By the time the Department of Energy published notice of the Northern Pass project in 2011, Thomas Getz was a decade into his chairmanship of the Public Utility Commission and Site Evaluation Committee. Now he’s lead counsel for the project in both theaters. Yet neither the PUC nor the SEC recognized his switch from the state’s foremost utility regulator to chief counsel for the largest transmission project in state history as having the appearance of impropriety despite the overlap.

The consumer advocate said nothing. The attorney general’s counsel for the public said nothing. Moreover, no one on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources or the House Science, Technology and Energy committees questioned it. No one.

In late summer of 2015, Dan Weeks wrote a piece in the Monitor comparing lobbyists’ influence on Vermont’s 151-mile New England Clean Power Link Transmission Project to New Hampshire’s 192-mile Northern Pass. It revealed a disturbing magnitude of difference between sums the transmission companies spent lobbying each state. Weeks used the Open Democracy Index to show that in 2014 Eversource’s New Hampshire affiliates handed over $585,000 to lobby state officials for support of Northern Pass, not counting thousands more for political campaigns.

Remember, $585,000 was for one year; we’re now into the sixth.

By contrast, in Vermont, the New York firm Transmission Developers Inc. proposed the Clean Power Link project in 2013, but the company first spent $2,500 to lobby state officials two years later. Weeks notes, “It (TDI) has donated nothing to political campaigns and has been discouraged from influence-peddling by robust disclosure requirements, campaign contribution limits and public funding of elections – reforms that are absent in New Hampshire.”

It seems New Hampshire’s public utilities lobby captured our state’s executive office, Legislature and regulators.

The PUC’s recent ruling against the Northern Pass power purchase agreement provides a case in point.

The commission found the agreement would violate our state’s 2015 divestiture law for its risk to ratepayers. Next, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee set to work on Senate Bill 128 so the commission could consider all proposals that could lower energy costs. If the full Senate and House agree to it, the regulators could abide the gamble of the Northern Pass agreement.

But this is fraught with trouble and, for their roles in the 2015 Evesource divestiture, Senate committee members Jeb Bradley and Dan Feltes should know better. Among the settlement’s most expensive problems was the PUC-approved Burgess Biomass power purchase agreement. It entailed a 20-year, over-market power purchase price that the consumer advocate and the commission’s own staff advised against. But urgent political pressure for the agreement in the interest of North Country economic development won out, so ratepayers were charged about $200 million in additional stranded costs.

George Sansoucy is an engineer and has worked over 40 years on energy and regulatory matters involving public and private utilities. He has testified in federal and state courts and agencies throughout the U.S. on utility infrastructure, energy projects and complex industrial property valuations. He graduated UNH in 1974 with a master’s degree in civil engineering.

On the Northern Pass Site Evaluation Committee, Sansoucy has responsibility for the technical interests of 14 municipalities along the proposed transmission line, including Concord’s. In November he called on the committee to terminate the Northern Pass hearings and require “that the company file a full-blown explanation” why it cannot use the existing Hydro-Quebec HVDC corridor. It’s the one National Grid now proposes for its transmission link.

Sansoucy testified that the facts around the Northern Pass application do not warrant its widespread negative impacts. In his view the project’s controversy stems from our regional utilities’ unwillingness to cooperate in the efficient use of already existing transmission and highway corridors for new HVDC lines. He also said – and this is critical – the route selected for Northern Pass is secondary to the company’s failure to demonstrate a need for the project.

But considering the leverage of New Hampshire’s utility lobby, I think only Hydro-Quebec’s cold feet over paying for construction of Northern Pass stand between the commonwealth of our state’s scenic beauty and an out-of-place, jaw-dropping transmission project.

(Terry Cronin lives in Hopkinton.)