PORTLAND, Maine — 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’s waste management policy.
For those years, lobbyists for PERC and its partner disclosed the most compensation for any single client.
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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’t 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.
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Spending more than $656,000 in disclosed lobbying during the 126th Legislature, PERC pushed for laws passed to add to the state’s licensing criteria for waste facilities (LD 1483), requiring consideration of the state’s 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’s statement opposing Fiberight’s DEP permits issued Friday.
“Fiberight cannot be a successful company without stymieing the growth of the composting industry in member communities,” NRCM wrote in its comments on Fiberight’s application to the DEP. “As 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.”
In the 126th Legislature, PERC and MRC focused on landfill regulations, with testimony pointing to PERC’s 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).
That requirement was a factor in MRC’s bid to create its own landfill and will influence the application from Casella Waste Systems to expand the state-owned Juniper Ridge landfill by 9.35 million cubic yards. That landfill accepts residual waste from PERC and is due to hit its full capacity sometime in 2019, according to the DEP’s latest solid waste generation report.
The focus on landfill regulations continued in the 127th Legislature for MRC, as the group of towns consider the Fiberight project’s options for disposing of the waste it does not recycle, burn for energy or use in some other way.
Their lobbyist told the Legislature that PERC’s contract terms with Juniper Ridge operator Casella prohibit the landfill from accepting trash from any MRC communities after PERC’s contract expires in 2018.
“The MRC could utilize other landfills to dispose of their landfill, but they are further away and lack sufficient future capacity,” Dan Walker, a lobbyist for MRC, wrote in legislative testimony. “The best, closest, and most inexpensive residual disposal strategy necessarily involves Juniper Ridge.”
Walker delivered that testimony on a failed bill (LD 1194) that would have allowed municipalities or regional associations to negotiate with any state-owned landfill and specifically would have nullified contracts preventing that, such as PERC and Casella’s.
MRC spent a total of about $18,000 in the last legislative session lobbying on six bills, including the landfill negotiation bill. That paled in comparison to PERC’s $185,740 in lobbying spending, which also has fueled tensions between the waste-to-energy facility and its member towns. The MRC has sued PERC for lobbying expenses on issues to which its members were o pposed.
Those proposals included new financial incentives for electricity generated by waste-to-energy facilities such as PERC, which would help the facility continue beyond the expiration of its current power contracts set to expire in 2018.
Three failed bills for new energy incentives (LDs 273, 1359 and 743) fell to opposition not only from MRC but also Emera Maine, which argued that the bill would use power rates to subsidize waste management for member towns of the MRC, hitting on a nerve that has driven much of the heated debate about the trash facility.
“In approximately two years, the PERC contract will end, and the subsidy from electricity ratepayers will end,” Emera Maine lobbyist Jim Cohen wrote in May 2015. “As a result, a typical residential customer in Emera Maine’s Bangor Hydro District will see a reduction of about 11 percent of their electricity delivery cost, and about 6 percent of their total electricity bill. This date has been transparent to all parties, and all parties have had decades to plan for what to do when the contract ends.”