Avangrid claims the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) and its chairman, Marissa Gillett, are withholding documents from discovery, including Gillett’s personal text messages believed to be related to an op/ed authored by the chairs of the legislature’s Energy and Technology Committee, which Avangrid believes will show the chair’s bias against the utility companies. 

Avangrid is seeking a motion for compliance or additional discovery in the utility giant’s ongoing appeal of PURA’s decision to undercut their gas company’s rate requests, which they say financially harmed the company and was based on irregular proceedings.

The op/ed in question, authored by Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, and Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, was published in CT Mirror on December 19, 2024, and claimed the utility companies had colluded with credit rating organizations to cast blame on Gillett for undercutting Eversource and Avangrid’s rate requests and ultimately lowering their credit rating.

However, text messages between Gillett and Steinberg later revealed by the Hartford Courant appear to show Gillett colluding with Steinberg to write the op/ed in the days before publication — something both Steinberg and Gillett have outright denied, claiming the “draft” mentioned in the text messages was a legislative proposal.

According to Avangrid’s motion, however, PURA failed to produce the “draft” discussed in the text messages between Gillett and Steinberg, as well as the text messages themselves from Gillett’s phone.

Instead, PURA merely provided a screenshot of the Hartford Courant’s screenshot of the text messages.

“The first and most glaring omission from PURA’s product is its failure to include Chairperson Gillett’s text messages, as sent and received from her own phone. In response to the Court’s order, PURA incorporated by reference a screenshot of the text messages, as published in the newspaper, which were taken from Rep. Steinberg’s phone and ‘provided to the Courant by the House Democratic caucus,’” wrote attorney John Cerreta. “In addition, the seven documents that PURA has produced (purportedly in the interest of ‘full transparency’) themselves demonstrate that not a single one of them can possibly pertain to the ‘draft’ that Chairperson Gillett ‘finished’ on or about Sunday, December 15, and discussed in her text conversation with Rep. Steinberg.”

One of the documents PURA provided to Avangrid under discovery, according to the court filing, was the “overly formal” communication mentioned in the text messages between Gillett and Steinberg. Another document produced by PURA was an email Gillett sent to two other PURA staff members about reviewing and assessing legislation, but PURA did not provide the actual Word document attachment. 

Another document provided by PURA was an email with an attachment named “Banana Bread” that Gillett circulated to staff members on December 17, asking for their input. Once again, PURA did not provide the actual Banana Bread document in question, only the email.

In both cases, Avangrid’s attorneys argue the dates of the emails compared to the text messages do not add up, and that the documents PURA did provide are not responsive to their discovery request. 

They believe PURA is either engaging in a “narrow, hyper-technical reading of the Court’s order – under which the very text message that gave rise to the order are somehow deemed non-responsive to it,” or that Gillett has deleted the text messages from her devices.

According to the newest court documents, Avangrid sent PURA a letter detailing their concerns that discovery production was incomplete and requesting PURA immediately produce Gillett’s text messages, as well as documents related to the draft mentioned in the text messages. But PURA provided one additional document they claimed to have mistakenly overlooked that involved Gillett wishing her staff happy holidays and telling them to enjoy Steinberg and Needleman’s op/ed. During a follow up meeting, PURA declined to offer any more documents.

PURA indicated that the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) performed a search of emails regarding the draft in question but found nothing; DAS also purportedly downloaded text messages from the work phones of Gillett and her chief of staff, Theresa Govert, but also found nothing there. 

However, it was Gillett and Govert who searched their own personal devices, email accounts and computer files “based on personal knowledge and using the search terms noted above,” and reportedly found nothing.

“Moreover, far from demonstrating ‘full transparency,’ PURA’s production actively hides the ball with respect to the ‘draft’ ‘release/op Ed’ that Chairperson Gillett finished, had her Chief of Staff and others review, and planned to send to Rep. Steinberg and Sen. Needleman,” Cerrata wrote. “More fundamentally, no search terms are even needed for PURA to quickly find, locate, and review the discrete categories of documents that Chairperson Gillett discussed in her text messages with Rep. Steinberg.” 

Connecticut’s two largest utilities, Eversource and Avangrid, both have appeals currently pending before the Superior Court, but have also filed a lawsuit against PURA over the agency allegedly not following state statute in how it conducts meetings and issues decisions on substantive motions, in an ongoing legal and administrative battle.

The utilities allege and, to an extent, PURA has admitted that Gillett alone has issued decisions on substantive docket motions under the guise of the full Authority by not indicating it was a decision by the presiding officer. The utilities claim this practice misled them into believing they could not appeal those motion decisions to a full vote by the Authority. PURA, on the other hand, claims this has been standard practice.

In permitting discovery, Superior Court Judge Matthew Budzik questioned why the agency did not keep records of how it reached critical decisions on these motions and wrote the agency “failed to articulate a coherent statutory basis for the procedures it allegedly follows.”

Avangrid claims PURA’s decision to cut its rate request for both its natural gas subsidiaries – Connecticut Natural Gas and the Southern Connecticut Gas Company – was plagued with “a series of highly unusual procedural irregularities,” that “demand reversal,” along with “numerous significant computation mistakes,” that financially harmed the company.

The conflict between Eversource, Avangrid and PURA has been well-known and almost led to Gillett losing the nomination vote in the Executive and Legislative Nominations Committee, but for a backroom deal that purportedly secured Sen. John Fonfara’s, D-Hartford, support – a deal that now appears dead in the water.

Avangrid is asking the Court to order PURA to review and produce “all text messages, emails, attachments, and any other documents,” related to the draft discussed between Steinberg and Gillett, and all of the attachments PURA withheld from the emails it has already provided.

“These documents constitute the bare minimum of what PURA must provide in order to comply with the scope and intent of the Court’s original order,” Cerreta wrote. “And even if these requests were deemed technically beyond the scope of the Court’s original order, it is evident that their production is necessary in order to resolve the serious issues of bias, partiality, and other procedural irregularity raise by the plaintiffs in this case.”

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