The former chair of the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, Marissa Gillett, was fined $2,500 on Wednesday after the authority was found to have mishandled a request for public records during her tenure.

The fine was handed down by the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission in response to a complaint by the utility company Eversource, which accused Gillett and her staff of “stonewalling” the company’s request for records about the authority’s internal procedures and handling of cases involving regulated utilities.

A hearing officer assigned to the dispute had previously recommended a $1,000 fine against Gillett, however that amount was increased to $2,500 on Wednesday after several commissioners raised concerns about state agencies failing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.

Gillett, who resigned from her position in October, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

The dispute over the records request was part of a long-running feud between Gillett and Connecticut’s two largest utility companies, Eversource and Avangrid, the parent company of United Illuminating. Earlier this year, the companies filed a lawsuit accusing Gillett of circumventing her fellow commissioners and exerting unilateral control over the authority.

Shortly before that lawsuit was filed, Eversource filed a records request with PURA seeking copies of any directives circulated by Gillett or her staff, including any emails instructing her fellow commissioners to get permission from Gillett’s office before seeking assistance from other authority staffers. The request was handled directly by Scott Muska, PURA’s general counsel.

While Muska released hundreds of documents in response to Eversource’s request, no emails regarding the alleged directive were among them. In their original complaint with the FOI Commission filed in December 2024, Eversource’s attorneys said that they had reason to believe such an email existed, but that PURA was deliberately withholding its release to cover up the fact that Gillett had issued the directive.

PURA did eventually release copies of that email — which was written by Gillett’s chief of staff — to The Hartford Courant in September. Two days later, Gillett announced her resignation.

“This organization was rotten inside and the way they helped to hide it was by cheating through FOIA,” said Thomas Murphy, an attorney representing Eversource.

Assistant Attorney General James Zimmer, who represented PURA before the FOI Commission, argued unsuccessfully for the commissioners to reject the report by hearing officer Danielle McGee, which had concluded that Gillett was ultimately responsible for complying with the records request as leader of the authority.

“There’s no evidence that she was involved beyond maybe tasking Scott Muska to directly handle the search,” Zimmer said.

Zimmer also objected to the report’s mention of the release of emails to The Hartford Courant — which came after the FOI Commission’s hearing on the matter — as well as judicial findings that Gillett has set up an auto-delete function on her personal cell phone, which he argued was irrelevant to the case at hand.

While the commissioners debated excluding those references, they ultimately decided against doing so before voting unanimously to adopt the report and a $2,500 fine. One commissioner, Judy Ganswindt, said she also considered levying a fine against Muska before deciding not to press the matter.

Muska did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.