It’s safe to say Senator Terry Williams (R-Rutland) and the Republican senators landed a blow with their parliamentary attempt to strip the Natural Resources & Energy Committee of the Clean Heat Standard repeal bill (S.68) and bring it to the floor for an up or down vote. Though all seventeen senate Democrats banded together to shoot that down, the move shined a light on the fact that the Donkey Party is and has been ignoring the legal fiasco they created when they passed this poorly thought-out scheme to tax fossil heating fuels.
The Williams move may have failed on the floor, but it succeeded in forcing a conversation the Democrats desperately don’t want to have. And it’s easy to see why.
Following Williams’ public call out that the Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee was ducking an issue of great interest to the voters, its chair, Anne Watson (D-Washington) scrambled to get some witnesses on the calendar to hear testimony on S.68 as if to say, no no! We really do care what voters think! Spoiler alert, they really don’t.
The Democrats’ objective is to lull voters into thinking the carbon tax is dead, while simultaneously keeping it alive in a “dormant” state – a legislative Nosferatu that will emerge from its coffin to suck the blood from your bank account the next time darkness falls in the form of a Democrat supermajority (or governor). Their fear is that a Senator Van Helsing and crew will emerge in the meantime and drive a stake through Act 18’s heart. Or, more aptly, will expose this vampire law to the disinfecting properties of sunlight, causing it to evaporate in a puff of smoke.
Nevertheless, as their excuse to keep Act 18 alive (or at least undead) and in statute, Democrats are clinging to the talking point that we still need the fuel dealer registry and the data it is intended to gather to inform future policies. Let’s just say it’s a flimsy excuse, because just like the carbon credit Rube Goldberg scheme in the law was an ill-conceived, poorly thought-out disaster of a policy, so too is this fuel dealer registry.
Here’s what’s wrong with it in a nutshell: It misdefines what a fuel dealer is for practical purposes, including in its net anyone who fills a barbeque grill propane tank in another state and brings it back into Vermont. The data it asks the PUC to collect regarding fuel imported across state lines is, if not for the purposes of assigning carbon credit obligations according to Act 18 which the Democrats insist it’s not, useless. And the data that is relevant for inform future policy, how many gallons are burned in Vermont, we already have.
As Senator Ruth Hardy (D-Addison) put it to Ed McNamara of the PUC, “What if we want the data, but it’s not it’s no longer tied necessarily to the construct of Act 18, but is helpful to have in order to understand the industry better and understand how much fuel is being imported into Vermont and just have data on the use of heating fuel in Vermont.”
McNamara’s response was politely blistering. “There’s two components… to that. One, is the data necessary? Like, here, it seems like, what’s the point of collecting data if we’re not going to use it? To me, that’s a really significant because it’s a burden on everybody to collect that data. So, is there’s a clear use for it, that’s one. But if it’s just because it happened to be in a bill two years ago and we want to stick with it, that, to me, doesn’t make any sense.”
No, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s exactly what the Democrats want to do. Waste a lot of people’s time and taxpayer money on a useless task so that they don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of cleaning up a legislative mess that they made. How much time and money? A lot!
As McNamara chides, “In order to have good information, you all [lawmakers] are gonna have to figure out how to fund us to actually provide somebody who can then track and say and be calling up people like, hey, it looks like you did this, and then following up with potential litigation, potential fines. It’s a lot of work to sort of create this from the ground up.” Work the Democrats have no intention of funding. In fact, they are defunding (or, more accurately, not re-funding) the three positions at the PUC created under Act 18 to implement the law – including the fuel dealer registry.
So, the reason the Democrats say we need to keep Act 18 on the books – the fuel dealer registry – is tasked by law with collecting irrelevant data that won’t be collected anyway because those same Democrats won’t provide the funds to keep the staff who would do the work of collecting it.
The buffoonery of Act 18 doesn’t end there. McNamara also testified that the law requires the PUC to prepare and pass a budget for hiring a Default Delivery Agent to run a program that supposedly isn’t going to be implemented. “In my mind, theoretically,” said McNamara, “we still have to do the work. So, it’s sort of an exercise in futility.” Yes, yes it is. “There’s also [the] Equity Advisory Group and Technical Advisory Group…. According to Act 18, as soon as you folks did something on clean heat [implementing the rules], then the Equity Advisory Group goes away. With this limbo, they’re still in existence. And the Technical Advisory Group is continuing on in perpetuity with the expectation that… they have certain tasks associated with looking at clean new measures [which will not exist].”
Given all this, the PUC sent a letter to the legislature several weeks ago containing legislative language to fix Act 18 to clarify that “the PUC no longer has to do any of the registration or advisory groups for the DDA… until you folks do something [to implement the Clean Heat Standard]. So, in other words, it just recognizes that there’s a pause in Clean Heat at the moment.” At the very least, the Democrats should do this because, well, common sense and good governance. Better yet, repeal Act 18 entirely. Remove this infected appendix from the body politic before it bursts.
