PURA Walks Back English Station Fine

by Jordan Allyn

The state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) dropped a fine this week that it had previously levied against United Illuminating (UI) for the power company’s failure to clean up English Station in a timely manner.

“So that’s taking a little bit of the pressure off UI to do something quickly,” city Economic Development Administrator Mike Piscitelli told a group of Fair Haveners as part of a broader update on the city’s plans to acquire the dilapidated ex-power plant site and turn it into a public park with an outdoor swimming pool.

Piscitelli brought that news to Thursday’s Fair Haven Community Management Team (CMT) meeting. CMT Co-Chair Lee Cruz facilitated the event with 41 people in attendance on Zoom and at the Fair Haven Library.

The defunct power plant site, still contaminated with toxic chemicals, sits on Ball Island in the Mill River. UI, the original owner and operator of the power plant, is responsible for cleaning up the area’s contamination. In a 2017 partial consent order, UI agreed to invest $30 million towards English Station remediation and finish the project by 2019 as part of a merger with the Spanish energy giant Iberdola. The company did not follow through on its commitment, so in 2023, PURA assigned UI a penalty for delaying the power plant’s clean-up. The authority imposed a 20-basis-point reduction on UI’s return on equity for each year it failed to comply with the partial consent order. 

On Tuesday, PURA eliminated the fine, waiting for various related state court cases to resolve before deciding whether or not to reinstate a penalty.

In a Tuesday press release, state Attorney General William Tong lambasted PURA for “now turning its back entirely on accountability for UI’s repeated failures to remediate dangerous contamination at English Station.” PURA also permitted UI to raise utility rates for customers, increasing its annual distribution revenues by approximately $68 million. 

At the Fair Haven library on Thursday, Piscitelli explained that the penalty went from $2 million to $1 million to nothing.

As cleanup lags, the city’s bid to acquire the site remains pending. Piscitelli said city representatives spoke earlier this week with the site’s current owners’ lawyers. “We’ve been talking, and I think that’s a good sign. They’ve invested in valuation. They’ve invested in counsel. That’s always a good sign,” said Piscitelli. If the two sides cannot agree on a price, the city plans to take the property through eminent domain. 

The Board of Alders Community Development Committee signed off on exactly that sale-or-eminent domain plan in February, when five out of six committee alders — including Magda Natal of Fair Haven’s Ward 16 — supported the proposal. That proposal now heads to the full Board of Alders for a final vote.

Natal elaborated on her committee vote at Thursday’s meeting. “It was a very difficult decision that I had to make.” She said the vote was not about the pool but rather about whether the city should be able to employ eminent domain. “I just thought it was time for us to begin to move forward in the process of trying to acquire the property and to ensure that it belonged to the city and did not go somewhere else,” said Natal. 

Frank Redente Jr., the alder for Fair Haven’s Ward 15, voted against the English Station-acquisition plan at the February committee hearing. He said that while he personally supports the idea of a park, he opposes the pool. “I am firmly against the pool,” Redente said, “seeing that we don’t really have a good track record of taking care of what we have.”

Alder Natal explains her committee vote. CMT Co-Chair Cruz.