2 May—The Connecticut Board of Railroad Commissioners, also known as the Railroad Commission, the General Railroad Commissioners, and the Board of Railroad Commissioners, was established by the General Assembly in 1853 to protect the public interest in matters of safety, property rights and accommodation.

By the turn of the last century, the establishment and growth of utility companies which had some connection to railroads (however tenuous in certain cases)—electric, gas, telegraph, telephone, water—gave bureaucrats the opportunity to expand the purview of the Board of Railroad Commissioners. So in 1911 it became the Public Utilities Commission, commonly known by its initialism PUC.

In 1969, with the consolidation of Connecticut’s Commission of Steamship Terminals, Department of Aeronautics, Department of Highways, and Transportation Authority into the inept Department of Transportation, which we call ConnDOT, PUC gladly ceded oversight of railroads to ConnDOT’s Office of Rail.

The PUC survived until 1975, when the General Assembly morphed it into the Public Utilities Control Authority, conveniently initialized as PUCA. That lasted until 1979, when it was shoved into the Department of Business Regulation as the Division of Public Utility Control and initialized as DPUC.

The very next year, 1980, the Division of Public Utility Control was granted independence and became the Department of Public Utility Control, allowing it to retain its unpopular initialism. The new DPUC was give jurisdiction over cable TV and other telecommunications companies but happily gave its jurisdiction over bus, trucking, and livery companies to the inept Department of Transportation.

It was only in 2011 that the DPUC was technically dismantled and all its functions transferred to the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, unpopularly known by its acronym PURA, as part of the super screw-up deal that established the monumentally inept and mismanaged Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, DEEP to everyone.

PURA is known primarily for setting utility rates, for better or worse. As its web page explains, it’s “statutorily-charged with ensuring that Connecticut’s investor-owned utilities, including the state’s electric, natural gas, water, and telecommunications companies, provide safe, clean, reliable, and affordable utility service and infrastructure. PURA’s mission is essential to advancing the state’s energy, economic, and environmental goals and is critical to maintaining public health and safety as well as a robust economy.” Sure.

“PURA,” the web page continued, “is a quasi-judicial agency that interprets and applies the statutes and regulations governing all aspects of Connecticut’s utility sector. Among other things, PURA sets the rates charged by investor-owned utilities, advances the modernization of the electric distribution system, regulates the retail electric supplier market, implements federal requirements for natural gas pipeline safety, ensures adequate water system infrastructure investments, reviews mergers and acquisitions, provides education and outreach for consumers, and regulates the expansion of telecommunications infrastructure.”

The Aquarion Water Company is almost as old as the Connecticut Board of Railroad Commissioners, having been chartered by the General Assembly in 1857 as the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company, under which name it remained through various corporate changes until 1991. Bridgeport Hydraulic actually went back to 1818, when Elijah Waterman—no joke—build Bridgeport’s first water delivery system. And there were a number of corporate changes and expansion since 1991, when Eversource bought Aquarion from Macquarie Infrastructure Partners, an Australian investment group, which had bought it from Yorkshire’s Kelda Group in the UK.

In all events, it’s been downhill ever since Eversource’s ill-advised—make that just plain stupid—purchase from the clever Ozzies—for Aquarion, Eversource, and Aquarion’s captive customers. (But not, of course, for Eversource’s and Aquarion’s senior management.)

PURA hasn’t done too well either. But now PURA has misfeasantly decided to allow Eversource to sell Aquarion to a quasi-public, rather than investor-owned, corporation, the South Central Connecticut Regional Water Authority, initialized as RWA. That relieves PURA of any control or responsibility over the soon-to-be-rogue utility. So Aquarion’s customers in Connecticut—its customers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire will have their own problems—are really in for a super screwing, just as RWA customers have been suffering for some time . . .