Mark Pazniokas and Jan Ellen Spiegel

A majority of the legislature’s Regulation Review Committee was poised to vote Tuesday to kill regulations prohibiting new gasoline-powered vehicle sales by 2035, forcing advocates and the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont to open talks on a new plan for passage by the full General Assembly in 2024.

Jonathan Dach, the governor’s chief of staff, said Monday that the administration reluctantly made the decision to withdraw the regulations after being told that opponents on the bipartisan committee had the votes to kill them and not merely reject them without prejudice, an action that would allow a later attempt at passage.

“The choice open to us is let them be killed or pull them,” Dach said. “We will pull them.”

“I was very hopeful we could get ‘rejection without prejudice’ so we could carry on the discussions,” said Rep. Lucy Dathan, D-New Canaan, the committee co-chair, after briefing Dach. “It’s disappointing.”

Lamont and legislators will hold a press conference Tuesday to outline an alternative: Have the General Assembly pass a bill keeping Connecticut in line with the timetable established by California and adopted by New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and other states to phase out new sales of most gas-powered vehicles.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said one possibility was emulating New Mexico and Colorado, states that endorsed a transition to zero-emission vehicles, but included a commitment before then to assess their states’ progress towards establishing the necessary electric infrastructure.

“This might give people comfort,” Ritter said.

Colorado adopted the California standards that progressively limit new gas-car sales with a major proviso: It would follow California only through 2032, then it would live by the lower federal clean air standards, the other option available to states.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed federal emission standards requiring that 67% of new light-duty vehicles and 25%  of new heavy-duty trucks sold in the United States are electric or otherwise powered by zero-emission engines by 2032.

A shift to the EPA goals would be welcome, said Rep. Nicole Klarides-Ditria, R-Seymour, a member of Regulation Review Committee and opponent of the proposed regulations.

“This is what we’ve been saying right along: The EPA regulations are just more realistic,” Klarides-Ditria said. Of the California goal of 100% by 2035, she said, “We all want to move in that direction, but it’s too aggressive.”

Without committing to a specific proposal, Dach said the administration supports the legislative efforts to keep Connecticut moving towards zero-emission vehicles. He was unsure if Lamont would attend the news conference.

Ritter said the administration’s withdrawal of the regulations give legislators flexibility. If the regulations were disapproved by the committee, the legislature only could vote to overturn the panel, not revise the regulations.

On the committee’s agenda Tuesday were two sets of regulations that would implement revisions to the California clean air standards followed by 17 states, including Connecticut and many neighbors.

The car regulations would have essentially updated existing emissions levels by requiring that all new vehicles sold in the state must have zero emissions beginning in 2035. The other is for medium and heavy duty vehicles — trucks. Beginning in 2035, 40% to 75% of new vehicle sales, depending on the class of vehicle, must be zero emissions.

Neither action affects existing vehicles, the sale of used vehicles, or prohibits zero-emission vehicles that are not electric. It also allows plug-in hybrid cars that have gasoline backups.

Both follow the standards set by California, which the Connecticut legislature approved two decades ago for cars. Under rules of the federal Clean Air Act going back to its inception in 1970, states have been able to choose one of two sets of emissions regulations for motor vehicles: those set by the EPA or more stringent ones set by California.

Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, a Regulation Review Committee member, had made clear for weeks that her vote was in jeopardy given her concern about the impact on agriculture in her largely rural district, as well as the cost of electric vehicles and the ability of the electric grid to meet the greater demand.

Osten said that some of the complications faced by Norway, where 87% of new car sales are EVs, also gave her pause. Osten said she was struck by the cost of subsidies, such as tax credits, and the disproportionate benefit on wealthier buyers.

She declined to say Monday if she had informed leaders she was a hard no, but others said the decision to withdraw them was based on a belief that Osten and Sen. Joan Hartley, D-Waterbury, would vote with the Republicans in opposition.

Hartley confirmed she would have voted against the regulations, despite a promise by Commissioner Katie Dykes of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection to convene a working group to oversee Connecticut’s infrastructure progress before the 2035 deadline.

“I said, ‘No, let’s work on this first,'” Hartley said.

Dykes could not be reached. She is scheduled to join Lamont, Democratic legislative leaders and others at a press conference Tuesday to respond and review next steps.

Hartley said she supports the transition to zero-emission vehicles as a necessary step towards protecting the environment, but she has questions about the state’s readiness and the impact on lower-income, urban constituents.

“I believe in it and endorse it,” Hartley said. But she added, “I represent a city of 116,000 with a median income of $42,000.”

The Republican minority, which has offered similar objections, is empowered under Connecticut’s unusual bipartisan system of reviewing and approving regulations.

Unlike the regulatory framework of the federal government and many states, Connecticut gives the legislature veto power over regulations, albeit one that is supposed to turn on a narrow question: Does the regulation implement legislation?

Attorney General William Tong said the proposed regulations meet the test of legal sufficiency. Charles Rothenberger, a climate-and-energy lawyer with the environmental group Save The Sound, said Monday he found it “difficult, if not impossible, to make any logical sense of it” of the failure to adopt the regulations.

“It’s really an embarrassment all the way around when it comes to this,” Rothenberger said. “If in fact the committee is not voting on these regulations tomorrow, it is really unconscionable.”

By rejecting the regulations, Connecticut is stepping away from two decades of progress that included adopting a low-emission vehicles program that set higher standards on gas and diesel engines that power cars and trucks, he said.

“We are walking away from our longtime partners in the effort to clean up our air and protect public health in terms of Massachusetts in New York and Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia,” Rothenberger said. “And we are declaring that we are content to align ourselves with the standards that are good enough for Alabama, and Mississippi, and West Virginia. And those are the states that we want to stand so it is you know, it boggles my mind.”

While the regulations proposed by the Democratic administration of Lamont stem from a law passed in 2004 under a Republican governor, Republicans said the 2035 deadline for transitioning to zero-emission vehicles was a public policy change that most lawmakers could not have foreseen two decades ago.

Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, a Regulation Review member, complained at a press conference two weeks ago that they reflect the desires of “unelected bureaucrats.”

“The majority wants to believe that California is better for Connecticut than Connecticut. Nobody represents us in Sacramento,” Kelly said.

On Monday, he said, “I think common sense prevailed. I do applaud the governor for withdrawing the regs, and I think this is what happens when we take issues from underneath the Capitol dome and go across Connecticut and bring issues to the people.”

Chris Herb, president of the Connecticut Energy Marketers Association, a trade group that represents gasoline and heating oil distributors, applauded the withdrawal of the regulations, if cautiously.

“This is victory for consumers who would have paid a big price tag for the state’s efforts to ban gas powered cars and trucks in the future. However, the battle may not be over,” Herb said. “It’s unclear what could happen next, but CEMA will continue to be vigilant in our opposition to this reckless policy. This is too much too fast, and we are not ready for an EV-only future.”

Huge Turbines Will Soon Bring First Offshore Wind Power to New Yorkers

Patrick McGeehan

The pier on the Connecticut coast is filled with so many massive oddities that it could be mistaken for the set of a sci-fi movie. Sword-shaped blades as long as a football field lie stacked along one edge, while towering yellow and green cranes hoist giant steel cylinders to stand like rockets on a launchpad.

It is a launching point, not for spacecraft, but for the first wind turbines being built to turn ocean wind into electricity for New Yorkers. Crews of union workers in New London, Conn., are preparing parts of 12 of the gargantuan fans before shipping them out for final assembly 15 miles offshore.

“They’re sort of space-stationesque,” said Christine Cohen, a Democratic state senator who toured the assembly site last week. “Seeing the components up close, it’s just breathtaking how immense they are.”

The turbines will make up South Fork Wind, a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean whose completion is pivotal to Northeastern states’ hopes of switching to renewable sources of energy. Recent setbacks to several other offshore projects in the region have raised concerns about whether and when they all will be built.

One of South Fork’s developers, Denmark-based Orsted, recently canceled plans for two much larger wind farms off the coast of New Jersey, saying they were no longer feasible.

The company had also planned to build Sunrise Wind, another wind farm in the Atlantic that would supply electricity to New York. But after state regulators refused to increase the subsidies for that project and three others, Orsted said it was unsure whether it would bid again for that contract. New York officials said they would seek new bids starting Nov. 30.

In the meantime, New York’s best bet for entering the era of offshore wind power is stacked up at the water’s edge in New London.

The pieces are so big that it has taken a cargo ship three voyages to transport them from Germany and Denmark, where they were made by Siemens Gamesa, a leading manufacturer of turbines. The ship is due back soon with the last load.

Orsted and its partner, Eversource, expect the electricity to start flowing from the first South Fork turbines before the end of the year. But the weather offshore — sometimes, it can be too windy to build a wind farm — as well as all sorts of mechanical matters and a simmering labor dispute at the pier could delay the flow of power from the ocean to Long Island.

In early November, the first barge to leave New London loaded with turbine parts had to return still carrying three blades because of a mechanical problem transferring them to a ship. It was not until two weeks later that the barge was able to make another eight-hour round trip and a successful transfer.

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The task is immense in every dimension, including distance, time and cost. Out in the ocean, more than 30 miles east of Montauk Point, the mission is to erect a dozen towers and attach 318-foot-long fiberglass blades to each of them. Imagine the 50-story General Motors Building with three Statues of Liberty rotating around the top, attached by the tips of their torches.

The central role at South Fork is played by the Aeolus, a jack-up ship. The Aeolus uses its crane to lift the turbine pieces off an arriving barge and then transforms itself into a platform by plunging its four legs to the ocean floor and rising out of the water.

Once one of the structures is intact, crew members from a supply ship will enter the tower and, ascending on a three-passenger elevator tucked inside, tighten bolts and connect cables to prepare the turbine to generate power.

Paul Murphy, an Orsted executive overseeing the project, said he expected South Fork to get past its remaining hurdles, including the sparring between powerful unions at the pier.

In September and October, busloads of longshoremen set up picket lines outside the pier’s gates, objecting to the operation of cranes there by members of the International Union of Operating Engineers. Their union, the International Longshoremen’s Association, has stopped trying to block work at the pier for now, but a union official said the matter was not resolved.

“We changed our method of protest temporarily,” said James H. Paylor, the union’s assistant general organizer. He said the union had been handing out fliers outside Orsted’s offices in New York, Boston and other cities.

Mr. Murphy said that after “some teething-type issues,” South Fork was “in the last stages.” When the wind is not blowing too hard, the workers out at sea can assemble a turbine in less than three days.

“The first time you do each activity, you want to make sure you do everything nice and slow” to ensure that it is done right and novice installers learn the steps, Mr. Murphy said.

The installation, which will continue for several weeks, involves more than 200 workers, on land and aboard several vessels. Last Monday, New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, announced that the installation of the first South Fork turbine marked “a momentous step” toward the state’s goal of getting 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

The pace of work could be faster if not for a century-old law known as the Jones Act, which prevents the Dutch-flagged Aeolus from picking up parts from the pier itself and ferrying them to the site. The Jones Act requires the involvement of American-made barges.

But the barges will not be needed once there is an American ship capable of installing turbines in the ocean. The first one, the Charybdis, is under construction in Texas, with a price tag of $625 million and completion expected by early 2025.

The Charybdis should be able to operate at least twice as fast because it will be able to carry up to four turbine towers at a time, said Ulysses B. Hammond, interim executive director of the Connecticut Port Authority.

“It’s huge,” Mr. Hammond said of the ship. “I mean huuuuge.”

Gesturing toward the nearby section of Interstate 95 crossing the Thames River, he added, “It’s going to stop the traffic on the Gold Star Bridge.”

Mr. Hammond has overseen the remaking of the state-owned pier, which sits at the mouth of the Thames River across from General Dynamics’ Electric Boat submarine shipyard, into a hub for the assembly of offshore wind turbines. With no bridges between it and the ocean, the pier has the rare advantage along the Northeast coast of offering access to seagoing vessels without any practical limitations on height or width.

The project is now estimated to cost about $300 million, more than triple the port authority’s original estimate. The developers of South Fork, Orsted and Eversource, are contributing about $100 million and the state is putting up the rest.

Connecticut’s governor, Ned Lamont, has called the spending an investment in capturing an outsize role in a budding regional industry.

“Connecticut’s deepwater ports, direct water access and long history of advanced manufacturing make our state a natural home for offshore wind projects serving all of New York and New England,” Mr. Lamont said in October.

Both the state and the developers are counting on the pier as the assembly point for more wind farms. Orsted and Eversource have formed joint ventures for two more offshore projects — Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind — that they plan to build after completing South Fork.

Revolution Wind, more than five times the size of South Fork, would provide Connecticut and Rhode Island with enough power for about 350,000 homes, Orsted says. Sunrise Wind would supply New York with enough power for nearly 600,000 homes, it says.

But at the moment, South Fork is the one to watch as the nation’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm.

“We’ve spent a lot of time talking about offshore wind power,” Mr. Murphy said. “In the next couple of months, we’ll be using it.”

Connecticut’s truck tax continues to fall short

Marc E. Fitch

Connecticut’s truck tax continues to underwhelm, falling $25 million short of estimated revenue from 2021 when the tax – called the Highway Use Tax (HUT) – was passed by the General Assembly along a party-line vote and over the protestations of Connecticut truckers.

The HUT was passed following the defeat of Gov. Lamont’s numerous tolling proposals for Connecticut highways, and supporters argued the tax was necessary to bolster the struggling Special Transportation Fund (STF) that pays for Connecticut’s transportation infrastructure and public transportation. The tax is based on the truck’s weight and the number of miles it travels in Connecticut.

At the time of passage, it was estimated the HUT would bring in $90 million by fiscal year 2024 and nearly $100 million by 2026. Those figures, however, have been adjusted downward by roughly $25 million to $30 million for the 2024 fiscal year, according to the latest Fiscal Accountability Report from the nonpartisan Office of Fiscal Analysis (OFA).

According to OFA, the HUT is now expected to bring in $65 million over the course of FY 2024 and $67.6 million in 2026. By fiscal year 2028, the tax is projected to bring in only $70 million, roughly $30 million less than earlier projections and taking years longer than previously expected to ramp up.

OFA wrote the HUT was adjusted downward by $25 million for 2024, “to reflect lower than expected collections.”

“As HUT is still in its relative infancy, its long-term outlook and growth rates are less certain at this point compared to more established tax streams,” the Fiscal Accountability Report says. “The downward adjustment for HUT is partly offset by higher than expected collections for motor vehicle registration and related fees as well as for interest income.”

John Blair, president of the Motor Transport Association of Connecticut (MTAC), which represents Connecticut trucking companies and truckers, says the lower revenue is what his organization warned about when the legislation was passed.

“From day one we as an organization at MTAC have said we expect this thing to underperform because the out of state carriers are not going to pay their fair share, or at all,” Blair said. “I believe if we dug into the numbers, it would bear out that in-state carriers are carrying the majority of the dollars that come into the state.”

“Because there’s no enforcement mechanism around it, the out of state carriers are unlikely to pay the same amount of tax,” Blair continued. 

There currently exists no way to enforce the tax other than trucking companies self-reporting their weights and miles, something the trucking industry has long said leaves similar taxes in other states struggling to meet expectations. During the 2023 session, the General Assembly voted to require only quarterly HUT taxes rather than monthly, which was an administrative relief for trucking companies in Connecticut, Blair said, but the tax remains cumbersome for trucking companies.

“This regulatory scheme is so complicated, from the quarterly filings to tracking miles on a daily basis, I also believe that affects the overall revenue collection because it’s very difficult to keep track and it’s an administrative burden,” Blair said.

Republicans who opposed the tax have unsuccessfully tried in years since to roll it back, even forcing a public hearing on repealing the tax before the Transportation Committee in 2023.

While the expected revenue from HUT is lower than anticipated, the overall trajectory of the Special Transportation Fund remains positive, for now. According to OFA’s report, the fund will start to see deficits in 2027 as expenses begin to outpace revenue. However, the fund has also built up its largest cumulative balance in history at $681.7 million. That balance is expected to grow to more than $1 billion by 2026, just as the shortfalls are expected the following year.

Much of that growth is due to the transfer of sales tax revenue into the STF, a tax that has seen increasing revenue for Connecticut, particularly during periods of high inflation. The OFA warns, however, that fuel taxes, which show a slight decline, could fall further if the state begins to phase out the sale of gasoline powered cars.

“Conversely, fuel tax growth is projected to be negative through FY 28 as vehicles become more fuel efficient and oil prices fall from recent highs,” the OFA report says. “Furthermore, the state is pursuing longer term goals that are expected to reduce fuel tax collections, including various strategies to increase the adoption of electric vehicles and to reduce vehicle miles traveled.” 

Overall, according to the report, Connecticut is expected to see lower surpluses due to declining revenue from Wall Street, business taxes and sales tax revenue, but continue its current run of taking in more revenue than it is paying out due to declining expenditures, resulting in balanced budgets.

The report did warn, however, that OFA’s report methodology “does not allow for growth in non-fixed cost expenditures or the consideration of other potential budgetary pressure, such as potential ongoing expenditures previously funded through temporary resources such as American Rescue Plan or carryforward funds. Therefore, the out-year balances should not be considered annual surpluses.”