I don’t think there’s any doubt you can consider Kevin Blacker of Noank a whistleblower, in the broadest sense of the term, given his role in exposing so much scandal at the Connecticut Port Authority.

And that makes the harassment of Blacker, by prosecutors and those in the highest echelons of state police, so troubling.

It wasn’t until Blacker last week appeared before a Superior Court judge and demanded a jury trial on the vengeful felony charge that was lodged against him almost a year ago — for a tame act of civil disobedience — that prosecutors finally substituted a more appropriate misdemeanor charge.

Indeed, they let the felony charge hang over Blacker’s head, knowing full well the amount of damage to the street signs he painted pink in protest was far less than the $1,500 threshold that would make the crime a felony.

Blacker, acting for the last two years as a whistleblowing mouthpiece for port authority insiders, board members and employees who chose to stay in the background, helped uncover all kinds of misdeeds at the quasi-public agency, from lavish personal spending on credit cards to giving lucrative contracts to family members and friends.

Blacker’s whistleblowing of insider information led to the resignations of two board members — including one sitting chairman and a former chairman — and was related to the dismissal of the authority’s executive director.

Blacker first started attending port authority board meetings because he was distressed about plans to close the New London port to traditional cargo and give it exclusively to rich utilities for wind farm development.

I lament that Gov. Ned Lamont, allowing authority board seats go unfilled and using his puppet chairman to control the hollowed, scandal-plagued agency, set up an unprecedented $150 million subsidy for the utilities’ profitable wind business. The governor, it seems, likes to give away lots of money to guys in expensive suits who don’t need it.

What is most alarming to me in the whole port authority saga, though, is the way the Lamont administration used the levers of criminal justice to attack and try to silence not just a loud critic but one who should have been protected, not unfairly prosecuted, for his whistleblower status.

Lamont’s staff literally unleashed police with the state’s elite major crime squad to intimidate and shut up Blacker, using Connecticut’s esteemed police like a third-world dictator might, sending goons after dissidents.

The intimidation began in the summer of 2019, when the port authority’s director first suggested he would report Blacker to the police. The threat came soon after Blacker made public the fact that he turned down a consulting job offered by the authority director, one he said looked like a hush-money bribe, given that he had no relevant experience.

It ratcheted up that August, after Blacker sent an email blast calling Lamont a “yellow-bellied wimp” and complaining that an upcoming Transportation Committee public hearing on the port authority would be a “choreographed political farce.”

As Blacker waited for that hearing to begin, in the hall of the legislative office building in Hartford, days after his yellow belly email, he was confronted by officers from the major crime squad, sent after a call from the governor’s office, and taken to a windowless room where he was interrogated about what police suggested were threats in his email.

He resisted a request by the police that he leave the building with them that day and therefore not testify in the hearing. I would call that attempted stifling of free speech.

If police had any reason to charge him that day, they would have. They also could have questioned him days before the hearing was scheduled. But they didn’t. They were there to intimidate.

Later, Blacker was contacted by the head of state police, who persisted in asking for a meeting.

If getting a summons from the chief police officer in the state suggesting a meeting in your hometown after being interrogated by detectives isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is.

The worst of it, though, came after Blacker’s mild civil disobedience. He painted over a couple of out-of-date state highway signs near New London’s State Pier, carefully damaging only the signs and not the posts.

It was David Kooris, chairman of the port authority board and a frequent target of Blacker’s scorn, who reported him to police and submitted an excessive estimate of the sign damage, putting it over the felony threshold.

Lo and behold, it was the major crime squad that lodged the bogus felony charge. And who do we think might have involved the elite of state police in a petty vandalism case?

The signs are owned by the state, not the port authority, and the state Department of Transportation clarified for prosecutors multiple times that the damage was less than the felony threshold of $1,500.

It wasn’t until the whole mess went before a judge last week that the felony was finally thrown out. Even not prosecuted, though, the felony arrest will haunt Blacker forever.

I hope the next time a judge looks at all this, it will be in a civil case to find some justice in the way this whistleblower has been so horribly mistreated in Lamont’s Connecticut, where only the guys in expensive suits are treated well.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com