Connecticut
CT universal paid sick leave a top priority for labor, Democratic leaders
The strength of labor and the political left in Connecticut, one of 17 states where Democrats hold control the executive and legislative branches of government, will be tested this year as a coalition seeks to expand the state’s limited mandate on paid sick days into a nearly universal benefit.
Watered-down sick days legislation passed in 2011 touches only a thin sliver of workers, but it packed a political punch as the first mandate of its kind in the U.S., branding Connecticut as favorable terrain for laws and benefits unattainable in Congress or by collective bargaining.
“Connecticut likes to lead. And unfortunately, this is an area where we were leaders in 2011, but we have fallen behind,” said Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, co-chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee since taking office in January 2019, the same day as Gov. Ned Lamont.
An expansion bill passed by the Senate and favored by the governor failed in the House last year, a frustrating session for a labor movement that had scored major victories in previous years, including a $15 million minimum wage and a paid family and medical leave program financed by mandatory payroll deductions.
Kushner, who was a UAW official leading a coalition pushing paid sick days in 2011, and Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven, pronounced paid sick leave expansion a top priority Friday. House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said he sees passage as likely.
The current law exempts manufacturers, some non-profits and any employer with fewer than 50 employees. It places no added burden on companies that already offer at least 40 hours in paid time off over the year, regardless of whether it is considered vacation, personal days or sick time.
Eligible workers accrue one hour of leave time for every 40 hours worked, with a maximum state-mandated benefit of five days off.
With every Republican opposed and four Democrats absent, the Senate voted 20-12 last year for a bill that would have eliminated the 50-employee threshold and the non-profit exemption. Any company with at least one employee would have been required to offer one hour off for every 30 hours worked. The bill also doubled the maximum benefit from 40 hours to 80.
The Lamont administration had proposed a bill lowering the threshold from 50 to 11 workers, but it agreed to the Senate version. The measure never came to a vote in the House.
“I think we’ll get there,” Ritter said Friday in an interview.
House Democrats last year proposed compromises, including one expanding coverage in phases over several years, bringing down the employee threshold from 50 to 25 immediately, then 20 next year, 15 the year after that and so on.
Janée Woods Weber, the director of Connecticut Women’s Education and Legal Fund, an advocacy group that led the campaign for passage and has since been renamed as She Leads Justice, rejected the phase-in because it never reached universal coverage.
Woods Weber said Friday that anything less than universal coverage was non-negotiable.
“A good policy would cover all workers,” she said. “We’re committed to passing good policy, not policy that we have to then come back and try to fix like, we’re trying to fix the 2011 law, which left out many, many workers.”
The state’s largest business group, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, remains opposed, though less about the particulars of the bill as the statement that passage would make about the business climate.
“That’s what is most concerning to me, the larger message,” said Chris DiPentima, the president and chief executive of CBIA. With every new mandate comes regulations in a state where CBIA says businesses already are over-regulated.
Lamont is generally deemed to be supportive of business, especially in the area of spending and taxes, but the Democratic governor has sided with labor over the minimum wage and paid family and medical leave, among other issues.
The governor intends to propose his own version of a bill to expand paid sick days. While his bill last year only would have applied to businesses with at least 11 workers, the version planned this year will have a threshold of only one.
With unions representing fewer than 10% of private-sector workers in Connecticut, labor and its allies have long looked to achieve in legislation what is beyond the reach of collective bargaining.
Looney, the Senate leader, said that is appropriate for government to intervene in providing something he sees as a basic right — sick days.
“We see these as just so basic and fundamental in terms of the social compact and equity that the state has to step in,” Looney said. “This is so critical because it benefits people who are living without a margin, living without a net, living day to day.”
Mark Pazniokas is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2024 © The Connecticut Mirror.
Connecticut
Connecticut’s time for energy investment is now – if state leaders get on board
As a 15-year veteran of the utility industry, I can tell you with certainty there’s nowhere like Connecticut. In other states, when utility companies receive downgrades in their credit rating, regulators and consumer advocates haul them into hearings, demanding to know their plans to rectify them.
Not so in Connecticut, where regulators themselves are named as the reason for the downgrades, and policymakers like the Office of Consumer Counsel and the Chairs of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee work overtime to provide political cover.
Meanwhile, the scope of these downgrades – from S&P and Moody’s, two of the most respected financial institutions in the world – extend statewide, from two Avangrid companies, Eversource and all its subsidiaries, to even a small water company.
Whatever the political rhetoric, the impacts are serious and the damage long-term. Building a grid for Connecticut’s future will require billions in new investment over the decades to come, and with the downgrades warning investors to be increasingly skeptical of Connecticut utilities, every single dollar just got more expensive.
The state has a long list of goals for its economy and clear objectives for its utilities: build a modern, sustainable, reliable, resilient, renewable, innovative electric grid capable of supporting massive capacity increases from electrification and data centers. Alienating the investment community does nothing to further those goals; it only makes them less attainable.
But until PURA and state policymakers abandon their anti-utility bias, they will continue to miss today’s golden opportunity to build the energy system of tomorrow –- an opportunity other states are rigorously pursuing. Instead, the excellent reliability that customers rely on, built through a long legacy of investment, will be whittled away even as costs continue to rise.
This, to a question that Sen. Norm Needleman and Rep. Jonathan Steinberg raise in their editorial, is why companies like ours “care” if our credit rating is downgraded. We are not so short-sighted as to shrug off the consequences of higher costs for our customers.
But even more significant are the consequences to long-term energy investment in Connecticut. Utilities are some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the country. We rely on selling bonds to finance safe, reliable, high-quality service through investments like new substations, battery storage, flood walls, microgrids and more.
Downgrades signal to investors they should pull their loans, leaving us with insufficient capital to advance these innovations. Instead, utilities are forced to put what limited capital we can raise (through higher premiums on our bonds) into the most basic, fundamental projects, like storm restoration efforts or pole replacements after traffic accidents.
Accepting – and even incentivizing – PURA to enable meager investments to support only the most basic service puts Connecticut out of step with our neighbors, as other northeastern states are doing the hard work of system planning for the future. It’s no coincidence that Eversource is putting forward 30-year investment plans in Massachusetts while pulling $500 million in investments from Connecticut. Nor should it be surprising that Avangrid company New York State Electric & Gas (NYSEG) is building two 1-megawatt battery energy storage systems that tap directly into New York substations, a major resiliency investment, while nothing of the sort is happening in Connecticut.
Regulators in Massachusetts and New York are far from easy or passive. They have high standards that utilities must work hard to meet, and they do not get everything they ask for, as Needleman and Steinberg baselessly claim is our demand.
What Massachusetts and New York do is set the rules of the road for utility companies. They set clear standards of performance they expect from utility companies – in everything from the level of detail in rate cases to their forward-looking investment plans – and they hold them accountable.
That is not the case in Connecticut. Legislators can obfuscate, downplay, or even offer fictitious conspiracy theories -– most incredibly, that we would pay credit rating agencies, which are independent referees under federal law, to downgrade our credit ratings when downgrades are good for no one.
But none of these political games change the fact that energy companies cannot invest in a state in which PURA puts politically expedient rate cuts over its stated objectives. Nor will they alleviate the underinvestment these policymakers are apparently willing to accept in favor of the fabrication that PURA is “simply holding utilities accountable.”
I fear Connecticut’s energy infrastructure, and the economy it’s built on, will be left behind as other states move forward with a clear vision. The golden opportunity for investment in the energy future is now, and we are at serious risk of missing it as our regulators and policymakers prioritize waging political war on the state’s utilities. The longer they dally, the more likely it is that PURA’s actions and inaction will leave us in the dark.
Charlotte Ancel is the Vice President of Investor Relations at Avangrid, the parent company of United Illuminating, Connecticut Natural Gas, and Southern Connecticut Gas.
Connecticut
Library in South Windsor wraps up 14th annual Gingerbread House Festival
Some people found a sweet escape from Sunday’s frigid winter temperatures. A chance to step outside the cold and into a different snowy environment.
It just made it feel like Christmas,” said Michael Mizla, of Manchester.
“We try to do this every year,” said Susan, Mizla’s wife.
Sunday was the last day to check out a festive, holiday tradition at the Wood Memorial Library and Museum in South Windsor – The 14th Annual Gingerbread House Festival, which organizers say is one of the largest gingerbread house festivals in New England.
“People have made this their tradition,” said the library’s executive director Carolyn Venne. “We see the same large Vermont family every year the day after Thanksgiving on opening day. So, as people come in to see family locally, this becomes part of their tradition, and that makes it all meaningful for us.”
These gingerbread houses are on display in multiple rooms and floors throughout the library for weeks, from late November to just before Christmas.
“We probably range from about 75 to 150, and I think one year we topped out around 200,” said Venne.
Venne says behind these intricate candy creations are bakers, students, and community members.
At the end of the day, the gingerbread houses went to some lucky raffle winners or were donated to a nursing home in the area.
Those who needed to do some last-minute holiday shopping, were covered – just like the icing on these graham cracker homes – as people could visit the library’s ‘Ye Old Gingerbread Shoppe’ and take some of the magic home with them.
“The holidays are full of things you remember as a kid, so it just feels like the kind of tradition you will remember as you grow up.”
While Sunday was the last day to immerse yourself in these festive, edible villages, there are more holiday traditions coming up at the library, including a Christmas concert next Saturday at 1:30 p.m.
Connecticut
Connecticut farmers to benefit from federal disaster relief package
Funding to help farmers impacted by disaster is on the way for those who have been seeking help.
That’s one aspect of what came out of a vote in Washington D.C. that in part prevented a government shutdown.
A 13 minute hailstorm in August destroyed William Dellacamera’s crops and cost him $400,000. He was only able to receive a little less than half of that from programs already in place.
“From that day on, basically everything I had grown for the season was destroyed,” said Dellacamera of Cecarelli’s Harrison Hill Farm.
He’s become known locally for driving his tractor from Connecticut to Washington D.C., advocating for more state and federal funding for farmers like him.
In his travels, he landed meetings with the USDA and Connecticut’s delegation.
“I think they’re taking it seriously, and they did. They took it seriously,” said Dellacamera.
President Biden signed a disaster relief bill into law, advocated for in part by Connecticut’s delegation.
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro says Connecticut has lost 460 farms over the last five years, primarily related to weather events that put their livelihoods at stake.
“I am pleased that we have an agreement on $100 billion in disaster aid,” said DeLauro on the House Floor Friday, who advocated for the bill.
As part of that, Connecticut farmers like Dellacamera will be able to tap into $23 million of relief from crop losses, according to Representative John Larson.
“Now knowing this is going to make a difference is a big deal. And I hope it does, I hope it does make a difference,” said Dellacamera.
Also part of the bill, DeLauro advocated for a block grant of $220 million that’s only for small and medium-sized farmers who have lost crops in 2023 and 2024.
All of New England would fit in the parameters for the grant, allowing farmers to get help without crop insurance or a national disaster declaration.
“We came to a conclusion that these were all of the pieces that were needed to move forward,” said DeLauro on the House Floor Friday, about the bill as a whole.
DeLauro’s team tells us that disaster relief funding will go from the USDA to the states to get payments out.
Dellacamera says he’s grateful, and there’s more work to be done. He hopes this block grant and general disaster relief funding will be able to live on.
“It takes the red tape out of it a little bit,” said Dellacamera of the block grant. “Hopefully it could be funded into the future, you know, as it might be needed more and more,” he said.
In the meantime, the state of Connecticut will be identifying which farmers experienced disasters in 2023 and 2024 to see who would benefit from block grant funding.
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