Gov. Ned Lamont’s relationship with top utility officials has attracted growing scrutiny this week as he nears the final stretch of a reelection campaign in which the cost of energy has taken center stage.

In campaign ads blanketing prime-time television, Lamont has touted his administration’s efforts to lower electricity bills by hundreds of dollars a year and enact “tough reforms to take on Eversource,” the state’s largest utility. In May, he publicly lambasted Eversource chief executive Joe Nolan’s eight-figure salary in response to the utility’s request for a new rate hike starting next year.

But Lamont’s message has been undercut in recent days by comments Nolan made to a group of investors downplaying criticisms from politicians and describing his relationship with New England governors, including Lamont, as friendly.

Then on Thursday, CT Insider published text messages between Lamont and Nolan in which the latter repeatedly urged the governor to “intervene” in the company’s dispute with Connecticut regulators over $1 billion in unpaid storm costs.

Lamont’s opponent in the governor’s race, state Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, siezed on those comments and accused the governor of having a “cozy” relationship with Eversource’s CEO.

Fazio stopped short of accusing Lamont of wrongdoing. However, he noted that in the same call with investors, Nolan said Eversource’s financial outlook had been buoyed by the resolution of the storm costs issue and the recent sale of its water utility, Aquarion, for $2.4 billion — both of which required approval from the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, whose members were appointed by Lamont.

“It’s not just the text messages which were overly familiar,” Fazio said. “It was also Nolan bragging to his investors that he’s friends with Lamont, and that the [governor’s] criticism of the company is just kind of insincere and campaign related, and that [Nolan] has been very happy with the resolution of both storm costs and the sale of Aquarion, both which required the active support the active support from the governor to to happen.”

In an interview with The Connecticut Mirror, Lamont defended his contacts with utility officials as part of the job of governor and said that he never felt compelled to act on their behalf.

He also chalked up Nolan’s comments last week to investors as “telling them what they want to hear.”

“I have a civil relationship with people, that’s what I do, and that includes, you know, leaders of the utilities,” Lamont said. “That does not mean we compromise fighting for our consumers every day.”

Lamont also said his administration has taken effective steps to rein in utility costs with bipartisan regulatory reforms and investments in nuclear and renewable energy sources. Connecticut’s electric rates fell by more than 10% over the last year, and the state now has better rates per kilowatt hour than its neighbors.

“Every single governor in the United States of America has to have a constructive relationship with the utilities that serve customers, who are also taxpayers,” said Max Reiss, a spokesman for Eversource.

Reiss declined to make Nolan available for an interview Thursday to clarify the CEO’s remarks.

‘Please Intervene’

For the last several years, Eversource has been engaged in a protracted dispute with PURA regarding its efforts to collect nearly $1 billion in costs the company says it spent responding to a series of “catastrophic” storms between 2018 and 2023. Last June, the company suffered a credit rating downgrade, based in part on what analysts described as a poor regulatory environment and delays in recovering storm costs.

That same month, Nolan reached out to Lamont with an urgent plea, according to copies of text messages published by CT Insider.

“please don’t leave town until we have a deal on storms. pressure is extraordinary with downgrades,” from credit rating agencies, Nolan’s text read.

CT Mirror sought access through the state’s Freedom of Information Act to those messages, as well as other communications between Lamont and Eversource officials on Thursday. The governor’s office has yet to turn over the records.

There was no indication in the text messages published by CT Insider that Lamont took any actions bowing to the pressure from Nolan to intervene in the storm costs case. In his response to Nolan, Lamont wrote that he had spoken with Consumer Counsel Claire Coleman — who leads the state agency responsible for representing utility customers before PURA — and had been told that her office was waiting on “a few documents” and “very serious proposal” from Eversource.

Coleman’s office never reached a settlement with Eversource in the storm costs case.

Instead, the case ended up going before PURA which issued its final decision this July allowing Eversource to recover $861 million in deferred storm costs — more than 90% of the company’s request — but rejecting the company’s request to collect nearly $400 million in interest on those costs. (Coleman’s office was among those who objected to the request.)

In an interview Thursday, Coleman said that she had conversations with the governor’s office, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and Eversource throughout the years-long debate over storm costs. She said she felt her views, and the independence of her office, were respected throughout those talks.

“I never felt in any of those conversations that I was being pressured to do something that was against the interests of customers,” Coleman said.

In the string of text messages published Thursday, Nolan then went one step further, offering to “hire Jonny,” a reference to former Lamont chief of staff Jonathan Dach, to “bang this out.”

Dach was part of Lamont’s team that worked on energy policy, specifically a wide-ranging set of utility reforms, Senate Bill 4, that the governor signed into law that summer. The bill included a provision allowing Eversource to securitize its storm costs through long-term borrowing, in order to lessen the bill impact on customers. Fazio, who is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Technology Committee, was also a negotiator on the bill, which he ultimately supported.

Nolan’s idea was to have Dach — who left state government that June amid scrutiny into his misuse of a state vehicle — work as a “independent mediator” to come up with a binding resolution for the storm costs dispute, according to Reiss. While the position would have been funded by Eversource, it would have been outside the company, Reiss said. In any event, Dach never applied for or received a formal offer for the position.

“During early discussions surrounding a settlement of storm costs, the concept of an independent mediator was raised and Jonny Dach, an attorney with policy and energy expertise, was considered as an option,” Reiss said in a statement. “In the end, this path did not materialize.”

In February, Dach joined the staff at Concourse, a tech startup in New York City that builds software for government agencies.

“I appreciate Gov. Lamont and Joe Nolan’s confidence that I could successfully mediate discussions between Eversource and the state parties, like OCC and DEEP, to any potential settlement,” Dach said in a statement Thursday. “But we never seriously discussed the role described in those text messages.”

Dach would not have been the first former official in Lamont’s office to go to work for Eversource. Reiss, the company spokesman, previously served as Lamont’s communications director. Jonathan Harris and Leslie O’Brien, who both work in government affairs for Eversource, also worked as aides to Lamont.

State ethics rules prohibit former executive branch employees from representing anyone other than the state in any matter in which they “participated personally and substantially while in state service.” The rules also include a “cooling off period” that bars ex-employees from lobbying directly with their former agency for at least one year after leaving state service.

Lamont said Thursday that he was not involved in any discussions about hiring Dach as a mediator in the storm costs dispute. He added that he was not surprised that companies like Eversource hire his former staffers and said those prior relationships do not impact his decision making.

“I don’t think there’s anything nefarious about that,” Lamont said. “You tend to hire people who used to be in government who have a lot of relationships.”

But Tom Swan, the executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group, said that the text messages and Eversource’s repeated hiring of former administration officials raises ethical concerns. Earlier this year, Swan wrote an op-ed calling for a complete ban on the “revolving door” of legislators and executive branch employees going to work for utilities and PURA.

“What I think was the most appalling is the fact that the company is so arrogant and so used to just hiring political insiders to get their way that Nolan would put that type of a question on the table,” Swan said.

‘Nothing personal’

The release of text messages between Nolan and Lamont came on the heels of another controversy involving remarks the Eversource CEO delivered to a group of investors on Sept. 30.

During his presentation, Nolan was asked to opine on the upcoming gubernatorial races in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire — the three states where Eversource operates — and what they mean for the company’s outlook.

Nolan began by saying he had little doubt that the incumbents in each of those races would win by large margins. He went on to say that Eversource has good relationships with “all of them” and that their occassional public criticisms were driven by political necessity.

“If had $1 for every time they’d say, “Hey, nothing personal, Joe, you know you’re our friend,'” Nolan said. “But they have to do that. Obviously, they’re getting attacked, utility issues are front and center, rates are front and center. But all that noise, in 37 days, you’re going to see the volume is going to go right down, and you won’t you won’t hear much of that.”

Lamont said Thursday that while he and Nolan have “grudging respect” for one another, the company’s actions tell a different story than the one presented by Nolan.

“You think Eversource thinks we’ve been too easy on them?” Lamont said. “I mean, anybody really think that? I think we’ve been tougher on utilities and held them accountable — performance-based regulation and pushing back — and that’s one of the reasons they were very reluctant to bring a [storm costs case to PURA] in the first place.”

Nolan made another remark later in the call that drew an outcry from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Asked about the company’s plans to invest money in Connecticut, Nolan said the company “shut the faucet off” in the state due to its dispute over storm costs. “Until we get paid the storm costs, we weren’t going to put another dime down there,” he said.

That sentiment wasn’t new.

In 2024, Nolan announced that Eversource would be cutting $500 million worth of investments in Connecticut over the subsequent five years due to delays in the storm costs case and other conflicts that the utility was having with then-PURA Chair Marissa Gillett, who had been appointed by Lamont. Those disputes culminated in a series of lawsuits and Gillett’s resignation late last year.

Since then, Lamont has appointed four new commissioners to PURA, who Nolan expressed optimism about working with during next year’s rate case. “Everybody in the space is a professional,” he said.

Reiss said Thursday that Nolan’s remarks to investors were being cast in a negative light due to the upcoming election.

“In a political season, it is more important than ever to get the story right, and the story Joe Nolan is telling about Connecticut to Wall Street is that the environment for investment is improving every day in Connecticut, which is important for customers, policymakers, and communities across the state,” Reiss said in a statement. “Investors turned their back on Connecticut for years, and now Joe is providing the update for investors that things have improved.”

Fazio said Nolan’s remarks were sign Eversource is getting what it wants from the Lamont administration, specifically with regard to policies such as the rollout of advanced metering technology and the Aquarion sale Fazio and other Republican lawmakers opposed. (Fazio, who voted to to confirm each of Lamont’s most recent nominees to PURA, said it is “too early to judge,” their performance.)

In his interview with CT Mirror Thursday, Lamont also said Fazio was playing up the controversy for political gain. “He was a ranking member on [the] Energy and Technology [Committee], he knew all the players,” Lamont said.

Fazio said he has never met Nolan or spoken to him by phone. He said he has met with other Eversource executives, as well as United Illuminating President Frank Reynolds.

“We don’t text or anything like that,” Fazio said. “Sometimes with many companies, I meet with them in my capacity as a state senator, but don’t have a close relationship at all with them.”