Editor’s note: This commentary is by Brian Shupe, of Waitsfield, who is executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
[T]o many people, this week’s big news was Gov. Scott’s veto of several bills passed by the Vermont Legislature that were intended to make Vermont more affordable for working families, including legislation to increase the minimum wage and provide paid leave for new parents and people providing care for sick family members.
And, of course, his veto of the state budget – only the third budget veto in Vermont’s history – garnered a lot of media attention. For the second year in a row, the governor essentially sat out the budgeting process for four months, only to emerge and unexpectedly reject a budget approved by a wide tri-partisan margin in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate.
These are far-reaching and consequential political disputes that are still playing out, and likely will for months and years to come. It’s important, however, that other disagreements, related to the stewardship of the state’s natural resources and the health and safety of Vermonters, also get the attention they deserve.
Perhaps most significantly, the governor’s veto of Senate Bill S.197 continued a pattern of putting the interests of industry above the well-being of our friends and neighbors. This legislation would have simply allowed innocent Vermonters the opportunity to try and recover costs for medical testing from the people who contaminated them with toxic pollution.
In Bennington, where scores of residents have high quantities of the chemical PFOA in their bodies, Vermont taxpayers are paying for this monitoring, although that service is not available to residents who have moved out of state to attend school, serve in the military or seek other opportunities. It is patently unfair for the public, much less the victim, to be responsible for these costs.
This veto was preceded with another, last month, of a bill that would have fixed a broken state program intended to make consumers aware of toxic chemicals in children’s products and enable the commissioner of the Department of Health to initiate action to ban those chemicals through a formal rule-making process.
Like the budget, the administration’s position on these toxic chemical bills remained vague until long after they had been vetted by legislative committees, and the governor’s staff made little effort to resolve his concerns before they reached his desk. Gov. Scott’s rejection of these bills begs the question of what steps, if any, he would take to protect Vermonters who are the innocent victims of toxic pollution.
Moreover, while the House and Senate attempted to identify a reliable long-term funding source to pay for cleaning up the state’s lakes and rivers, including Lake Champlain, which the state has committed to doing, they fell short in the face of the governor’s opposition to any funding mechanism. Current funding dries up in July 2019, and we are no closer to having a long-term funding plan in place than when Act 64 — Vermont’s Clean Water Act — was passed three years ago.
The fate of another bill related to water quality, H.576, remains uncertain as this is being written, although indications from administration officials are that it will likely become law. This legislation would take a positive step forward by providing new tools for the Agency of Natural Resources to bring what are currently unregulated water pollution sources into compliance with the state’s stormwater runoff rules. However, this was passed only after key legislative committees objected to the administration’s attempts to use the bill as a vehicle for rolling back important provisions of Act 64.
Gov. Scott’s oft-stated goals for his administration are to improve Vermont’s economy, make the state more affordable and protect the most vulnerable. How he balances these priorities — or even evaluates the impact of policy alternatives on these goals — is a mystery.
Failing to act on the state’s legal obligation to clean up Lake Champlain and the rivers and streams that flow into it is hardly in the long-term economic interests of the state, especially considering that a broad coalition of leading business interests, conservation advocates, anglers, and municipalities joined together and called on Gov. Scott to work with the Legislature to enact a funding source for clean water initiatives. Do that, they warned, or suffer the adverse economic implications of allowing Lake Champlain to continue to deteriorate.
And choosing to protect multi-national corporations over the health of poisoned Vermonters is not protecting the most vulnerable, nor is sticking these victims with the bill for being poisoned doing anything to make their lives more affordable.
