To The Editor:
Regarding your Feb. 12 editorial, “A Clean Dirty Fund,” it must be a particularly slow news week for the HBJ to drag this up yet again. I believe in doing so, you do a great disservice to all involved.
First, stating improprieties and lack of results since 2000, you shamefully did not do your homework about how then-Gov. Rowland picked the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund clean to pay for budget overruns. It had to be done for sure, as other state agencies were subject to the same fate. But, one can hardly expect an agency to accomplish results without the means to do so. As far as the alleged improprieties are concerned, they were quite minimal and most questionable as to their true impropriety, as was well pointed out in the Connecticut Innovations Inc.’s chairman’s fact-based response to a similar editorial in the Hartford Courant, which I do not recall them rebutting.
In a state where its leaders and media are so bereft of the spirit of innovation, I would expect nothing less than a recommendation to move the CCEF under a bureaucratic agency such as the DPUC. The CCEF model wants to create clean energy from innovative new technologies, creatively funded by the public. Quite possibly, a thriving new Connecticut industry can be formed as a result. Sure, there will be missteps and failures along the way but it is rare that breakthrough solutions are otherwise invented. I believe the CCEF needs the innovative support that CII can provide them, especially under CII’s new, experienced and aggressive leadership.
Without knowing the details about Tallon Lumber, I wonder if the issues raised in this editorial are supported by evidence of incompetent squandering of the public trust or possibly HBJ just showing its lack of entrepreneurial perspective? Although my bias for risk and innovation is most evident, I do promise to keep an open mind.
Del Merenda
President & CEO
i-MARK, Inc.
Hartford
