It’s hard to believe that public officials would make a decision on legislation based on a whisper campaign by a handful of Quinipiac professors who were hired by the American Petroleum Industry, but that is apparently what happened. Fortunately State Rep William Tong-D Stamford is hoping mad about it. And so should we the people.

Closer to home we have the likes of Rick Fuller on the BOE repeatedly intoning the “Trust the professionals” line when it came to asking questions of the Dr. Evil Sal Corda and Stuart Opdahl’s faith based budget. If we wanted a rubber stamp as an official we could dispense with elections and trot on over to Staples, click the easy button and get a real one, made in china, for $1.59. But I digress.

I had to read the article several times to parse out the important bits. This is what Tong said:

Tong yesterday said he sent a formal request to the professors because he remains skeptical of their claim not to have the information.

“They have gone around the General Assembly . . . and (said) that based on their academic and scientific opinion a ban would not result in lower gas prices. They ought to back that up,” Tong said. “To come back and say, ‘Oops, we destroyed the data,’ seems so disingenuous as to not be believable . . . You can’t just run up here, say something and hide the ball. It makes me really angry.”

He also requested copies of any agreements with big oil firms for the study and the professors’ resumes.

Got that? There’s that faith based strategy eeking out again. We are professors, so you must believe us.

But Matthew Rafferty, an associate economics professor, said last night said there is nothing to turn over.

“The (oil) companies gave us data. They own it, so at the end we eliminated the data from our hard drive,” Rafferty said. “We don’t have it.”

He and his colleagues will issue a response, Rafferty said.

The $40,000 Quinnipiac study, funded by big oil companies, concluded the ban would hike prices everywhere except Fairfield County.

Now let’s review some basic economic realities. If you buy a bottle of coca-cola in a grocery store in Middletown and a grocery store in Norwalk, you would expect that it might be a little more expensive in Norwalk because the overhead in Norwalk is a little more expensive. But you would also expect that both grocery stores bought the product at the same wholesale price.

The gas companies believe that the wholesaler should be able to mark up gas at the wholesale level to add on to the price because they see that retail price increase as an indicator that people are used to paying more. It’s legislated price gouging.

An industry study is an industry study. Big Oil isn’t going to pay for a study that says that they should let the free market decide gas prices when they effectively have a built in way to manipulate the market price to their benefit.

source:: , Tong wants profs’ data on zone pricing study, By Brian Lockhart, June 14 2007