To the Editor:
It should be obvious, but for regulators at the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA), it’s worth repeating: there’s no way for any company, no matter what business they’re in, to take hit after hit while their workers escape unscathed.
And “hit after hit” certainly describes what PURA’s latest draft decision has offered to United Illuminating (UI), the company where I serve as Chief Line Crew Leader and whose front-line workers are members of the union where I serve as President – the Utility Workers Union of America Local 470-1.
I’m not even talking about the fact that PURA’s decision in UI’s 2023 rate case already had ripple effects that made my life and the lives of my union members much more challenging. From refusing to replace our bucket trucks to cutting the opportunities for us to bring in outside resources when it would benefit our customers, it’s been a difficult two years.
I’ve talked for years about the harms of that decision – but believe it or not, for UI employees and the customers we proudly serve, this year’s proposal from PURA has the potential to make things much, much worse.
The draft decision continues to push out the major investments that UI’s electric distribution system needs. That’s a short-sighted decision that workers would pay for. It prevents UI from replacing aging infrastructure with newer, safer technologies, leaving us to keep working with out-of-date equipment.
Worse, it exposes our customers to those consequences, especially longer and more frequent power outages. We feel those consequences, too. Think about it this way. Let’s say a customer lives on a street served by an outdated, faulty transformer that should be replaced, but PURA didn’t provide UI the capital to do it. Instead, lineworkers have to respond to an outage on that block every other week, effectively relegated to wallpapering over the cracks.
Who are the customers on that block going to blame? Regulators, who have prevented UI from getting the money? The nameless, faceless “company management”? No. Having done this work for more than 30 years, I can tell you, any grumbling – or worse – is going to be taken out on us, the women and men who keep showing up on their block, unable to provide the real fix they need.
Weaker, older infrastructure is also more likely to fail during a routine thunderstorm, Nor’easter, or snowstorm. But the draft decision cuts that budget too, and by a stunning amount, providing just $389,000 off our request for nearly $3 million.
With that tiny fraction, we can forget bringing in outside resources to help restore customers more quickly. By mid-February or so, we ourselves wouldn’t even be able to work outside of normal business hours to bring customers’ lights back on.
How would customers feel if they see us leaving our job site a couple houses down at 3:30 pm, but their power is still out? How would you feel?
As lineworkers, we care about our customers. We take a lot of pride in our work, and we like exceeding their expectations on how quickly we can get them back online. Forcing us into a situation in which we simply can’t do that is painful for customers, and it’s painful for us.
Of course, we can’t forget the elephant in the room, the most direct hit the draft decision deploys on UI’s dedicated team of union and non-union employees: it cut the funding of 72 full-time employees, more than 10% of UI’s workforce. These are critical roles: in addition to my nearly 400 front-line members, there are engineers, project managers, billing analysis, program administrators, and many more.
These workforce cuts could also very well wipe out any opportunity for us to continue our high school internship program, in which we in the union, together with UI and Avangrid, provide a 10-week summer training course in electric lineworking for 7-10 students from local trade high schools. This program is valuable, not just to students but to the state, as we focus on recruiting from underserved communities. The draft decision may not intend to cut such an important resource, but that’s what happens when you take a hatchet to an investment plan.
No one – not my members, not our customers, and not the state in which we all live and work – will benefit if the draft decision is passed without a serious overhaul. Connecticut’s first responders, including UI’s 110 lineworkers, deserve better than what this proposal offers.
Moses Rams is the President of the Utility Workers Union of America Local 470-1 and the Chief Line Crew Leader at UI.