Longtime Democratic Councilor Paulann Sheets Won't Seek Re-Election

Longtime Democratic Groton Town Councilor and lawyer Paulann Sheets, who spent years fighting for local environmental causes, will not seek re-election this fall.

“I have, I think, been as useful as I can be,” said Sheets, 70, of her time on the council. She works as a lawyer in Action Advocacy Law Office, mostly defending homeowners facing foreclosure, and feels she can’t devote enough time to this job and the council.

Colleagues said she will be missed.

“She’s done a lot for energy and energy conservation,” Town Councilor Bill Johnson said. “She really spearheaded that whole drive.” Groton has 11 buildings receiving solar energy largely because of her efforts, he said.

Sheets was instrumental in pushing forward a referendum in 1988 to buy five properties to preserve open space in Groton, Town Clerk Betsy Moukawsher said. Sheets also served as pro buono lawyer for the Groton Open Space Association, defending the group when developers sued in 2003 to try to develop the 75-acre Merritt Property.

State Rep. Elissa Wright, (D-Groton) said Sheets led a fight to save waters off Mumford Cove, argued for open debate about the conduct of teachers in schools, and backed measures like phasing in property reassessments to minimize the blow to taxpayers.

“Not only is Paulann extraordinarily articulate, she brings a profound intensity and a breadth and depth of legal knowledge and human understanding to every issue and every problem she addresses,” Wright said.

Sheets was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Ind., the younger of two children. Her father was an engineer who founded a heating, cooling and air conditioning business. Her mother stayed home.

Sheets earned her bachelor’s degree at Indiana University, finished the coursework toward a doctorate in government, then decided to go to law school.

She’d started college as a Goldwater Republican, but said she learned the world was not as comfortable a place as she’d first believed. Sheets was a student in the 1960s when a group organized a campus lecture on the sit-in movement, then was indicted on charges of conspiracy to overthrow the government. She left school to help raise money for the defense. The indictments were eventually dismissed.

The law was viewed as a place to change inequity, she said, whether related to race, sex or economics.

“The law was seen as a point of leverage,” she said. “That was where the action was.”

In 1968, she married David Caplovitz, a Columbia University sociologist known for his dissertation “The Poor Pay More,” who she met while he was visiting Indiana to give a lecture. Sheets then moved to New York and attended law school at Columbia University. The couple had two children.

She worked on research projects from home when her daughter was young, then was hired by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a firm that had about 250 lawyers at the time of her hire in the 1970s. Now it has more than 1,200 lawyers and handled the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

Sheets was the lawyer in charge of energy and utilities for the firm, and handled the cases for merchants like JC Penney and Sears at the time of the first energy crisis. She kept the job for eight years, then moved on to the attorney general’s office.

From 1980 until 1982, she was assistant attorney general for New York in charge of energy and utilities. When a utility sought a rate increase, for example, she intervened on behalf of ratepayers.

She and Caplovitz divorced in 1981, and she met her second husband, Herman Sheets, when he was an expert witness in her biggest case. He lived in Groton and served as chief scientist for Electric Boat’s nuclear subs.  Sheets moved to Connecticut in 1982.

At the time, Groton was discharging its treatment plant into Fort Hill Brook, and she became part of a citizen suit brought by the Mumford Cove Association against Groton for violating a state order and the federal Clean Water Act. The suit succeeded, and obtained an injunction to stop the discharge into the fresh-water brook.

It also gained Sheets notoriety, and the chairman of the Democratic Party asked her to run for Board of Education in 1985. She won, and stayed on until 1992.

Years later, she became involved in another local environmental case. In 2001, she filed a motion at the health department saying Pequot Medical Center should be forced to obtain permits before expanding, because construction could affect the local drinking water supply.  She did not get all the requirements she sought, but restrictions were imposed on the project, so she felt she succeeded.

The Democratic Committee asked her to run for Town Council in 2003; she has kept the post ever since, though she never campaigned.

Her one regret leaving, she said, is the unfinished business of moving forward the recommendations of the task force on climate change, which recently completed its report.

The group recommended hiring a staff member to develop an energy savings plan for Groton, write grant proposals to carry it out and capture savings to cover the position. The position has not yet been approved.

“I’m leaving with this unfinished task,” she said. “It’s the big, big regret - but I’ve had to choose.”