Targeted legislative agenda
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
The priorities, spearheaded by the Environment Council of Rhode Island, a
coalition of more than 60 environmental groups and organizations, were
announced during ECRI’s annual Lobby Day at the Statehouse. The event featured
speeches from lawmakers, state officials, and Speaker of the House Joseph
Shekarchi, D-Warwick.
ECRI’s priorities are centered around seven different
individual bills.
The Building Decarbonization Act (S2952/H7617), legislation
that would require large buildings statewide to begin tracking the amount of
fuel, water and greenhouse gas emissions they consume and produce over a
three-year period, with the intention to create a building performance standard
to be executed by the Office of Energy Resources (OER).
An additional section of the bills would require all new
building construction to be all-electric, using no fossil fuels for heating,
cooking, or other processes.
“It doesn’t make sense to build new buildings with fossil fuel infrastructure that’s going to last 20 years when our first major climate goal is six years away,” said Amanda Barker, policy associate for Green Energy Consumers Alliance and a vice president for policy at ECRI.
The Environmental Justice Act (S2535/H8127) would require
the Department of Environmental Management to designate specific geographic
areas of the state as environmental justice zones based on criteria including
low-income levels, percentage of people of color, and lack of English language
proficiency. In these areas, state regulators would be required to assess the
environmental impact of permit applications, as well as the cumulative impact
within the environmental justice zone.
Under current state law, state regulators — DEM, the Energy Facility Siting Board, and others — aren’t allowed to assess the cumulative impacts projects have on their surrounding environment.
Adding the
requirement has been a longtime goal for environmental advocates who have long
argued local sacrifice zones, such as the Port of Providence, only occur near
low-income neighborhoods with high populations of Black and brown people and
not wealthier communities such as Barrington and Bristol.
Prior versions of the bill have passed the Senate the
past three years, but have not managed to secure passage in the House. This
year’s Senate version was up for a committee vote April 30 but was postponed to
a future date.
ECRI’s last priority is a bill (H7774) introduced by
Rep. Karen Alzate, D-Pawtucket, to allocate $78 million to save RIPTA from
its fiscal cliff and begin funding the state’s Transit Master Plan, which has
been quietly sitting in a drawer unfunded since released by the state at the
end of 2020.
Gov. Dan McKee’s budget proposed giving RIPTA $8 million
from federal pandemic funds, but that leaves the transit agency almost $10
million short of its deficit. Alzate’s bill would give RIPTA another $24
million. The remaining $46 million would kick-start state funding for
implementing the Transit Master Plan.
In prepared remarks, Shekarchi thanked ECRI for its
continued environmental advocacy year after year, and pledged to keep the
success going. At the end of the 2021-2022 General Assembly session, the group
had announced, thanks to the Act on Climate law, that Rhode Island had seen its
best legislative session for the environment so far.
“Climate change is real. Anyone who tells you it’s not,
don’t believe them, they need a reality check,” Shekarchi said. “It’s not only
affecting our environment, it’s affecting our economy and that’s a fact.”
Shekarchi also credited his deputy, Majority Leader Rep.
Chris Blazejewski, D-Providence, as “instrumental” in passing the Act on
Climate and helping kill a bill in 2022 that would have allowed plastic
pyrolysis facilities to be exempt from waste management regulations. The failed
pyrolysis bill narrowly passed the Senate.
In addition to the top three legislative priorities, ECRI
is supporting dozens of other bills related
to the environment, ranging from prohibiting certain rodenticides, to a
comprehensive PFAS ban, to CRMC reform.
The list of legislation opposed by ECRI is shorter this
year; the group only lists three bills, two introduced by Republicans, one by
Democrats, to oppose this session.
Chief among them, S2044 and 7126, introduced by
Sen. Jessica de la Cruz, R-Burrillville, and Rep. Michael Chippendale,
R-Foster, would require the state to study the environmental impact on
developing countries that mine many of the necessary metals that go into
building renewable energy facilities.
Another bill, S2155, would require
the state to assess whether solar power projects would be carbon-neutral (the
bill does not specify what carbon neutral means in its context). A final pair
of bills, S2823/H7491, would allow
RIPTA to hire design-build contracts and issue bonds and debt for transit
projects.
