[A]nother member of Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has denied a request from the Legislature for information.
Lawmakers last month asked Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts to explain why farms are exempt from the state land-use law, Act 250. Farms are among the top water polluters in the state, and lawmakers are seeking to understand why farms aren’t required to follow the same land-use laws as other industries.
Tebbetts on Wednesday made several statements in response but did not provide answers to questions from lawmakers about information they requested months ago. The secretary said he had not conducted an analysis that would enable him to respond to lawmakers’ questions.
Instead, he said, the system currently in place “works,” without providing a justification for how or why it works.
Tebbetts was asked last month to explain whether the agriculture industry’s exemption from land-use law contributes to pollution of public waters, as part of an analysis now underway by the Commission on Act 250. This group of lawmakers is updating the law, which was enacted five decades ago.
The group is statutorily directed to find out whether an agricultural exemption from Act 250 contributes to Vermont farms’ pollution problems.
Tebbetts said farms are already heavily regulated. At least one of those regulations, having to do with the distance of farm structures from property lines and other objects, leads to public involvement in the regulatory process, he said.
But over the course of several exchanges Tebbetts repeatedly said he didn’t know how to answer the question lawmakers had actually posed.
Vermont farms account for about 40 percent of the phosphorus pollution that led Lake Champlain to be placed under a federal pollution control order last year, Pearson said. He asked whether agriculture’s exemption from Act 250 contributed in any way to that outcome.
“I would say that’s a very difficult thing to answer,” Tebbetts said, “because we’re going back in time, so if Act 250 had said, ‘OK, we’re going to do all the regulation,’ and [the Agency of] Ag has no say in that, what would that look like?
“Now, it’s a difficult — it’s kind of a ‘what if?’” Tebbetts continued. “I have found no evidence that if agriculture had been under Act 250 — it’s just one of those ‘what ifs.’ I don’t know how we go back, I don’t know how we then analyze that,” Tebbetts said.
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, gave it another shot.
“Are there any scenarios you can think of,” Campion said, “where the Act 250 exemption for agriculture would pollute the waters [of the state] in any way at all?”
That would be hard to answer, too, Tebbetts said, because there are other laws in place regulating farms, and the Agency of Agriculture has focused on those existing regulations.
“It’s very difficult to answer, because all the things we have thought about are under regulation already,” he said. “It’s just not in the Act 250 realm. It’s being handled in a different realm.”
Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, gave it another go.
“I think what we have in place now works,” Tebbetts said. “It works. The present structure we have, farmers are under regulation.”
Regulations are enforced by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. That same agency seeks to promote and support farmers and agriculture, said Brian Shupe, the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council. The Department of Environmental Conservation should regulate farming, Shupe said, because Vermont’s failure to improve water quality suggests the current system does not work.
Stephanie Smith, the chief policy enforcement officer for the Agency of Agriculture, maintained that the agency through its own rules upholds the same water quality protections that Act 250 would.
But if farmers must already comply with the same water quality standards as they would under Act 250, Campion asked, why continue the exemption?
Because the rules the Agency of Agriculture has put in place “are as supportive of water quality” as Act 250 would be, Smith said.
Campion then asked how the exemption from Act 250 helps farmers.
“I don’t know, because I don’t know what taking away the exemption would look like for farm operators,” Smith said.
Is there any benefit to farmers from the Act 250 exemption, economic or otherwise, that Tebbetts or Smith could describe to lawmakers, Campion asked.
Tebbetts pursed his lips. Smith said if lawmakers put the question in writing, it would be easier for the agency to answer.
Tebbetts is not the first Scott administration appointee to refuse to answer questions from lawmakers.
His boss, Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, recently refused to provide an analysis that a group she led was directed by law to produce.
Moore and several other of Scott’s administrators had been asked by the Legislature to analyze what would be the best long-term funding method to pay for the multibillion-dollar effort to stem the state’s water pollution. Her group was also tasked with writing draft legislation to put that long-term funding mechanism into effect.
Instead of providing a long-term funding recommendation, however, Moore and her group wrote that in the short term there was no need to raise any additional revenue. That’s largely because Tebbetts’ agency hadn’t yet figured out how to spend the money effectively, she said.
