[A] group devoted to clean water met last week to recap the water-quality bills the Legislature passed this year. The list was short: S. 260 and H.576.
The Vermont Clean Water Network, the members of which include environmentalists and government officials, held a panel discussion on Tuesday morning at the ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain in Burlington.
The four speakers were Sen. Chris Pearson, P/D-Chittenden; Jared Carpenter, a water advocate with the Lake Champlain Committee; Commissioner Emily Boedecker of the Department of Environmental Conservation; and Rebekah Weber, Lake Champlain lakekeeper with the Vermont chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation.
Speakers largely confined their remarks to the two water quality bills that actually succeeded in navigating the murky waters of Statehouse politics: S.260 and H.576.
So far. Either bill could still be vetoed by Gov. Phil Scott. Rebecca Kelley, the governor’s spokesperson, has not responded to multiple inquiries about his intentions.
Three environmentalists at the panel said they are exasperated with an administration that has repeatedly failed to comply with laws intended to abate phosphorus pollution, which is feeding toxic algae blooms in Lake Champlain. A member of the Scott administration cast the governor’s inaction as good governance.
The event was “a good opportunity to dispel any notion that we’re on time or on track. We’re not,” said Weber, Lake Champlain’s lakekeeper.
Instead, the Scott administration has displayed a willingness to ignore deadlines for rules, regulations and permit language meant to halt further decline in the quality of Vermont’s public waters, Weber said.
The Department of Environmental Conservation’s Boedecker said repeatedly in response that she and her colleagues are simply seeking to ensure things are “as effective and efficient as possible.”
Pearson laid the blame for the state’s inaction on water quality squarely at Scott’s feet, but he said legislators abetted the governor when they failed to mount a concerted response. As a result, there was no consensus: House members went one way, senators another, and the Scott administration took an entirely different tack.
“The Legislature is excellent at punting its responsibilities,” Pearson said. “Clean water is in the headlines these days, but a lot of us have been cognizant of it for 20 years. We need to stop ignoring it. People around the state need to stop putting up with the excuses.”
For most of the session, S.260 appeared to be the bill offering lawmakers the best opportunity to make a significant contribution to water-quality. The initial purpose of S.260 was to identify sources of funding for hundreds of millions of dollars Vermonters will be paying for water pollution reduction efforts required by state and federal clean-water laws.
Scott promised to veto the bill if it contained a fee component. That won’t be necessary, because in the end, lawmakers rejected a funding mechanism for clean water.
The bill does establish a Clean Water Board. It coordinates grant-making between several agencies involved in water quality, and it creates a process requiring agencies to respond to lakes found to be in a pollution “crisis.” And the bill declared chronically polluted Lake Carmi to be in a crisis.
The second important water-quality bill lawmakers passed this year requires Secretary of Natural Resources Julie Moore to write rules and permit language requiring developers of large properties to abate runoff from three acres or more of parking lots. Runoff from impermeable surfaces is a major source of phosphorus pollution.
The actions called for in both bills are long overdue. The EPA had set a deadline of the end of 2017 for the state to identify funding for pollution reduction, and the Agency of Natural Resources also had an end of year deadline to draft the so-called three-acre rule. Neither deadline was met.
Early versions of both S.260 and H.576 called for the Legislature to censure natural resources secretary Julie Moore for inaction; by the end of the session the rebuke remained in H.576.
“ANR’s failure to adopt the three-acre permit and its failure to comply with statutory requirements are not accepted by the [Legislature] and the citizens of Vermont,” H.576 states.
“ANR did not issue the three-acre permit by January 1, 2018,” it says. “As a result, private property owners who would be subject to the three-acre permit lack certainty as to when their property will be required to be permitted and what the permit will require.”
The agency prepared the rule and the permit language over the course of three years, but Moore in October unexpectedly withdrew the regulations from the public process.
Moore had denied acting on developers’ behalf. She did, however, ask lawmakers this year to consider public subsidies for developers, to offset costs associated with complying with the three-acre permit.
Moore said this week that she will comply with the law requiring her to publish the stormwater rules, and the associated three-acre permit language. She said she anticipated publishing them “later this summer.”
As for the public censure, Moore said she’s unrepentant.
“I’m going to keep doing the job that needs to be done, and ultimately the quality of my work will speak for itself,” she said.
Rebekah Weber, the Lake Champlain Waterkeeper for the Conservation Law Foundation, said she is not impressed.
“We’re missing two things: One of them is vision, and one is leadership,” Weber said. “When we talk about the mission of protecting our water resources, that has been the jurisdiction of the Agency of Natural Resources, and so when we’re thinking about putting that leadership or putting that vision forward, we need to be relying on the expertise within the ANR to do that.”
Pearson noted Moore’s repeated refusal, in testimony before the Legislature this year, to take responsibility for the state of Vermont’s public waters.
“My committee,” Pearson said, “was sick of saying, ‘Who really answers for this? When the EPA comes to yell at us, who do they yell at?’”
That’s why, in addition to censuring Moore, lawmakers this year created a Clean Water Board and made the board — and, ultimately, Secretary of Administration Susanne Young — responsible for planning, funding and responding to pollution in the state’s ailing public waters.
That board already exists as the Clean Water Funding Board, and it comprises five members of the Scott administration — the secretaries of natural resources, commerce, agriculture, transportation and administration. S.260 expands the board’s membership to include four Vermonters outside of the administration. It also designates the Secretary of Administration as the board’s chair.
This restructuring of clean-water authority, and the naming of the chair, Pearson said, was at least in part “in response to a need for someone in charge.”
Several environmental advocates said they were “disappointed” by the legislative session. But there was at least one bright spot, Weber said — namely, new restrictions on water pollution from parking lots.
The stormwater rule requires big developers to retrofit their properties to slow runoff. This is the so-called “three-acre permit.” Moore said she would publish it this summer. It would be a violation of federal law were she to fail to do so.
Environmentalists also were buoyed by the instructions in H.576 directing Moore to write into the stormwater rule new language for another type of permit, one that requires the owners of even smaller areas of impervious surfaces — down to half an acre — to abate phosphorus runoff when they develop or renovate.
As a result, Pearson said last week, “that’s a pretty significant bill… Even the people frustrated about S.260 are celebrating that — that’s a big deal, that was a big priority for a lot of us.”
