Businesses taking certain steps to stem global climate change will enjoy an advantage when competing for state contracts worth more than $25,000, according to an executive order signed this week by Gov. Peter Shumlin, now in the final weeks of his gubernatorial tenure.
Under the order, businesses competing for state contracts may now set their bids apart by describing practices that use renewable energy or that otherwise reduce common harms businesses can inflict upon the natural environment.
“With the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of State and the Energy Department all set to be occupied by climate-change deniers and skeptics, it is now more important than ever that Vermont lead the way in combating this grave threat,” Shumlin said in a statement released Tuesday.
The preferential treatment established by Shumlin’s order applies only to businesses whose contract bids meet all other applicable state policies, and whose contract bids are otherwise competitive.
“When all considerations are similar for a given contract, the new policies require that a business that has strong climate change and renewable energy policies will be given preference over one that does not,” the governor’s office said in a statement.
Companies may now distinguish their practices during the bidding process by responding to four questions having to do with promotion of clean energy and global climate change. Those questions pertain to energy efficiency and conservation measures the business employs, to efforts by the business to encourage use of electric vehicles, to offering employees retirement accounts that don’t contain fossil-fuel assets, and to whether a competing business through its goods or services furthers conservation efforts.
The policy affects only those contracts exceeding $25,000, which accounts for 97 percent of the funding the state expends in its contracts. Vermont contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods and services every year.
