experience at CL&P. He currently serves as vice president – Customer Solutions. His previous experience includes overseeing distribution, operations and maintenance among other functions. Additionally, he has worked closely with the towns and the state following Tropical Storm Irene. Quinlan will continue to report to the president and COO of CL&P.
  
  Additionally, Shivery announced that Dana Louth, currently vice president – Asset Strategy, has been named to the new position of vice president – CL&P Infrastructure Hardening, reporting to Quinlan. Louth is a 35-year CL&P veteran with extensive experience in the design and maintenance of electric systems.
  
  Infrastructure hardening refers to making the electric system more resistant to weather related events. This includes vegetation management, structural hardening, electrical hardening and undergrounding of the electric system. In his new role, Louth will be responsible for reviewing and making recommendations on how the company can improve the resiliency of its electric system.
  
  "I am proud of our employees and their hard work in response to these historic storms," said Shivery. "Today's changes are major steps to help CL&P and our employees better meet future challenges. There are still things to learn, but with winter coming these were changes I knew we should and could make right now."

  ---

• Storm could lead to higher electric rates in Conn.
  Norwalk HOUR
  MICHAEL MELIA, Associated Press
  Posted on 11/12/2011
  
  HARTFORD -- A rare October snow storm that caused record-breaking power outages could lead to increased electricity costs in Connecticut, where residents who endured days in the dark and cold already pay higher rates than any other state in the continental United States.
  
  The price tag is expected to run to $100 million or more for the 12-day campaign that involved crews from as far as Colorado and Michigan in restoring power to more than 850,000 customers.
  
  In a recent financial filing, the parent company of Connecticut's main electric utility said it expects to recover costs for the Oct. 29 snow storm by going through regulators. With multiple investigations probing the utility's storm response, however, the state's energy commissioner and a key state lawmaker told The Associated Press that claims of mismanagement and subpar performance -- if proven true -- could block the company from passing costs on to ratepayers.
  
  "We don't know if it's going to be borne by ratepayers. I think it's very premature to make that statement," said Connecticut state Rep. Vicki Nardello of Prospect, co-chairwoman of the legislature's energy committee. She said Connecticut Light & Power has insurance against storms and a reserve account, and state energy regulators can prevent the utility from passing storm-related expenses on to customers if they are deemed to be "imprudent."  FULL STORY HERE.
  

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• Malloy panel questions CL&P's tree-trimming budget
  Keith M. Phaneuf and Mark Pazniokas, CT MIRROR
  November 9, 2011
  
  Despite recent budget increases, Connecticut Light and Power Co. spent less on tree-trimming--after adjustments for inflation--and cleared fewer miles of wires last year than it did a decade ago, according to testimony state utility regulators submitted Wednesday to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's panel studying responses to major storms. 
  
  Also, state regulators noted while they measure utilities' tree-trimming efforts by monitoring past expenditures and annual incidents of limbs hitting lines, there is no clear external standard for assessing the adequacy of these measures, nor are requirements set specifically to mitigate the effects of major weather-related disasters.
  
  "What sort of tree-trimming program would be required to eliminate that risk?" former state economic development commissioner Joseph McGee, chairman of Malloy's Two Storm Panel, asked. He didn't get a precise answer from regulators, municipal tree wardens and others who participated in Wednesday's informational meeting.
  
  But McGee noted that while CL&P's state-approved budget for tree maintenance has fluctuated up and down over the last decade, it hasn't matched the 3,532 miles of wires trimmed in 2001 in any year since.  McGee's question stemmed in part from the charge Malloy gave the panel to open its Wednesday meeting.  Originally formed in September to explore utility and state agencies' readiness and response to Tropical Storm Irene, which caused over 760,000 power outages, the panel was tasked with asking the same questions about a second storm after an Oct. 29 nor'easter dumped between one and two feet of snow on northern and central Connecticut, causing over 880,000 outages.
  
  Malloy said the state and the utilities need to view the string of  recent storms in the context of climate change. He said the benchmark used to be the 1950s, when then state saw three significant hurricanes.
  
  "We've now seen perhaps two of the top three or four storms hit in a  period of seven or eight weeks," Malloy said. "We need to drill. We change the fabric, the backbone of our utilities so that they are  better able to overcome these challenges."
  
  "Take the storm for what I believe it was, a warning of things to come," the governor said. "We have to accept that that's what it is."
  
  Malloy has rejected CL&P officials' arguments that its power restoration efforts, which exceeded 11 days, were due primarily to an unprecedented storm causing historic damage levels. The governor, who also ordered a second, independent review being performed by Witt Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based risk management firm, said he's convinced the problems stem in significant part by mistakes made by the utility.
  
  "They told us what the standard was. They failed to meet the standard,  and in doing so they can't complain about the repercussions... They broadly disappointed the people of Connecticut, and that will require a response."
  
  That means improverd response to future storms similar to the Oct. 29 event. "They must have less impact on the citizens of the state of Connecticut," Malloy said. "That's our goal."
  
  The ongoing reviews will scrutinize CL&P from "top to bottom," Malloy said. "Were they sufficiently structured to make sure that recovery was as high a priority as it needed to be?"
  
  The governor ordered the panel not to rely on assumptions that another incident like this couldn't happen any time soon.
  
  "It's no secret that we need to look at tree trimming  budgets and programs going forward," a statement issued Wednesday from CL&P read. "We are an active participant in this review and look forward to hearing the recommendations from the panel and others involved in this process."
  
  Malloy said the state had sufficient authority to force necessary changes.
  
  "We have all kinds of tools," he said. "We have the regulatory  process. We have the ability to raise issues before [the state Public Utility Regulatory Authority]. We have a  department of energy that we never had before, which I think was a failure in government, one which we addressed relatively quickly. And  of course we always have legislative recourse, legislative action."
  
  Regulatory changes could affect the utilities' rates, earnings, and required spending on tree-trimming and other maintenance.  The state utility regulators have to consider a delicate balance when making decisions in these areas, ensuring utilities have enough resources and spend sufficient funds to provide reliable service, while also working to keep customer rates as low as possible, said Steve Cadwallader, chief of utility regulation for the Public Utility Regulatory Authority.
  
  Utilities bear primary responsibility for crafting their own budgets, including expenditures for tree-trimming, Cadwallader said.  After panel members noted that CL&P's tree-trimming spending fell from an annual average of $20.4 million from 2001 through 2003 to a three-year average of $13.9 million from 2004 through 2006, Cadwallader said spending in this area tends to fluctuate as the need to "ramp up" tree trimming becomes clear. Regulators have authority to order higher spending, and have utilized it, he said.
  
  The state wanted to accelerate CL&P's tree-trimming efforts so that it could approach a cycle in which nearly all trees in power line buffer zones are cut back ever four years, he said. Currently the utility's pace is roughly a five-year cycle.  The utility's tree-trimming spending rose over the last four years when ranged between $23.7 million and $27.4 million.
  
  Still, CL&P's $22.6 million tree-trimming expenditure in 2001 -- is worth $28.9 million now according to the national Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation index. That's larger than both this year's budget, and last year's $25.1 million expenditure when it also is adjusted for inflation.
  
  Though the state measures utilities maintenance efforts by comparing past expenditures and monitoring annual problems, McGee asked regulators how they know these criteria are sufficient, and whether any national standard is used.
  
  "I'm not aware that there is a national standard," John Buckingham, PURA's senior engineer for utility reliability issues told the panel. Regulators believe the utilities have access to industry data that ranks and compares tree-trimming and related maintenance efforts, but PURA hasn't been able to obtain it. "There's been some legal wrangling over submitting it," Buckingham said.
  
  "We would expect them to spend what is necessary to maintain  safe and reliable service," Cadwallader said.

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• THIS IS A LINK TO ONE OF THE MOST EVEN-HANDED BITS OF COMMENTARY ON THE DISASTER, IN OUR OPINION
  

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• Malloy predicts 'malfeasance' behind slow response to outages
  Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR
  November 7, 2011
  
  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy predicted his new probe of Connecticut Light & Power Co. would uncover "some level of malfeasance" in the utility's response to the Oct. 29 snowstorm, and hinted that the company's top management needs change.
  
  "A monopoly is a trust with the people they serve," Malloy said, referring to the franchise that allows CL&P to exclusively serve nearly 80 percent of all of Connecticut's utility customers. "It is clear they failed that trust... I feel CL&P has let the people of Connecticut down."
  
  Malloy was referring to nearly 834,000 outages faced by CL&P customers because of the snow storm and company President Jeffrey Butler's repeated assurances that 99 percent of all outages would be resolved by midnight Sunday. Butler withdrew that pledge Saturday and as of 6 p.m., Monday, 3 percent of the customer base, 41,540 residences and businesses, remained without power, according to the company's website.
  
  Further complicating matters, Butler said Monday morning that he was uncertain CL&P would meet its revised target of restoring 99 percent of all customers by midnight Monday.
  
  "They failed by their own standard. I suspect they failed by the industry standard as well," Malloy said. "I think they have a gigantic credibility problem," the governor added. "There's no one to blame but themselves."
  
  The governor announced Friday that he had asked Witt Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based risk assessment firm led by former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Witt, to conduct a study of CL&P's response.
  
  "I presume we're going to find some level of malfeasance," Malloy said. "Those responsible will be held accountable ... and we will hold them to a very high standard." He wouldn't rule out legal action that could lead to financial penalties against CL&P.
  
  "It really is about their capacity" the governor said, adding that despite repeated assurances, it became clear the utility could neither swiftly mobilize the crews needed to restore power promptly, nor effectively deploy and manage them as they arrived here. He specifically targeted Butler.
  
  "His company's handling of this entire situation has been unacceptable," Malloy added. "I think it is time to change the way this company is being managed."
  
  When asked whether he believes Butler should continue as CL&P's top executive, Malloy added that "I think that's a good question to ask" of Northeast Utilities, which is CL&P's parent company.
  
  Malloy said he spoke Monday with NU President and CEO Charles W. Shivery, adding that the utility executive assures him that CL&P is "pouring crews into high-impact towns" to make it revised deadline.
  
  Malloy said at least part of Connecticut's response will come through the regulatory process. Though the governor didn't mention any specific changes that might be proposed, the state's Public Utility Regulatory Authority has both rate-setting power as well as the ability to approve utility spending on specific areas such as maintenance and emergency response.
  
  Charles Fisher, Witt Associates' vice president of preparedness operations, said his company, which is performing the study pro bono, will have five or six associates working in Connecticut this week, though they will be supported by company resources in other offices.
  
  The study, to be completed by Dec. 1, will look at CL&P's emergency response plans, related training, and how execution compares both with the plan as well as past company and industry practices, mutual aid compacts, company policies regarding hiring of private crews, cooperation with municipal public works staff, and communications with municipal and state officials.
  
  Malloy said the Attorney General's George C. Jepsen's office was brought into the review to ensure Witt Associates would be able to secure the documents it needs from CL&P  to conduct the probe.
  
  Butler insisted Monday that although his company could improve its performance, particularly in the area of communications, that in general it performed well. The single-biggest reason behind the prolonged outages, he added, was an autumn storm of historic proportions that dumped between one and two feet of snow on much of central Connecticut, causing unprecedented tree damage.
  
  "I personally apologize for CL&P not meeting the needs of the towns," he said. "But when you look at the magnitude of the storm, an unprecedented storm... I think you'll find there were many, many things we did very, very well."
  
  Butler added that while his company would perform its own assessment after all power has been restored, "in many parts of the state we met expectations."
  
  

• "Comfort Station" not open Sunday, Nov. 6
  
• POWER TO...MY STREET...ALMOST PRECISELY SEVEN (7) WHOLE DAYS...WENT OUT AT 2:45PM SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29 AND CAME BACK AT 2:07PM SATURDAY NOVEMBER 5.  
  
• OK - news at 3pm on Thursday and repeated at Board of Selectmen meeting at 7:30pm:  to get to "comfort station," no more going around to the back of the WMS - enter by pool entrance in the FRONT of the building
  
• NYTIMES story on schools and the winter here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/education/storm-forces-many-schools-to-use-up-snow-days-early.html?hp
  
• The CT General Assembly is getting ready to come down hard on power companies, according to this story...
  
• Here's what was found mid-day on the CL&P site for specific customers... "About Town" electricity return estimate:  Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 11pm.  CL&P's main site still says Friday at 11:59pm general Weston restoration. However, at 4pm today,Wednesday, the message on my specific site indicated that some work had been done on my street, but that repeated visits would be needed (not the exact wording).
  
• NEWS ALERT: Norfield Grange is open, has heat, power, coffee - do this in the morning - then spend the rest of the day at the WHS movie triple feature!The Norfield Grange at 12 Goodhill Road is open today, Tuesday, Nov. 1, as well as tomorrow, Wednesday, Nov. 2, and Thursday, Nov. 3, from 9 to noon. The grange has power and heat. All Weston residents are welcome to stop by and charge their cell phones and use WiFi for computers. Grange member Lyn Kimberly said, "If you have a power strip, bring it."Coffee, tea and hot chocolate will be served.  If there is no school on Friday, the grange will also be open then from 9 to noon."It's nice and warm here, we want our neighbors to have a nice spot to visit," Ms. Kimberly said.
• TUESDAY, Nov. 1, 2011 - morning brings news of restorations dates for many communities, but not Weston.  Not this weekend coming up (for example, Redding and Wilton are still in the dark, but Westport and New Canaan and other can count on...the rest of the week and thru the weekend out of power.
  
• MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2011, 4:45PM - In addition to today and tomorrow, Weston schools will remain closed Wednesday, Nov. 2, due to "current road conditions prohibiting safe passage of school buses," according to an alert from the school district.
• CHANNEL 12 TRUCK JUST LEAVING AS WE DROVE IN...our take on a visit to Town Hall and the WMS:  People are really, really quiet. Hushed, in fact.  All candidates for the Board of Selectmen were taking turns answering telephones, according to a fairly official report, and we spoke with both First Selectman candidates, one at Town Hall and one at the WMS Shelter/Comfort Station.  Some unhappy campers called in, according to the same source. 
  
• Plus we directed a resident with his builder in tow, who were looking for the place to get permits to install...a GENERATOR!
  
• OK SPORTS FANS!  The FORUM crack reporter was on the scene @noon, and will be checking in online soon, we would imagine!
  
• Just got off the telephone with the Voice of the Town, First Selectman Gayle Weinstein, who still has not gotten estimates from CL&P - however, crews are here, major roads are clear, the Senior Center and Town Hall are open 'til 5pm for Internet access and recharging.
  
• NEWS OR FIAT:  Besides the official Police request, the Town is now officially declaring Nov. 5 as Halloween
  
• WMS via back entrance, is the combo comfort station and shelter.  Bring towels, bedding and toiletries.  Cots provided.
• Library to open soon.
• PLUS...Movies at the high school the WHS auditorium seats just under 600 people.  How about a triple feature and more!  School's out - how about a triple-feature?
  
• WESTON - 71% without power @5pm;  AT 68% at 10am, 69% first thing Monday morning, 76% out Sunday, down from 80%.  NYTIMES map - click on WMS.
• "About Town" out of power since 2:45pm Saturday. Went to bed w/o early Saturday night and upon rising, felt the cold in my bones.  My small private street is like a war zone, with power lines and fallen trees everywhere.
• CL&P warns if could blow another power restoration deadline
• Keith M. Phaneuf, CT MIRROR,November 7, 2011 - One day after failing to meet a long-promised power restoration deadline, Connecticut's largest electric utility offered a new pledge Monday morning--and almost in the same breath warned it might miss that one as well. Connecticut Light and Power Co. crews scrambling Sunday to restore power in the Farmington Valley and in Tolland County found both regions to be harder hit by the Oct. 29 Nor'easter than originally anticipated, CL&P President and CEO Jeffrey Butler said during Monday's 8:30 a.m. briefing at the state armory in Hartford.
• "Given the extent and complexity of the damge in the areas hardest hit by the storm, we may not be able to achieve this goal" of restoring power to 99 percent of customers in each of CL&P's 149 service communities by midnight on Monday, Butler said. "Those areas were extremely hard hit."
• The utility already failed over the weekend to hit its self-imposed 99 percent target in each community by midnight on Sunday.  As of 8:30 a.m., Monday, CL&P still had 4 percent of its customers, nearly 61,600, still without power. A total of 91 communities served by CL&P had at least 99 percent of their customers with service. Another 24 communities had between 95 and 99 percent of customers served, while 14 had between 90 and 95 percent and 20 were below 90 percent, Butler said.
• "It is extremely frustrating. We understand that and we are doing everything possible," he said, adding that the company would not release any of its work crews until all customers were restored.
• At the height of the outages immediately after the storm, more than 880,000 customers had lost service, including about 830,000 CL&P customers.  The state's other major electric utility, United Illuminating, had restored service to about 50,000 of its customers that had lost service -- in southwestern Connecticut -- by the end of last Tuesday.
• Meanwhile, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who ordered his own independent inquiry on Friday into the Connecticut utilities' storm response, announced Monday that officials from the  Washington, D.C.-based Witt Associates would be in state today to consult with his staff, and with Attorney General George C. Jepsen's office. The AG announced late Friday that his office also would participate in the review.
• Witt Associates, a consulting firm led by former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt, has agreed to conduct the review pro bono and will report back to the Malloy administration by Dec. 1.
• The governor, who expressed skepticism at several points last week about the likelihood of CL&P meeting its Sunday deadline, made it clear Monday that he believes the utility's response was insufficient.
• The Witt Associates report will provide "tangible short-term solutions to fix what is broken," Malloy said.
• Butler apologized on several occasions last week and conceded early on that CL&P was struggling to bring private line and tree repair crews into the state in quick fashion to accelerate power restoration.  But the utility executive also insisted that his company performed well and that the major culprit simply was a storm of historic proportions. The Oct. 29 event dumped between one and two feet of snow on much of northern and central Connecticut, weighing down many trees that still hadn't shed their leaves and causing extensive damage.
• The governor also announced that 98 percent of Connecticut's polling places for Tuesday's municipal elections have power, but the other 2 percent -- involving about 6 precincts -- will have to be relocated later Monday.
• "We will ensure that each town is in a position to hold elections tomorrow," he said. "Everyone who is eligible should get out and vote."

TOP STORIES DURING FIRST FULL WEEK OF NO POWER:

State school board looks at decades-old integration law
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT MIRROR
November 7, 2011

Some 340 children attend Verplanck Elementary School in Manchester, but the town Board of Education this school year found itself facing difficult decisions because Verplanck was just two students out of compliance with the state's racial imbalance law.

"It doesn't seem like such a problem. Am I not understanding something?" State Board of Education Member Ellen Camhi said reacting to a presentation at a recent meeting on Manchester's inability to resolve years of non-compliance with the law.

Each year the State Department of Education informs several districts that they are violating the law by having schools with demographics far less diverse than their district. This year six districts were cited: Fairfield, Greenwich, Groton, Manchester, Enfield and Bristol. Just a handful of students put most of these districts out of compliance, and obliged them to come up with integration plans.

This reality, and appeals from local school leaders, has led members of the State Board of Education to begin to reconsider the decades-old law.

"I'm not sure the implementation of the law still matches up with the spirit of the law," said Ferdinand L. Risco, Jr., a member of the SBE and of New Haven's school board. "We should move to change that law so it fits 2011 and not 1969."

Connecticut lawmakers passed its racial imbalance law during a time of civil unrest. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated the previous year and people were rioting in cities across the country.

To achieve integration, the law requires districts to report their student demographics for each school. If any school has 25 percent more minorities than the district average, the community must submit a plan to address the imbalance within 60 days.

"We are seeing these reports more and more frequently," Theresa Hopkins-Staten, the chairwoman of the SBE Legislative and Bylaws Committee, when announcing they would be looking at making some recommendations to revise the law. "We understand the spirit of the law, but what is the impact of the law?"

The impact, some board members say, is that many school districts' response is to simply close down the school cited for being imbalanced. Local boards complain that the rapid growth of minority communities in some towns makes it nearly impossible to stay in compliance.

"Its a moving target. We are changing very rapidly," Kathleen Ouelette, the former superintendent of schools in Manchester who now heads the Waterbury system, told the board last month. "It seems every time we get back into compliance we have to change that plan" the following year for being imbalanced again.

Allan B. Taylor, chairman of the SBE, said because the law was written at a time when demographics were relatively stable, a district's integration plan would "hold for a while. That is no longer the case. It's not clear the law is working for what's going on now."

And the solutions to integrate the schools are often costly. In Manchester, they approved a costly preschool program at three schools in an attempt to attract more white students.

"We have struggled with this because of financial reasons," Ouelette said, after her school board at first unanimously rejected the plan. They quickly changed their mind after the SBE warned them of the ramifications of not having a plan months after they were told to create one.

Districts that show no progress in integrating schools or fail to have a plan are subject to losing their state funding.

Urban districts are exempt from the law because their populations are overwhelmingly made up of ethnic minorities. Taylor said regional integration requirements would be politically very difficult to pass.

"I don't know if there is a solution for that," he said. "This law is was written to deal with imbalance in districts. Fixing it regionally, well that's a much bigger question that I am not sure will be able to be achieved."

Any recommended changes would ultimately need to be approved by the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Rep. Andy Fleischmann, D-West Harford and house chairman of the Education Committee, said he is open to considering changes, but the goal of integrating schools must remain.

"It's important that towns have racial diversity in their schools," he said. "The General Assembly hasn't reconsidered this law in a long time. I am open to considering change, but it's going to be a tough knot to untie."

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Here Comes the Sun
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYTIMES
November 6, 2011

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let’s talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking.

Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that “there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don’t want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all.”

So it’s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government “pick winners,” yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner.

And now for something completely different: the success story you haven’t heard about.

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

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The Politics of Austerity
By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYTIMES
November 5, 2011, 4:04 pm

The economic collapse of 2008 transformed American politics. In place of shared abundance, battles at every level of government now focus on picking the losers who will bear the costs of deficit reduction and austerity.

Fights in Washington are over inflicting pain on antagonists either through spending cuts or tax increases, a struggle over who will get a smaller piece of a shrinking pie. This hostile climate stands in sharp contrast to the post-World-War II history of economic growth. Worse, current income and employment trends suggest that this is not a temporary shift.

The year 2008 marked the emergence of a Democratic Party driven by surging constituencies of minorities, single women and voters under 30. The flowering of this coalition, manifested in the election of President Obama and in continued Democratic control of Congress, was quickly followed by developments affirming the activist, redistributive state: the enactment of a $787 billion economic stimulus bill, passage of the $900 billion health care reform act and rising demand for food stamps, unemployment compensation and Medicaid.

From the vantage point of Republicans, the newly empowered Democratic Party was determined to institutionalize government expansion through oversight of the financial sector, broadening access to medical care and federally mandated environmental regulation. As the national debt grew from $10.6 trillion when Obama took office to $13.7 trillion on Election Day 2010, the stage was set for a conservative revival. Conservatives successfully shifted the focus of American politics to the twin themes of debt and austerity — with a specific attack on means-tested entitlement programs.

The Republican Party, after winning back control of the House in 2010, has reverted to the penny-pinching of an earlier era, the green eyeshade Grand Old Party of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, advocating a “root canal” approach to governance evident in the first budget passed by the Republican-controlled House — the Paul Ryan “path to prosperity” budget with $4 trillion in cuts — and the subsequent Aug. 2 debt ceiling agreement.

The new embattled partisan environment allows conservatives to pit taxpayers against tax consumers, those dependent on safety-net programs against those who see such programs as eating away at their personal income and assets.

In a nuanced study, “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism,” the sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues at Harvard found that opposition to government spending was concentrated on resentment of federal government “handouts.” Tea Party activists, they wrote, “define themselves as workers, in opposition to categories of nonworkers they perceive as undeserving of government assistance.”

In a March 15 declaration calling for defunding of most social programs, the New Boston Tea Party was blunt: “The locusts are eating, or should we say devouring, the productive output of the hard working taxpayer.”

The conservative agenda, in a climate of scarcity, racializes policy making, calling for deep cuts in programs for the poor. The beneficiaries of these programs are disproportionately black and Hispanic. In 2009, according to census data, 50.9 percent of black households, 53.3 percent of Hispanic households and 20.5 percent of white households received some form of means-tested government assistance, including food stamps, Medicaid and public housing.

Less obviously, but just as racially charged, is the assault on public employees. “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” declared Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.

For black Americans, government employment is a crucial means of upward mobility. The federal work force is 18.6 percent African-American, compared with 10.9 percent in the private sector. The percentages of African-Americans are highest in just those agencies that are most actively targeted for cuts by Republicans: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 38.3 percent; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 42.4 percent; and the Education Department, 36.6 percent.

The politics of austerity are inherently favorable to conservatives and inhospitable to liberals. Congressional trench warfare rewards those most willing to risk all. Republicans demonstrated this in last summer’s debt ceiling fight, deploying the threat of a default on Treasury obligations to force spending cuts.

Conservatives are more willing to inflict harm on adversaries and more readily see conflicts in zero-sum terms — the basic framework of the contemporary debate. Once austerity dominates the agenda, the only question is where the ax falls.

Still, conservatives have a tendency to overestimate public support for their agenda and consequently to overreach: recall the two government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996; the 1998 Clinton impeachment; and the Ryan budget, which gave Democrats a recent victory in upstate New York.

Most signs point toward a relentless continuation of struggle in the context of austerity. Congress faces self-imposed deadlines of Nov. 23 and Dec. 23 to approve a deficit reduction of $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, or accept across-the-board cuts of $1.2 trillion.

Democratic strategists privately worry that many voters see reduced spending as a threshold issue that candidates must meet. “Our message — ‘We want fewer budget cuts, more taxes’ — is all that voters are getting right now,” said one strategist involved in presidential and Congressional campaigns. “It doesn’t sell.”

Republicans are playing with fire, though, when they threaten American standing in the world, as they did in provoking Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating to AA+ from AAA in August. Confidence in Congressional Republicans fell 36 points after the debt ceiling debacle, compared with a 22-point drop for Mr. Obama.

While the outcome of the election exactly one year from today remains uncertain, the prospects for economic growth, with prosperity reaching beyond corporations and Wall Street to the electorate at large, are dim. The two main sources of new jobs, government and health services, face substantial fiscal constraints. Technology continues to make skilled jobs “tradable,” that is, exportable to lower-wage countries, and corporations are making productivity gains through automation, not new hiring.

In many respects, austerity feeds on itself. If the country needs to invest in education and rebuilding infrastructure to regain competitiveness, as many economists of varying ideological stripes argue, those initiatives are in large part precluded in a political environment that places top priority on deficit and debt reduction. Retrenchment, in effect, becomes a noose, choking off prospects for growth.

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Sad Proof of Europe’s Fallout
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON, NYTIMES
November 5, 2011

WHO are you going to believe — me, or your own lying eyes?

That old line from the Marx Brothers came to mind last week as MF Global, the brokerage firm run by Jon S. Corzine, was felled by over-the-top leverage and bad derivative bets on debt-weakened European countries.

Suddenly, all of those claims that American financial institutions have little to no exposure to Europe rang hollow.

You can understand why Wall Street wants to play down the threats from Europe. Its profits depend on the market’s confidence in the products it sells — and on the belief that the firms that sell those products will be around tomorrow.

But MF Global provides two lessons. The first is that our financial institutions are not impervious to Euro-shocks. The second is that when those problems reach our shores, they usually ride in on a wave of derivatives.

“The problems that we’ve had since the inception of the credit derivatives market have never been solved in any meaningful way,” said Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance and an authority on these instruments. “How many times do we want to live through this?”

MF Global’s debacle was a result of complex swaps deals it had struck with trading partners. While those partners owned the underlying assets — in this case, government debt — MF Global held the risk relating to both market price and default.

These arrangements at MF Global underscore two big problems in the credit derivatives market: risks that can be hidden from view, and risks that are not backed by adequate postings of collateral.

These are the same market flaws that helped hide the problems at the American International Group — problems that arose from insurance that A.I.G. had foolishly written on crummy mortgage securities.

The International Swaps & Derivatives Association, an industry lobbying group, contends that the market in credit default swaps is far more transparent than it was in 2008. For example, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation compiles figures on the number and dollar amount of swaps outstanding on its trade information warehouse.

The numbers are pretty mind-boggling. As of Oct. 28, for example, the warehouse reported $24 billion in net credit default swaps outstanding on debt issued by France, up from $14.4 billion one year ago. Some $17 billion in net credit default swaps were outstanding on Spain, up from $15.5 billion in 2010. Net swaps on Italy were $21.2 billion at last count, down from $28.5 billion last year.

The amount of net credit default swap exposure on the imperiled nation of Greece was much smaller: $3.7 billion late last month. It was $7 billion a year earlier. Officials at the I.S.D.A. say these bets are manageable because they are probably backed by substantial collateral.

MOREOVER, because of the “voluntary” nature of the Greek restructuring deal, which would require private holders of the nation’s debt to write off half its value, the I.S.D.A. predicts that the arrangement should not qualify as a default.

Therefore, the insurance that has been written on all this Greek debt will not cover investor losses generated by the 50 percent write-down — a disturbing consequence to those who thought they were buying insurance against that very risk. Given this turn of events, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would continue to buy credit default swaps.

In any case, the figures compiled by the D.T.C. don’t show the entire amount of credit insurance that has been written on Greece and other nations. D.T.C. says it believes its figures capture 98 percent of the market, but credit default swaps are often struck privately; not all of them are reported to regulators.

Consider an investment vehicle known as a credit-linked note. In these deals, investors buy a note issued by a special-purpose vehicle that contains a credit default swap referencing a debt issuer, like a government. That swap provides credit insurance to the party buying the protection, meaning that the holder of the note is responsible for losses in a so-called credit event, like a default.

Credit-linked notes are very popular and have been issued extensively by European banks. Many are governed by I.S.D.A. contracts, which define the terms of a credit event and require a ruling by the association on whether such an event has occurred.

But some deals have different definitions or contractual language overriding the I.S.D.A. agreement. “The people writing these contracts may say, ‘I would like to be paid if there is a voluntary restructuring of debt, or if Greece goes back to the drachma, or if Greece goes to war with Cyprus,’ ” Ms. Tavakoli said. “I can declare a credit event where I am entitled to get paid if any of those events happen.”

Cash calls can also be generated by declines in the market price of the notes or increases in the cost of insuring the underlying sovereign debt issue, according to credit-linked note prospectuses.

The other party has to agree to these terms up front. But, given the nature of these so-called bespoke deals, we don’t know the full extent of the insurance that investors have written on troubled nations or the circumstances under which the insurance must be paid. Neither do we know who may be facing severe collateral calls or demands for termination payments on the contracts.

When those collateral calls start coming, market values assigned to the securities that have been provided as backup can decline significantly. And when a company’s credit rating is downgraded, as MF Global’s was in late October, cash demands from skittish trading partners become even greater.

“At this late date we still don’t know the risks that are out there,” Ms. Tavakoli said. “This market is opaque, bespoke, and the regulators don’t know what they’re doing.”

At least regulators didn’t deem MF Global too big to fail. That’s a plus. But given the billions at stake in these markets, more transparency is needed about market participants, their financial soundness and their ability to withstand liquidity crises like the one that wiped out MF Global.

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Pakistan Indicts 7 in Bhutto Assassination
By WAQAR GILLANI, NYTIMES
November 5, 2011

LAHORE, Pakistan — A Pakistani antiterrorism court indicted five militants and two police officers Saturday in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, prosecutors said.

Ms. Bhutto was killed after an election rally in 2007 in an attack by at least one gunman and a suicide bomber, both of whom were believed to have been killed in the assault.

The seven people indicted on Saturday, who include the former police chief of Rawalpindi, where the assassination took place, were charged with being part of a conspiracy.

In a closed-door hearing at a high-security prison in Rawalpindi, Justice Shahid Rafique charged all seven men with criminal conspiracy and murder, according to Chaudhry Azhar, a special public prosecutor in the case.

The five militants, who are believed to be members of the Pakistani Taliban, were arrested four years ago and remain in jail, Mr. Azhar said. Two of them have admitted to helping in the suicide bombing, he said.

The five men were identified as Sher Zaman, Hasnain Gul, Rafaqat Hussain, Abdul Rasheed and Aitzaz Shah. All are from the troubled northwestern region of the country.

The two police officers charged were Saud Aziz, who was the Rawalpindi police chief at the time of the killing, and Khurram Shahzad, another senior officer.

Mr. Azhar said they had been charged with failure to perform their duties by ordering the crime scene hosed down two hours after the attack, by removing evidence and by reducing Ms. Bhutto’s security detail several days before the attack. The two officers were free on bail.

All seven suspects denied the charges on Saturday.

The killing of Ms. Bhutto on Dec. 27, 2007, as she stood in the sunroof of a car waving to crowds two weeks before parliamentary elections, threw Pakistani politics into turmoil. Twice elected prime minister, she was the leader of Pakistan’s largest political party and vying for a third term after having returned from eight years in exile.

Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was later elected president, and her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, leads the coalition government.

The circumstances of her death — including the cleansing of the crime scene, the police refusal of an autopsy request, and conflicting reports of the number of attackers and cause of death — have generated confusion about the case and raised questions about the possible involvement of the military government, then led by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Ms. Bhutto’s rival.

A United Nations investigation reported last year that the failure of Pakistani authorities to effectively investigate the killing was “deliberate” and that the investigation had been “severely hampered” by the country’s powerful intelligence agencies.

The report singled out Mr. Aziz, the police chief, for ordering the washing of the scene and impeding the investigation. But it also said that Mr. Aziz gave the order after receiving a call from army headquarters, possibly involving Maj. Gen. Nadeem Ijaz Ahmad, then director general of military intelligence.

The government had blamed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, for masterminding the attack. Mr. Mehsud was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike in 2009.

Mr. Musharraf, who fled the country in 2008 under threat of impeachment, has also been charged in the case. A Pakistani court issued an arrest warrant for him in February, accusing him of failing to provide Ms. Bhutto with adequate security.

Mr. Musharraf has been living in exile in London and has failed to respond to subpoenas.

Meanwhile, the legal case against the suspects in custody has been delayed by procedural moves on both sides, although four years is not a particularly long time for an indictment in a murder case in Pakistan.

“Whether the case is high profile or low profile, the court has to adopt the legal procedure to ensure justice and fairness,” said Syed Zahid Hussain Bukhari, a former judge and prosecutor in Punjab Province.

The indictment starts the trial phase of the prosecution. The court instructed the accused to present witnesses at the next hearing, on Nov. 19.

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Malloy Brings In Former FEMA Director To Assess Utilities; Towns Still Unhappy With CL&P
CTNEWSJUNKIE
by Christine Stuart and Hugh McQuaid
Nov 4, 2011 7:39pm

In what could be viewed as a vote of no confidence in the state’s largest utility, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy announced Friday evening that the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under former President Bill Clinton will be coming to assess the response of both Connecticut Light & Power and United Illuminating to the October Nor’Easter.

James Lee Witt, the CEO of Witt Associates and former FEMA director,  reached out to Malloy through Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and agreed to do the assessment of the two utilities free of charge.

More than 52,000 United Illuminating customers in the southern part of the state had their power back by the middle of the week, while hundreds of thousands of CL&P customers were still in the dark Friday. More than 830,000 were out at some point since last weekend and about 282,000 remained out of power Friday evening.

UI services 17 towns in the New Haven area, while CL&P services 149 towns, including many in the northern part of the state which saw upwards of 20 inches of snow last weekend.

“As soon as everyone’s lights are back on, we need to have a very timely thorough review of the power companies performance to evaluate what went wrong, why it went wrong, and most importantly identify solutions for the short term before winter’s first storm impacts,” Malloy said.

The review will be completed by Dec. 1.

One of Malloy’s biggest disappointments at the beginning of the storm recovery efforts was its inability to get out-of-state crews to Connecticut in a timely manner. Malloy had a follow up conversation today with the deputy from the U.S. Department of Energy who was here on Tuesday. Malloy said he was told the mutual aid agreements require out-of-state crews to stop at the first place that needs assistance and with the storm hitting states to the north it hindered Connecticut’s efforts to get crews in a timely manner.

Jeffrey Butler, president and chief operating officer of CL&P, said the company will do its own internal review and welcomes the review from Witt Associates. He said the company is still on track to have power back to 99 percent of its customers by midnight Sunday.

Meanwhile House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr. called for a special session to pass legislation requiring additional utility work crews, minimum staffing levels, and other initiatives he says will shorten future outages.

Malloy said he’s not the first person to come up with that idea.

“I think a special session when we have something to do is highly appropriate. I know something about special sessions probably having the most successful special session in the state’s history when it came to job production and job growth,” Malloy said. “When we have a package to put forward I will be highly supportive of a regular or special session addressing it.”

Public Policy and Public Officials

One of the biggest public policy issues the state will face at some point is: How many trees it should have? A majority of the damage to the power lines was done by falling trees and tree limbs, which are still making some roads impassible six days after the storm.

“There has not historically been an agreement about trees in Connecticut,” Malloy said. “I can tell you that first hand from my 14 years as mayor when I was very aggressive in trying to protect the wires and was roundly criticized for pushing that thought process.”

However, there seems to be a growing consensus amongst Connecticut residents that something has to change, he said.

“What we have learned after the last few days of August is that we are a vulnerable state to different types of weather conditions. Wind and snow are clearly two of those,” Malloy said.

“I think we can have just as beautiful a state without wires being wrapped by trees,” he added.

One of the biggest complaints local town officials have at the moment is all the downed wires tangled in tree branches which they can’t touch until a CL&P crew gives them the okay. And it’s difficult to get a a crew to come to town or stick around after restoring portions of the town.

South Windsor Town Manager Matthew Galligan said he thought CL&P could have been more prepared especially after Tropical Storm Irene.

“They should have been prepared. We deployed our crews. They were ready and waiting right away. But I think [CL&P] fell short,” he said.

While the utility’s liaison program has been helpful, Galligan said there have been some issues. His town had seven or eight restoration crews that helped restore power to businesses that supply local hospitals but he said its difficult to know how long a crew will stick around in town.

“One day you have a crew the next day you don’t have a crew,” he said.

While it’s nice to have businesses up and running, Galligan said the utility has neglected some more life-threatening issues. With more than 30 roads still blocked in town, emergency personnel have no way of reaching residents in emergencies, he said. Earlier in the week, a resident needed to be transported by ambulance to a hospital but EMS workers found the roads to the house impassable, he said.

“They couldn’t get by because of live wires and trees lying all over the place. So they walked in and got him,” Galligan said. “...They walked about a quarter mile.”

On Friday morning South Windsor , Fire Chief Philip E. Crómbie, Jr. sent out a press release condemning CL&P for failing to make the town safe.

“Because of CL&P’s lack of action residents of South Windsor could die in fires and homes could burn to the ground,” the statement said.

Galligan said he thought the press release got their attention. He said he was told by a representative of the Connecticut National Guard that 13 CL&P crews would be heading to South Windsor along with National Guard troops to help and direct traffic.

Andy Goodhall, first selectman of Union, the only town to remain above 90 percent out consistently since Saturday, said he has been having trouble getting any help from CL&P. The town hall, Union’s only shelter, has been running on generator power for six days now, he said. So far only 10 homes have been restored, he said.

“We got a tree cutting crew only for the day on Tuesday. That was a big help but they pulled them out the next day,” he said.

Since then, Goodhall was promised 8 crews to help with tree removal and power restoration but said he only received two of them. Those two crews spent most of the day in neighboring Stafford and had barely made it across the Union by Friday evening, he said.

“These guys lied to us basically and we have this one floundering crew coming here at a snail’s pace,” he said.

The town itself has come together well and residents have done a good job of looking out for each other, he said. But Goodhall was upset, not only with CL&P’s response but that of AT&T and Cox Communication, companies he said have also failed to assist the small town.

“I get it. We only have 455 customers, we don’t mean that much. But if you’re not going to do it don’t promise it. That’s why I’m on a war path,” he said.

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To Fix Housing, See the Data
By JOE NOCERA, NYTIMES
November 4, 2011

In Miami recently, I met up with Laurie Goodman, a senior managing director of Amherst Securities. I’d been trying to meet her ever since I’d read an article that she had written in March entitled “The Case for Principal Reductions.” But our schedules never seemed to mesh. So when I noticed that we were both going to be at a conference in Miami, I wangled a breakfast appointment. It was one of the more illuminating breakfasts I’ve had in a while.

The idea of helping struggling homeowners by writing down some principal on their mortgages — as opposed to reducing the interest or reconfiguring the terms to lower the monthly payments — is much in the air right now. Banks loathe the idea of principal reduction; they fear that people who are current on their mortgages will start defaulting just to get their principal reduced. They also don’t want the hit to their balance sheets.

But the states’ attorneys general who sued over the robo-signing scandal have made principal reduction the central plank of the settlement they are close to completing. The settlement will force the big banks to begin a sustained program of principal reduction, and will heavily penalize banks that don’t comply. From what I hear, the goal of the states is to prove to the banks that principal reduction will not cause the sky to fall — and is, ultimately, less damaging to bank profits than foreclosures.

Housing activists love principal reduction because they tend to see it as a just solution to an unjust situation — it’s a way of making the banks pay a real price for their sins during the subprime madness while allowing people to keep their homes. Conservatives, on the other hand, hate principal reduction. They believe that borrowers who made poor decisions by taking out mortgages they could never afford have to take responsibility for those decisions. If that means foreclosure, so be it.

Enter Laurie Goodman. One of the country’s foremost authorities on mortgage-backed securities, she is also one of the most data-driven people I’ve ever met; at breakfast, she was constantly pointing me to one chart or another that backed up her claims. “She’s not into politics,” says my friend, and her client, Daniel Alpert of Westwood Capital. “She is using data to tell us the truth.”

Her truth begins with a shocking calculation: of the 55 million mortgages in America, more than 10 million are reasonably likely to default. That is a staggering number — and it is, in large part, because so many homes are worth so much less than the mortgage the homeowners are holding. That is, they’re underwater.

Her second calculation is that the supply of housing is going to drastically outstrip demand for the foreseeable future; she estimates that the glut of unneeded homes could get as high as 6.2 million over the next six years. The primary reason for this, she says, is that household formation has been very low in recent years, presumably because of the grim economy. (Young adults are living with their parents instead of moving into their own homes, etc.) What’s more, nearly 20 percent of current homeowners no longer qualify for a mortgage, as lending standards have tightened.

The implication is almost too awful to contemplate. As Goodman put it in testimony she recently gave before Congress, the supply/demand imbalance means that housing prices “are likely to decline further. This may recreate the housing death spiral — as lower housing prices mean more borrowers become underwater.” Which makes them more likely to default, which lowers prices further, and on and on.

The only way to stop the death spiral is through principal reduction. The reason is simple: “The data show that principal modifications work better” than other kinds of modifications, she says. Interest rate reductions can lower monthly payments, but the home remains just as underwater as it was before the modification. And the extent to which a home is underwater is the single best indicator of whether the homeowner will default. The only way to change the imbalance between the size of the mortgage and the value of the home is to reduce principal.

Will widespread principal reduction cause homeowners to purposely default on their mortgages? Goodman has some ideas about how to reduce that likelihood, but she is also realistic: “A borrower will make a decision to default if it is in his or her best interest.”

One wishes that the country could make economic decisions that are in its best interest, decisions that use Laurie Goodman’s data-driven approach instead of being motivated by ideology. Goodman’s case for principal reduction is powerful precisely because it is not about just or unjust, or who’s to blame and who’s at fault.

It is about cold, hard economics. Three years after the bursting of the subprime bubble, principal reduction isn’t just a nice-sounding way to help homeowners. It is our only hope of finally ending the housing crisis.

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Shale Gas Revolution
By DAVID BROOKS, NYTIMES
November 3, 2011

The United States is a country that has received many blessings, and once upon a time you could assume that Americans would come together to take advantage of them. But you can no longer make that assumption. The country is more divided and more clogged by special interests. Now we groan to absorb even the most wondrous gifts.

A few years ago, a business genius named George P. Mitchell helped offer such a gift. As Daniel Yergin writes in “The Quest,” his gripping history of energy innovation, Mitchell fought through waves of skepticism and opposition to extract natural gas from shale. The method he and his team used to release the trapped gas, called fracking, has paid off in the most immense way. In 2000, shale gas represented just 1 percent of American natural gas supplies. Today, it is 30 percent and rising.

John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.

The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.

Already shale gas has produced more than half a million new jobs, not only in traditional areas like Texas but also in economically wounded places like western Pennsylvania and, soon, Ohio. If current trends continue, there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs to come.

Chemical companies rely heavily on natural gas, and the abundance of this new source has induced companies like Dow Chemical to invest in the U.S. rather than abroad. The French company Vallourec is building a $650 million plant in Youngstown, Ohio, to make steel tubes for the wells. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York will reap billions in additional revenue. Consumers also benefit. Today, natural gas prices are less than half of what they were three years ago, lowering electricity prices. Meanwhile, America is less reliant on foreign suppliers.

All of this is tremendously good news, but, of course, nothing is that simple. The U.S. is polarized between “drill, baby, drill” conservatives, who seem suspicious of most regulation, and some environmentalists, who seem to regard fossil fuels as morally corrupt and imagine we can switch to wind and solar overnight.

The shale gas revolution challenges the coal industry, renders new nuclear plants uneconomic and changes the economics for the renewable energy companies, which are now much further from viability. So forces have gathered against shale gas, with predictable results.

The clashes between the industry and the environmentalists are now becoming brutal and totalistic, dehumanizing each side. Not-in-my-backyard activists are organizing to prevent exploration. Environmentalists and their publicists wax apocalyptic.

Like every energy source, fracking has its dangers. The process involves injecting large amounts of water and chemicals deep underground. If done right, this should not contaminate freshwater supplies, but rogue companies have screwed up and there have been instances of contamination.

The wells, which are sometimes beneath residential areas, are serviced by big trucks that damage the roads and alter the atmosphere in neighborhoods. A few sloppy companies could discredit the whole sector.

These problems are real, but not insurmountable. An exhaustive study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded, “With 20,000 shale wells drilled in the last 10 years, the environmental record of shale-gas development is for the most part a good one.” In other words, the inherent risks can be managed if there is a reasonable regulatory regime, and if the general public has a balanced and realistic sense of the costs and benefits.

This kind of balance is exactly what our political system doesn’t deliver. So far, the Obama administration has done a good job of trying to promote fracking while investigating the downsides. But the general public seems to be largely uninterested in the breakthrough (even though it could have a major impact on the 21st-century economy). The discussion is dominated by vested interests and the extremes. It’s becoming another weapon in the political wars, with Republicans swinging behind fracking and Democrats being pressured to come out against. Especially in the Northeast, the gas companies are demonized as Satan in corporate form.

A few weeks ago, I sat around with John Rowe, one of the most trusted people in the energy business, and listened to him talk enthusiastically about this windfall. He has no vested interest in this; indeed, his company might be hurt. But he knows how much shale gas could mean to America. It would be a crime if we squandered this blessing.

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Olligarchy, American Style
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NYTIMES
November 3, 2011

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth.

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?

Some pundits are still trying to dismiss concerns about rising inequality as somehow foolish. But the truth is that the whole nature of our society is at stake.

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WikiLeaks Founder Can Be Extradited to Sweden in Sex Abuse Case
By RAVI SOMAIYA, NYTIMES
November 2, 2011

LONDON — Britain’s High Court ruled Wednesday that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, can be extradited to Sweden for questioning over allegations of sexual abuse made against him by two women there last year. He will seek a final appeal to Britain’s highest court, according to a person close to Mr. Assange.

Two of Britain’s most senior judges declined all four of the objections his defense team had raised, summarizing their decision in five short words: “The court dismissed the appeal.” The decision makes it increasingly likely that Mr. Assange will face his accusers in Sweden.

The 43-page judgment was the latest twist in a dramatic 11-month-long legal battle that has seen multiple court appearances across London, throngs of supporters wielding placards and WikiLeaks temporarily shuttered. Mr. Assange was briefly jailed last December, as Swedish authorities filed an arrest warrant demanding he return to face allegations of sexual molestation, unlawful coercion and rape made by two WikiLeaks volunteers in Stockholm in August 2010...full story here.

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Irene and snow storm could extend school calendars
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT MIRROR
November 2, 2011

Between Tropical Storm Irene and last weekend's winter storm that still has thousands without power, many school districts across the state have already used up all their scheduled snow days--and it's not even winter yet.

"These districts are absolutely going to have to cut in the spring vacations or other breaks," said Robert J. Rader, the head of the state's school board association. He estimates one-third of the school districts across the state have exhausted all their inclement weather days, and will not be able to reach the 180-day school calendar requirement without extending their schedules.

"We are all well aware of the issue and the challenges," said Mark Linabury, a spokesman for the State Department of Education, adding it is way too early to know if the state will need to relax the 180-day requirement. Almost half of the public schools in the state were still closed Tuesday and most districts only allow for about five days to cancel school for inclement weather.

"There may be an opportunity to revisit this," he said.

Last school year, districts found themselves in a similar predicament following a harsh winter. After considering relaxing the 180-day requirement or granting waivers, legislators and the SDE decided against the change.

And it doesn't seem that's going to change this year either. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Tuesday these natural disasters were not enough to convince him to back down on the requirement.

"I am not in favor of changing the 180-day state requirement. Children deserve a quality education regardless of the weather conditions," he said. "I hope on a system-by-system basis, or district-by-district basis, that each district will address this issue."

But Malloy did leave the possibility that spring and summer breaks will not need to be cut into, mentioning longer school days to make up the difference could be a possibility.

"Changing vacation schedules, elongating days, cancelling other holidays, I think that's a better way to assure the children of Connecticut get the quality education they so richly deserve," he said.

Rader warns that all those options could be costly to local boards of educations, since some employee contracts forbid such initiatives without additional pay for the unionized workers.

"There's going to be a budget impact," he said.

Thirty other states besides Connecticut have the 180-school day requirement, with the remaining states allowing districts to have longer school days to meet the hours of instruction requirements, according to the Education Commission of the States.

"There's no federal requirement whatsoever on the school calendar -- this is a state decision 100 percent," said Kathy Christie, the chief of staff for the non-partisan ECS, a education policy research group.

Christie said if Connecticut does change it's mind and decide to relax this requirement, it would not be the first time a state has had to rethink their requirement because of natural disasters. Following Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana relaxed their requirements. Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington have also changed their laws in recent years as well.

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Plan to Leave Euro for Drachma Gains Support in Greece
NYTIMES
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
November 1, 2011

The political upheaval in Athens has suddenly made the once unspeakable — Greek debt default — a distinct possibility.  So now it is time to ponder the once unthinkable: that Greece might end its 10-year use of the euro and return to its former currency, the drachma...full story here.

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Government in Greece Nears Collapse Over Referendum
NYTIMES
By NIKI KITSANTONIS and RACHEL DONADIO
November 1, 2011

ATHENS — The Greek government was plunged into chaos on Tuesday and faced an imminent collapse, as lawmakers rebelled against Prime Minister George Papandreou’s surprise call for a popular referendum on a new debt deal with Greece’s foreign lenders.

Such a collapse would not only render the referendum plan moot, it would likely scuttle — or at least delay — the debt deal that was agreed on in Brussels last week, putting Greece on a fast track to default and possible exit from the monetary union of countries sharing the euro currency...full story here.

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In The Aftermath Of Historic October Storm
Outdid Irene: Pre-Halloween storm caused the largest number of outages ever in Connecticut
Hartford Courant editorial
November 1, 2011

Tropical Storm Irene was, it seems, just a dress rehearsal for the ferocious nor'easter that battered Connecticut this past weekend. But the question remains open as to whether Connecticut has learned the right lessons from the storm that buffeted the state barely two months ago.

The wicked October snowstorm eclipsed August's summery blast, causing 884,000 customers to lose power — the largest number of outages ever in Connecticut — compared with 767,000 homes and businesses without electricity during Irene's peak. The October storm knocked down five times as many trees as Irene, the state says. And it did critical damage to 44 transmission lines.

In all, it left a mess. Enough to, sadly, make Halloween too risky in communities still struggling with massive damage. It's wiser to put it off to next weekend.

As much of Connecticut lay in darkness Sunday night — utility crews were assessing the damage, officials said — distressed residents without power were wondering where the cavalry was. Rescue efforts seemed slow off the mark.

Sure, it would be great if people would buck up and live like pioneers and love it — but the truth is that not everybody can. The longer the outages, the more lost: work and school time, spoiled food, hygiene, public comity and more. It's not really a camping trip.

If anything was clear after Irene and the legislative hearings that followed, it was that tree limbs had to be cleared from power lines. Connecticut has had this argument many times. Burying power lines is too expensive, the utilities say. So let's be more aggressive in pruning.

We expect that the inevitable hearings after this freaky storm (it really deserves a name) will tell us whether utility companies need to add more full-time crews to do the pruning work. If they haven't, they should. The number of trees downed by snow and wind this past weekend is all the evidence that's needed.

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