The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Trash ‘innovation’ agency approved $1M in payouts, and state still has a garbage crisis
On the frigid night of Christmas Eve, the folks who run the New England electric grid up in western Massachusetts called on emergency generators to crank out more juice immediately as regular power plants fell short. An hour south, Connecticut’s largest trash management agency tried to respond with its jet engines set up just for such urgent moments.
The decades-old jets at the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority failed, a setback that would cost the quasi-public agency, known as MIRA, $370,000 in penalties, according to the MIRA CEO. It was a fitting end to a year that saw MIRA close its aging trash-toenergy plant in Hartford and struggle to manage the flow of trash from its dwindling roster of member towns as haulers shipped garbage to other states.
Just 13 days after that holiday breakdown, MIRA’s top four executives became eligible for at least $1 million in severance payouts — a few hundred thousand dollars for each. Three of them, including the longtime CEO, were on their way out of the fading agency with a dwindling roster of 23 member towns.
A fourth executive, Mark Daley, the former MIRA chief financial officer, became the CEO on that payday, Jan. 6 — and still was in line for a full severance payout.
The four executives, including Thomas Kirk, the former CEO whose last day was Jan. 6, were approved for the payments months earlier under the terms of their contracts. The severance included a year’s pay; up to 80 weeks of accrued vacation time; cash for extended COBRA health insurance whether they needed it or not; and other benefits, with total values impossible to determine based on public records.
Their base salaries ranged from $187,567 for Laurie Hunt, the general counsel, to $335,320 for Kirk, public records show.
The payments did not reward great results. Rather, they were designed to make sure the executives didn’t exit for other jobs as the agency wound down its main activities of recycling and trash-burning.
Either way, as the state finally, years late, reckons with its rotten, stinking garbage crisis, the payouts at MIRA and the demise of the agency point to lessons Connecticut can learn on how to remove its trash — and how not to manage the process.
MIRA will likely no longer exist in just a few months, certainly not in its present form, as Gov. Ned Lamont, lawmakers and Katie Dykes, Lamont’s energy and environmental protection commissioner, push for a new plan to handle 2.2 million tons of yearly garbage, plus about half that amount in material aimed at recycling.
Hearings on the sweeping plan by Lamont and Dykes happened at the legislature Monday — with some controversial ideas such as surcharges on packaging and on garbage shipped out of state, and hopes for a dramatic increase in the tonnage of food and other organic waste pulled out of the trash flow. Little was said about the performance of the state’s trash management system other than that it’s in crisis.
The crisis is so bad that thousands of tons of refuse meant for recycling was burned or shipped out to be buried in 2020 and 2021 — the result of poor recycling separation by residents, obsolete equipment and a dispute between MIRA and its recycling operator. No one can say how much would-be recycling material was incinerated but a former MIRA board member told me Hartford alone may have accounted for about 4,000 tons.
As an aside, speaking of recycling, we need to stop thinking that tossing a bottle or a box in a recycling bin takes care of the environment. Vast amounts of recycling is buried or burned even in a well functioning system, which we assuredly do not have. And even when recycling works perfectly it uses large amounts of energy.
At the moment Connecticut sends 40 percent of our trash, about 860,000 tons a year, to other states, mostly Pennsylvania and Ohio, to be buried in landfills. MIRA is just a small part of that. The whole state, not just the MIRA member towns, faces a toxic blend of old technology, a public that doesn’t give a damn, garbage economics that don’t work and rising prices that no one wants to pay.
MIRA was created in 2014 by an act of the legislature, years after a management and financial crisis at its predecessor agency, the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority, aka CRRA. The “Innovation” part of its name signaled hopes for
new ways of thinking, which didn’t happen and wasn’t ever set up to happen.
The board was dominated not by state officials with a broad vision but by city and town leaders whose main goal seemed to be to keep their per-ton tip fees as low as possible — or in the case of the city of Hartford, to move the region’s refuse incinerator someplace else in the name of environmental justice.
“When you put municipalities in charge of an organization, they’re going to struggle to think big-picture,” said state Sen. Norm Needleman, D-Essex, cochair of the legislature’s energy and technology committee. He ought to know — he’s first selectman of Essex, one of more than 25 cities and towns that exited MIRA, and still home to a MIRA transfer station.
Doomed from the start
Was MIRA’s charge impossible? Maybe. Several factors lined up against the agency.
MIRA was born into a mess in 2014, as Daley made clear during a meeting Friday at the Capitol on how to solve the crisis. Its trash-to-energy plant ran turbines that dated to the 1940s when the South Meadows location was a coal-fired electricity generator owned by the old Hartford Electric Light Co., now part of Eversource. Competing political interests made true, European-style trash management innovation difficult and the rebuilding of the old plant impossible.
The MIRA charter from the state took away the predecessor agency’s role in formulating waste management policy, and in reaching out directly to the public.
If all that wasn’t enough, energy prices collapsed, making
MIRA’s main product, electricity generated by burning trash, less valuable; and the entire recycling system imploded after China in 2017 stopped accepting much of America’s materials, sending the tip fees for recycling above those of regular trash in some places.
So in the big picture, we might agree that MIRA’s path to success was blocked. Still, some observers and insiders, including Thomas Swarr, a MIRA board member from 2018 to 2022, say the agency — and state officials — could have done a lot more before we reached this point.
From the start, MIRA’s board pushed for a rebuilding of the old trash-to-energy plant. After years, the state chose a contractor whose dreamy bid turned out to be undoable. The old plant, constantly beset by problems, sputtered shut in late 2018, through that following winter.
Swarr wrote op-Eds and letters but could not spark urgent action for a comprehensive plan.
“When that plant failed, we should have said we need to rethink this whole thing,” Swarr told me a few days ago, reflecting what the record shows he said at the time. “That bill that’s in now, everybody could have done this in 2019. It was the state’s failure.”
He added, “It wasn’t a crisis because the garbage was still disappearing from people’s front lawns...I was astounded that no politician thought that that was a crisis, or a crisis worth acting on. Nobody was interested.”
In July, 2020, Dykes wrote a letter to MIRA slamming the agency for failing year after year to submit an acceptable plan of operations as state law required. Commenting on the hundreds of millions of dollars MIRA was
seeking for a new plant, Dykes said in the letter, “the MIRA management team has not considered obvious alternatives,” and she named some — including ideas now in the governor’s bill.
Dykes said last week that she never received an acceptable plan but she did not want to talk in detail about MIRA or her agency’s oversight of it. Nor does Gov. Ned Lamont, he said through a spokesman.
“We’re focused on the future,” Dykes said. “This legislation signals the administration’s commitment to take a stronger role in the future.”
‘No longer a public purpose’
That stronger role needs to be not just in strategies that make sense but in day-to-day oversight.
In a March, 2022 report, the state Auditors criticized MIRA for failing to produce an acceptable plan of operations. And the audit said, “MIRA entered two contracts, totaling $298,000, without a public bidding process.” Most audited agencies respond to such reports by promising to do better. But in both issues, MIRA had no comment for the auditors, the report said.
MIRA has also been criticized by the state Freedom of Information Commission for improperly closing some meetings and documents from the public. In a draft decision last fall, the commission said the lapses were wrong but based on reasonable logic, and added, “at some point, reliance on an attorney’s advice, under similar circumstances may no longer be deemed reasonable.”
In short, the record is clear that, yes, the big headwinds were against MIRA but people and systems were not in place to push back. For example, when material meant for recycling was being incinerated, Swarr said, MIRA had no financial incentive to fix the problem because the material was feeding its trash-to-energy plant. “I don’t think there was any MIRA conspirsacy to do this although it did benefit MIRA,” he said.
In a March 2022 meeting of the MIRA board, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, a board member, said MIRA was “burning down reserves to meet our contractual obligations without any long-term sustainability plan.”
“I just want to express my strong conviction that there is no longer a public purpose for MIRA,” Bronin said.
Daley, the former chief financial officer who became CEO on Jan. 6, said MIRA has always been hamstrung in how it could change its operations under state law. “There’s been incremental watering down of CRRA and now MIRA’s authority,” he told me in an interview.
The Jan. 6 payout, in light of all this, “raises eyebrows,” said Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury, the legislature’s finance committee co-chair. “This isn’t the only quasi-public that’s had challenges in terms of who has responsibility,” she said. “There needs to be more focused accountability.”
Donald Stein, the longtime MIRA chairman, retired from that post Jan. 31. The vice chair, James Hayden, defended the payouts as standard procedure well within normal levels for a company or agency winding down operations with key people who need to stay on to make it happen.
“We certainly needed to see that we maintained prudent leadership,” Hayden, a former East Granby first selectman, told me. “All that was very visible… it was reviewed by the board, contractual obligations were reviewed by internal and outside counsel.”
Looking ahead, the main lesson in this is that Connecticut can’t hide behind a large agency to do its trash-management business. The bill by Lamont and Dykes creates a new quasipublic agency but only for two years, when it would go away in favor of regular state departments, including Dykes’ state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, doing the work.
Hayden and Daley said in testimony Monday that it’s a conflict for DEEP to be the main actor and the regulator. We can debate that but we can’t debate the need for direct accountability in a way that quasi-public operators always seem to avoid.
The failure of Connecticut’s waste management system is as much the fault of Dykes and Lamont and the legislature as it is of the operators. They did not oversee MIRA strongly enough, though Dykes tried, and they did not propose bold action until now.