We really haven't heard much from Eversource CEO Joe Nolan about the gift of staggering proportions that Gov. Ned Lamont is providing the rich utility and its Danish partner in offshore wind: a remake of State Pier in New London that is going to cost at least a quarter-billion dollars.

Actually, incredibly, we don't know even know yet exactly how much it's costing, with the Connecticut Port Authority not expected to disclose the latest price until its April meeting.

Meanwhile, even as the FBI busily investigates contracts for the project, construction continues at breakneck speed on a pier remake that already has spiraled in cost from $93 million to $235 million, at last reckoning, with Lamont using borrowed public money for all of those increases, FBI investigation be damned.

Even as runaway spending continues, with no certain price ceiling in place, port authority board member John Johnson, who shrugged off a ruling from the Connecticut Office of State Ethics that he not routinely vote on State Pier matters because of a conflict — an admonishment ignored by the scandal-plagued Lamont administration —  said publicly this week that construction should go into overtime overdrive.

Welcome to Lamont's Connecticut, where the governor, with his administration being investigated by the FBI, tries to underfund the state's contracting watchdog agency as it scolds him for the pier project, and ignores a ruling from state ethics officials regarding the very project under federal scrutiny.

I know it's because I am a grizzled old cynical journalist, but I can't help but think that the timing of Eversource's Nolan's sudden public praise for the State Pier construction is related to the growing scandals surrounding the project.

Nolan told investment analysts in a recent conference call that State Pier will be the best wind turbine assembly facility between Virginia and Nova Scotia, a pronouncement prominently reported, with backup statements from utility public relations executives, in the Hartford Courant.

You could almost picture a grateful Lamont tapping the headline, maybe one he helped conjure up, as if all that money, spent from contracts now under investigation by the FBI, has been well spent.

Actually, the state should have performed its own analysis of the offshore wind industry before making such an enormous investment of public money, but I learned from some internal emails that the Lamont administration bungled and then disbanded an offshore wind study task force team.

The state has done no research of its own to determine whether the quarter-billion dollars being spent on the New London pier makes sense or whether similar facilities in New Jersey and Massachusetts could better accommodate the industry.

We apparently have only the word of a utility CEO, delighted that Connecticut is spending so much public money on a facility Eversource and its partner will have exclusive use of.

CEO Nolan, who apparently decided to throw Lamont a compliment bone, as the governor's administration is mired in scandal, was also on hand back in early 2020 at the news conference in which Lamont unveiled the deal in which the state takes responsibility for all cost overruns at what they might as well rename Eversource Pier.

Also present that day was Konstantinos Diamantis, Lamont's then-trusted deputy budget chief, who is now apparently in the FBI's sights.

The governor verbally clapped Diamantis on the back that day and suggested his chief construction manager was going to bring the pier project in on time and under budget.

Wow. Talk about poor character judgment and misplaced confidence.

Today, we still don't know even how much it's all going to cost, what the price eventually will skyrocket to, and Lamont and Nolan are in full spin mode.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com