[T]he debate over long-term funding to clean up the state’s lakes has raged throughout the legislative session. It finished relatively quietly on Friday with a bill rushed through the Senate after its central component was stripped out.
The bill, S. 260, was the only one before lawmakers this year that would have addressed the pressing question of where the state is going to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for federally mandated clean water efforts over the next 20 years.
Senators passed the bill, but only after removing the part about funding, which Gov. Phil Scott has been adamantly opposed to, arguing that a decision on long-term funding should be put off for at least another year.
“It is suddenly a clean water funding bill with no clean water funding, or any path to establish stable, long-term clean water funding,” said Jared Carpenter, a water protection advocate with the Lake Champlain Committee.
When Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, wrote the bill, it would have established two study groups tasked with figuring out how best to pay for the $25 million per year that Vermont must come up with to comply with a federal pollution-reduction order.
The Senate passed that bill in late March and sent it to the House, where committees sought to skip the study and instead institute funding sources through the bill.
Potential funding sources inserted into the bill included a $2 per night tax on hotel room occupancies, money from beverage distributors who currently keep unclaimed bottle deposits and an increase to the state’s rooms and meals tax by a quarter of a percent.
These measures came at the urging of state Treasurer Beth Pearce, who studied the issue exhaustively two years ago and suggested a long list of possible funding sources to pay for the mandate. Pearce this year urged lawmakers to avoid redundant studies and just fund the effort, arguing that further delay would only increase the eventual cost.
Last-minute wrangling between members of the House and Senate eliminated both the study groups and the funding sources.
What remains in S.260 are a few items that senators said are nevertheless significant.
The bill sets out actions that the administration must take in response to public waters that are polluted enough to constitute a “crisis” situation. They must plan out a response, write a budget for it, and take urgent action, according to the bill.
The bill also states that Lake Carmi is currently in crisis, and requires prompt action from Scott. It also creates a Clean Water Authority tasked with mounting a similar response over the long term to polluted waters statewide.
“I think in a sense the governor had us in a very difficult box, when it comes to water quality this year, because he took funding off the table and didn’t have any policy proposals,” said Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden, a member of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy, which drafted the bill.
“In the end, I don’t think this is a landmark bill,” Pearson said.
Bray said his biggest regret over the bill is the fact that it doesn’t even contemplate studying an imminent financial liability for the state.
A funding source was supposed to have been identified by the end of 2017, according to the federal order requiring Vermont to cut its rate of water pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave the state a one-year extension to pin down a definite source of long-term funding for the effort.
But lawmakers were this year up against a governor who would permit neither a funding source nor a plan to identify a funding source, Bray said.
Scott pledged earlier this year to veto S.260 because it required a study of a funding source that could at some future date result in a tax or a fee — “so even planning for the future seems to be off the table for him,” Bray said.
