As some of you know I have been active on conservation issues for a long time. That activism is primarily done as a member of the Northern Plains Resource Council and our local affiliate here in Gardiner, Bear Creek Council. This being a legislative year we have had plenty to do.
I want to lead off by joining the chorus of alarm swirling around HB-309 which redefines irrigation ditches in such as way as to potentially include many miles of main stem rivers and their side channels as ditches not subject to access under Montana’s stream access law. As I write this the Senate Agriculture Committee has not yet acted upon this bill so you should contact the committee and ask it to kill the bill. Find out how your Representative voted and contact your Senator for his position. If by some mischance it should end up passing the Senate in anything like its current form, demand the Governor veto it.
A second water bill to track and watch out for is HB-24. This bill opens the door to private ownership and marketing of water, probably not in the interest of anglers.
During the last election everybody in both parties was running on a “jobs” platform. Clearly the Republican majority in both houses of the legislature have a very different idea about which jobs are desirable and how to create them than do the Democrats. While the public media have spent a lot of time on the Republican efforts to gut the Montana Environmental Policy Act they have spent very little effort on their concerted attack on every sensible component of the state’s energy policy.
Just to be clear - I think developing clean, renewable energy sources creates jobs. I think a coherent policy promoting energy efficiency, both in public facilities and for private individuals and business creates jobs and is economically sensible. I think the current explosion of unrest in the Middle East and North Africa underscores the insanity of putting all our energy eggs in the fossil fuel basket. I would think that this should be so self evident that it transcends partisan politics. Evidently, not so.
What follows is a partial list of bills the legislature seems determined to pass that vitiate much of the progress made in the last few years.
SB-226 (Priest) Requires the addition of a “transmission” charge to the energy delivered to the grid by small generators using net metering. This makes installing your own photovoltaic or wind generators much less economical.
SB-330 (Walker) Allows utilities to duck out of meeting the Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard (RES) by simply declaring that its inconvenient. Poof goes the market for private renewable developers like the Judith Gap Wind Farm.
SB-109 (Barrett) Declares all the existing old hydro power can be used to meet the RES, another way to eliminate the market for renewable projects.
SB-104 (also Priest) Prohibits the Public Service Commission from using “inverted block rates.” An inverted block rate charges a consumer more for using more energy thus providing an incentive for efficiency.
SB-159 (probably Priest’s most perverse bill) Requires that building codes can not require an efficiency practice unless it totally pays for itself in 5 years. This completely ignores the facts that we don’t build for 5 years and that any one component of a design needs to be considered in relation to the rest of the design.
If you are a Montana citizen I urge you to take a few minutes to tell our governor to exercise that VETO brand he had made on these bills as well as a lot of the other stuff you have heard about. Find out how your Representative and Senator are voting on these bills and hold them accountable when next they ask for your vote.
