Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • 42

C2 THE HARTFORD COURANT: Thurtdoy, October 21, 1982 Northeast Utilities Cuts $13 Million From Rate Request rates would rise 7.9 pecent and gas rates 10.7 percent. Wednesday's reduction followed a precedent set earlier this year, when the company sought $139.3 million in higher rates. Last year, the company had asked for $260.8 million in rate increases and was granted $186 million by the DPUC. In the past, the company had sought increasingly higher rates from the regulators, citing high inflation rates and rising interest costs. Hearings on the rate case are continuing before the DPUC.

Regulators expect a decision late this year. est, but sold at 15 percent The reduction affect's both electric and gas rates for the company's more than 1 million customers in the state. In its original application, NU had asked for increases of $112.9 million in electric rates and $26.4 million in gas rates. The revised application asks increases of $101.1 for electric rates, an $11.8 million reduction from the original, and $25.2 million for gas rates, a $1.2 million reduction. Under the revised figure, electric The company's financial condition its ability to generate profits and attract investors for its construction program of nearly $500 million a year has been the subject of continuing rate hearings before the DPUC.

Two years ago, Sillin said his com- fiany was in a financial crisis, but early his year he was more optimistic. "We're not trying to come out of as deep a hole as we were in," he said. Forde said reduced interest costs on a $100 million' bond sale Oct. 5 was one factor in Wednesday's move. The com-'pany had anticipated 16 percent inter partment of Public Utility Control for $139.3 million in rate increases, an average 9.1 percent boost in prices.

The new figure, if approved by the DPUC, would reduce the price increases to an average of 8.3 percent, Forde said. Lelan F. Sillin NU chairman, cited "a moderation in the factors contributing to the need for higher rates" as the principal reason for Wednesday's reduction. "We have stated repeatedly that the rates we seek are no more than what is absolutely necessary to restore our company to financial health," he said. By CRAIG W.

BAGGOTT Courant Staff Writer Northeast Utilities Wednesday reduced its request for higher electric and gas rates to $126.3 million, a $13 million cut the company said reflected lower than expected interest costs and inflation, It was the first time in memory the company has made such a move, spokesman Emmanuel S. Forde said, and followed NU's decision to ask for less money this year than it did last year. In July, the company asked the De Funeral Director Buries Forgotten Dead I' si 5 i i I Vfw 1 I mmmr 'i, II I it it i if I I If I if St i i I I i 4 1 ---i l. i'lfW' 1 a' Gennaro Capobianco, owner of Greater Hartford Funeral Services conducting a funeral. With his funeral home acting as the city's Chapels walks through Northwood Cemetery in Hartford after morgue, Capobianco often acts minister as well as funeral director.

By JUDY BENSON and JOSEPH F. NUNES Courant Staff Writers Vincent Martin's death in St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center Oct. 9 went largely unnoticed. There were no bedside mourners, no flowers.

There was no one to claim the body. Martin Was classified as "indigent and welfare dead," a term the City of Hartford uses for those who die poor, whose corpses cannot be identified, whose relatives cannot be traced or whose survivors refuse to pay burial costs. About 125 such people have died in Hartford this year. In each case, authorities notify Gennaro Capobianco, owner of Greater Hartford Funeral Services Chapels which is under contract to serve as the city morgue. It is a job that forces Capobianco to wear many hats, including those of a detective and a clergyman.

But it is a job he finds satisfying. Last Thursday at Northwood Cemetery, a light rain fell on the simple coffin containing Martin's body. Only Capobianco and his assistant looked on as four cemetery workers prepared to lower the casket into the ground. Capobianco, a licensed minister, recited final prayers, blessed the casket and scattered flower petals over the grave. The lonely graveside scene is one he repeats about once a week.

"The way I look at it, that poor soul could've been someone in my family," Capobianco said of Martin. "If they have no family, I am the family." Capobianco had never met Vincent Martin, who died of a heart attack. But as he left Martin's burial, he probably knew more about the man than anyone alive. When a hospital employee notified Capobianco Oct. 12 about Martin's death, "I didn't know anything except his name," the funeral home owner said.

Martin became what Capobianco calls "a typical morgue case." There was only sketchy information about the man, and no last legal address the information Capobianco needs in order to be paid the $600 the city provides for a pauper's funeral services. The town in which a person last lived is responsible for the cost of burying the indigent, Capobianco explained. Under the city contract, Capobianco is required to conduct a full investigation to try to locate a person next of kin. As in Martin case, the investigative work is demanding. Using the only leads he had a welfare identification number and the name of the Newington convalescent home where Martin last lived Capobianco learned that Martin had been confined to a state institution for 31 years before being released in the 1950s.

He since had lived in a number of rest homes, some of which no longer exist. Admission Seeks End to 'Leak' Issue U.S. Official Says He Provided Tip On Wastes Story By BARBARA T. ROESSNER and STEVE GRANT i Courant Staff Writers Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Toby Moffett, rushing to douse a political brush fire in Waterbury, Wednesday produced a federal official who took credit for leaking a story about the alleged illegal dumping of toxic wastes in Waterbury by Environmental Waste Removal Inc.

to The New York Times. Some Democratic Party workers in Waterbury threatened this week to withdraw their support for Moffett because, they claimed, he gave The Times information about EWR but withheld it from Democratic Mayor Edward D. Bergin. Waterbury Democrats have refused to accept Moffett's claims that he did not plant the story in The Times last week that set off a storm of controversy. Wednesday, Moffett offered proof of his claim.

"I leaked the story to The Times over a month and a half ago," Hugh Kaufman, an Environmental Protection Agency official who has irritated both the Carter and Reagan administrations with his whistle-blowing activities, said in a telephone interview with The Courant that was arranged by Moffett's campaign, staff. "I leaked the whole story to The Times. I feel bad for Toby," Kaufman said. "The poor guy, for just playing it straight and pushing the issue, is getting whip-sawed. It's just not fair.

Everyone's playing politics with the fieople of Waterbury. I wish hey spend more time investigating the situation." Kaufman accused Bergin and the state Department of Environmental Protection of covering up illegal dumping. "You know what makes Bergin look bad? Bergin," Kaufman said. A citizens' group in Waterbury has complained for months that the city and state were dragging their feet on the problems at EWR. Federal and state environmental officials had cited the company for violations of toxic wastes regulations, but the far more serious allegations published in The Times touched off a flurry of new activity by officials.

DEP officials, for example, moved immediately to take test borings under a concrete floor in a warehouse owned by EWR where former and current em- Eloyees claimed toxic wastes had een buried. About 20 borings have been made, and Wednesday a DEP official said an initial analysis of samples from seven holes show only traces of oil or oil-based substances. The results are similar to those from the first three borings, which were received Monday. Stephen W. Hitchcock, DEP hazardous materials management director, said lab tests so far have concentrated on the presence of volatile materials, such as solvents.

The samples also are to be tested for other toxic substances. The department, meanwhile, is awaiting results of retests of samples drawn from a treated sludge pile on the property. A state laboratory found one of five sludge samples contained more than 50 parts per million of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls the level of contamination defined as hazardous and the DEP ordered the contaminated sludge removed. EWR, however, said it had the same material tested by a consultant who found all five samples with less than 50 parts per million. The company, which has asked to have the sludge approved for road surfacing material or other uses, may challenge the DEP test results, its lawyer said Tuesday.

In addition to retesting the original five sludge samples, the DEP Wednesday look another 12 samples of material from the pile for testing. rr-Y, riu zt.n.-V Richard E. Bergen The Hartford Courant: Four Northwood Cemetery employees lower a casket into the ground tinder supervision of funeral director Gennaro Capobianco. more 'Noes' than His frustration about this prompted Capobianco to obtain his minister's license from the Universal Life Church so he can officiate when no one else will. As part of his contract with the city, Capobianco also must retrieve the unidentified victims of suicides, fires and murders.

He is on call 24 hours a day, and "I'm usually there within 30 minutes," he said. His funeral home at 588 Farming-ton Avenue has a refrigerated room that can accommodate up to six bodies at a time. Although Capobianco is the city's primary morgue contractor, he uses four other funeral homes as subcontractors. He has held the city contract for the last year and a half. Capobianco said he does not like the way the city pays for services for the indigent dead.

Hartford gives the funeral home a flat rate of $600 for each case. Of that, however, Capobianco immediately must return $115 to the city for the cost of hiring gravediggers. "I can't bury a person unless the city is paid first, and that has to come out of my pocket," Capobianco said. The city, in turn, may not pay him for up to a year, he said. Because Capobianco sees death almost every day, he has thought a great deal about his own death, he said.

Although he is only 34, he has left instructions with his family that he be cremated and his ashes placed in a brass urn that sits near his desk. As usually happens in such cases, Capobianco said, neither the state nor the existing convalescent homes had more specific information. "The record-keep-, ing stinks. Once you're put away (in an institution), forget it." By tracing welfare records, Capobianco learned that Martin was born in Fulton, N.Y., and as a young man married a woman named Anna Tolbin, who is presumed dead. Martin had not heard from Tolbin since 1930, when he became institutionalized after being diagnosed as a schizophrenic.

The couple had no children. Capobianco also learned that Martin worked for a time as a farmhand and a glove factory employee before moving to Hartford in the 1920s. Scanning old Hartford city directories, he determined that Martin had lived at 50 Sumner St. and had worked as a clerk for the Travelers Insurance Cos. Despite the exhaustive work, Capobianco was unable to find any survivors.

It's not as if I'm looking for someone to pay for the funeral," Capobianco said. "The welfare department will take care of that. I'm just looking for someone to attend the funeral." A major disappointment of his job, he said, comes when relatives refuse to acknowledge their dead kin. "It's very sad when people don't take the re-, sponsibility of burying their own dead," Capobianco said. Other times, however, he is pleasantly surprised by the number of friends and relatives who attend a pauper's funeral.

Such was the case with Ana, a 43-year-old Hartford woman who died penniless in Hartford Hospital in late September. Her relatives, including a common-law husband and two sons, could not afford to pay for the funeral and burial. Capobianco originally thought her body could not be viewed because she died of hepatitis, a contagious disease. But his embalmer was able to disinfect her body so that, with glass covering the open coffin, her family and friends could view her body during the funeral service. "I was very happy about that because I knew how important it was to the family," Capobianco said.

About 100 relatives and friends collected $50 among them so they could view Ana's body for 4 hours, instead of the one hour the city provides. She was buried in Northwood Cemetery in the unlined, gray-vinyl-covered coffin that the city provides at a cost of $100. Ana was more fortunate than many others, Capobianco said; a Roman Catholic priest and a Pentecostal minister performed her funeral service. Often, he cannot find a clergyman willing to perform the ceremony. It's tough to get a priest to a pauper's funeral," he said.

"I get Los Angeles Group Drops Bid To Buy Channel 18 someone with more roots in the Hartford area. Faith Center's problems with WHCT began when it refused to cooperate with a federal investigation of on-air fund raising broadcasts over another of its three stations, KHOF-TV in San Bernardino, Calif. When the FCC began hearings that might have led to the revocation of the licenses of all three stations, Faith Center offered to sell the stations under a commission rule that allows a station owner under investigation to sell to a minority-owned company for no more than 75 percent of the market value of the outlet The commission rejected that proposal, revoking KHOF's license outright and putting the license of a Faith Center station in San Francisco up for review. It did, however, allow the fundamentalist group to sell WHCT under the "distress sale" rule to a minority-controlled group. Jones' company, the Interstate Media is wholly minority-owned and would qualify for a distress sale if financing can be found.

By CHARLES McCOLLUM Courant Staff Writer A controversial, Los Angeles-based Hispanic community group has dropped its efforts to purchase Hartford's WHCT-TV, putting the future of the troubled Channel 18 into limbo. The East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU) informed the Federal Communications Commission a few weeks ago that it was unable to raise enough money to meet the $4 million purchase price set by WHCT's current owners, Faith Center Inc. of Glendale, and to begin operation of the new station. TELACU had been half-owner of the Television Corporation of Hartford, which was on the verge of taking over Channel 18 earlier this year. The Los Angeles group then came under investigation for misuse of federal anti-poverty funds, and its financial backers a group of Virginia businessmen who included the state's lieutenant governor and Democratic nominee (or the U.S.

Senate, Richard J. Davis dropped out because of the adverse publicity. Without the Virginia group's financial support, TELACU had to look elsewhere for money and finally was forced to drop its bid after its last potential partner, Buena Vista a California television production company, told the FCC that it was "not interested at this time" in WHCT. In the wake of TELACU's decision, Faith Center a fundamentalist group headed by the Rev. W.

euGene Scott has come up with a new buyer for the religious station, West Coast businessman Joseph Delano Jones, who has told the FCC that he is. interested in purchasing the station and has filed an application. However, Jones' Washington, D.C., attorney, Bruce A. Eisen, said Wednesday that his client is still trying to raise the necessary funds, which include a new purchase price of $5 million set by Faith Center. "We have pledged to the FCC that we will file the necessary papers on our financing within 30 days," Eisen said.

"I am confident we will make that deadline. "We hope this will work out and this will be the last applicant for Channel 18." The FCC had no official statement to make about the new development, but staff members had indicated previously that the commission's patience is "wearing thin." "If this does not work out, we would robably step in and move to revoke the icense, said an FCC attorney, who asked not to be named. The threat of a possible revocation stems from problems with another station owned by Faith Center. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, an attorney with the Washington-based Media Access Project who has worked with Hartford community leaders on the WHCT controversy, expressed similiar sentiments Wednesday, suggesting a petition to revoke the Channel 18 license might be filed if the Jones purchase does not come thrbugh. "We are becoming increasingly impatient and revocation is one of things we are contemplating," Schwartzman said, adding that community leaders still prefer.