As the Penobscot Energy Recovery Co. fights for its future beyond 2018, the company and its partner, USA Energy Group, have for the last two legislative sessions spent heavily to change the state鈥檚 waste management policy. For those years, lobbyists for PERC and its partner disclosed the most compensation for any single client.
That spending has come as the group of 187 towns sending trash to PERC has leaned in favor of the proposed Fiberight facility in Hampden, which on Friday passed muster with environmental regulators and secured three permits it will need to move ahead.
In the two most recent legislatures, PERC far outspent the 187-member Municipal Revenue Committee, according to a Bangor Daily News analysis of lobbying disclosures for those years. (Lawmakers don鈥檛 have to disclose certain meals or gifts worth less than $300, and strict interpretations of the disclosure law leave room for lobbyists to omit some compensation from a client from state reports.)
As the two entities carried out a town-by-town battle for waste from the northern two-thirds of Maine, the battle extended into the halls of the State House. In large part, their efforts centered on the same bills. Spending more than $656,000 in disclosed lobbying during the 126th Legislature, PERC pushed for laws passed to add to the state鈥檚 licensing criteria for waste facilities (LD 1483), requiring consideration of the state鈥檚 waste management priorities, or the waste management hierarchy.
In the 127th Legislature, lawmakers approved a bill to add to that hierarchy, creating new goals for keeping food out of the waste stream. MRC testified against an earlier version of the bill (LD 1578), which also had a new battery recycling program. The version that passed (LD 313) was the basis for the Natural Resources Council of Maine鈥檚 statement opposing Fiberight鈥檚 DEP permits issued Friday.
鈥淔iberight cannot be a successful company without stymieing the growth of the composting industry in member communities,鈥� NRCM wrote in its comments on Fiberight鈥檚 application to the DEP. 鈥淎s such, we are perplexed as to how DEP could possibly endorse this shift away from local composting programs within such a large portion of the state.鈥�
In the 126th Legislature, PERC and MRC focused on landfill regulations, with testimony pointing to PERC鈥檚 opposition to a bill that would have prohibited it and other incinerators from accepting out-of-state waste (LD 1363). The final version of the bill set a temporary moratorium on expanding any existing state-owned landfills.
PERC also supported a failed bill (LD 907) that would have assessed a flat $15 fee per ton on municipal solid waste or solid waste transferred from one facility to another and a successful proposal requiring environmental regulators to determine there are public benefits before expanding any state-owned landfill (LD 694).
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