One of the luxuries of writing a weekly column not tied to yesterday’s news is that I can arbitrarily pick and choose subjects about which I am appropriately indignant. Not much danger of being one of those “reasonable,” “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” kind of bland opinion writers.
On the other hand (oops), there are interesting things that pop up about which reasonable men may differ; about which angry columnists may have no strong opinion, which still might deserve a bit of “analysis” — which is sort of like “opinion,” but less cranky and personal.
Whenever a Democrat in Connecticut proposes a regulatory change about which the Connecticut Business & Industry Association expresses “some anxiety,” as opposed to indignant outrage, I know I’ve discovered a subject that cries out for tepid analysis.
There was no marching in the streets when Gov. Dan Malloy proposed merging the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Public Utility Control. There were some shrugs; there were some mildly encouraging nods from the “efficiency” gang that believes government is sprawling and inefficient. There was some grumbling from insiders who said the experiment wouldn’t work; that the agency cultures and missions weren’t similar enough to justify the disruptive change, however modest.
Are you fascinated yet? In truth, with all the trauma of budget-cutting and tax raising, the proposed merger of DEP and DPUC was assigned by most folks to that tiny corner of the legislative world where budget efficiency stuff (a technical term) goes and quietly get passed or killed, when no one is watching.
The merger mania is going on all over, as governments attempt to create some relatively painless efficiencies; by streamlining bureaucracy run amok. In Kansas, the state Human Rights Commission may be gobbled up by the attorney general’s office. In Massachusetts, two agencies that deal with child protection may be cobbled together. Although there is little chance it would ever happen, there are some at the federal level that want the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to be one, big, happy family.
Much of this push for streamlining is justified as a matter of dollars and cents, but there are often underlying philosophical explanations worthy of 15 seconds of debate.
The Connecticut DEP-DPUC monster baby has left business interests and some Republicans grumpy, if not exactly furious, on the assumption that the quasi-judicial utility regulators would be overly influenced by the policy pests at environmental protection.
Connecticut is one of the highest utility-cost states in the union, even without the utility regulators mandating expensive green-energy experiments. In truth, a state full of rich people, with sluggish population growth and a stagnant manufacturing sector, is going to have high energy costs, whether or not the power plants run on molasses and a prayer.
The regulatory marriage of utility regulation and environmental protection is certainly not illogical, but the mix of the two does come with uncertainties. In Maryland, the legislators are quarreling over a piece of mischief that would label ‘solid waste’ as a ‘renewable’ energy source, in a comical effort to curb rising energy costs, without making the environmental activists cry acid-rain tears.
Complicating all this in Connecticut is the reality that DEP does have a quasi-judicial role to play, similar in some ways to DPUC. While the main concern is whether the DPUC utility regulators will be unduly swayed by the environmentalists, the reality could be intra-agency squabbling about which side of the house to blame for high electric rates.
Is this a regulatory marriage made in Heaven? No one seems quite sure. Not even the opinionated columnist.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.