2010 Sierra Club Georgia Legislative News #5
IN THIS ISSUE:
House Bill 1059: The Job Killer, the More Landfills for Georgia Bill, gets out of
House Ag Committee. Call your State House Rep and Urge a NO! vote today.
HB 1094/SB 370: Governor's Water Stewardship bills pass in both House and Senate
SB 496: Return of the 2009's SB 229 No Justice for Georgia bill which makes
winning appeals of Coal plant or any other environmental permit appeal impossible.
Where are we now? The General Assembly has met for 24 of its allotted 40 Days.
During the 16 Days remaining most of the work of the Session remains to be done.
Foremost among these chores is passing a budget for 2011, which means finding a
combination of new revenue and spending cuts that equal about a billion dollars.
The Legislature will meet for three days for each of the next two weeks. Tuesday, March
16 is Day 25. Next Thursday, March 25, is Day 30. Day 30 is Crossover Day by which
time a bill must pass either the House or Senate to stay alive.
HB 1059 -- More Landfills for Georgia, Passes Agriculture Committee
Rep. Randy Nix of LaGrange has been a good member of the House Natural Resources
Committee on most environmental issues, particularly those dealing with water
management. It was not a pleasant surprise to see his name at the top of the Solid Waste
industry’s Big Bill for 2010. The recession, it seems, has not been kind to the bottom
lines of the Big Dump outfits, and they want more money.
In the late 1990s, there was an effort to cut the volume of waste going into GA landfills, a
problem because they dumps were filling up too fast, and locating new dumps was
becoming a huge political headache for local and state officials. The expedient chosen for
the reduction was to prohibit the burying of yard waste in sanitary landfills. Yard waste
is about 25% of the solid waste in GA and totaled about 1.5 million tons in 2007
according to the State Dept. of Cummunity Affairs. The volume of the yard trimmings is
even a greater share of the waste stream as it is estimated to be 40% by volume. Yard
timmings can be used beneficially to make mulch and compost or as fuel in boilers that is
cleaner than coal.
The diversion of yard waste from the landfills has been an enormous success in GA. It
has prompted the creation and growth of a whole new, profitable and job creating
industry managing solid waste. But the recession has caused the volume of waste to drop
off, and the Dumpers are looking at those new businesses, well, at their income, with
jealousy.
The big garbage companies tried to get the ban on yard trimmings going into their lined
landfills repealed in 2006 due to high gas prices. Now they claim the waste should go
into their landfills to produce green energy. This is a big green scam as the methane
recovered from such energy is tiny and actually is a negative due to the leakage of the
methane.
The economics of trash is not complicated. To dump stuff a per-ton “tipping fee” is
charged. The average tipping fee in GA is about $35 a ton. In much of the northeast, and
Florida, tipping fees range upward to $100 a ton. The tipping fee for an “inert” landfill,
where yard waste goes, is about $10 a ton. If Mr. Dump can charge $35 per ton, instead
of letting it go for $10 a ton, what is Mr. Dump going to want to do? The fact that much
out of state waste is a “mixed stream,” in which yard waste is already contaminated in
ordinary trash and garbage, has meant that the material that costs $100 a ton to dump
outside GA is not available for our dumps, which are prohibited from burying yard waste.
If the yard waste ban can be overturned, local GA yard waste can be dumped in landfills
at $35 per ton. And, more importantly, out of state waste that is presently banned from
Ga landfills, would then be eligible. That means Mr. Dump’s $35 per ton is going to be
very competitive with the $100 per ton fee in other states Mr. Dump wipes out his local
competition, the mulchers, the composters and the fuel chippers. And Mr. Dump cashes
in on a waste stream now headed to Alabama, which has always welcomed any kind of
trash it could get, since the 1820s.
The More Landfills for GA bill got out of the House Agriculture Committee after a two
session hearing that lasted over 3 hours. During that time Mr. Dump’s men, who talked
very fast and very clearly, were able to so thoroughly confuse the members that only 3 of
them were able to see the way clearly to vote NO on the bill. This trash needs to be
defeated on the House Floor, if it makes it that far.
ACTION ALERT!!! Please call your State Representative this week and urge them to vote NO
on House Bill 1059. Georgia does not need to fill its landfills quicker. This bill will lead to more
landfills and more out of state waste according to the Georgia DCA. The energy recovered from
all the methane produced by all the yard trimmings in Georgia is a trivial amount, a few MGW.
This bill will kill the jobs of the many small businesses grinding, composting and otherwise
beneficially processing yard trimmings.
HB 1094, SB 370, Water Stewardship Act Passes both Houses
Gov. Perdue is in his last year of office, and this is his final legislative session. He has
governed GA during an historic drought, and instead of seeking legislative remedies for
water supply problems, he offered prayers for rain. Now, however, everything is
different. The drought may be over, but US District Court Judge Paul Magnuson has
found that GA and the Army Corps of Engineers have been operating Lake Lanier for
water supply, contrary to the explicit laws under which the Lake was built and is
supposed to be operated. The Judge has given GA until July, 2012 to get Congress to
reauthorize the Lake for water supply purposes.
In order for GA to get Congress to act favorably, GA is going to have reach an agreement
on water sharing with Alabama and Florida. The three states supposedly tried to reach
such an agreement for 10 years, but failed at that project. GA’s stubbornness in
negotiation is widely credited with the failure. That resistance that was, and perhaps still
is based on the future water use projections cooked up by the Metro Atlanta Growth
Industry to assure their ability to continue sprawling subdivisions all the way to the north
GA mountains. In order to get the other states to agree on a reauthorization of Lanier,
GA is going to have to “give” some.
The Water Stewardship Act is the first piece of “give” we have seen. It enacts very
conservative versions of ideas that have been pushed forward for years by the GA Water
Coalition (of which the GA Chapter of Sierra Club is a founding member), and its many
legislative allies. Most of the bill’s features have an effective date of July, 2012,
coincident with the date of the effectiveness of Judge Magnuson’s order. The choice of
that date seems indicative of the attitude of Gov. Perdue toward cooperation; it mirrors
the behavior of a surly teen who performs household chores only at the moment his
allowance is due.
One major water conservation measure that didn’t get into the Stewardship Act would be
one to deal with the one million out of date toilets still flushing extra water every day in
Metro Atlanta. Some Metro counties have taken steps to stop this waste: Gwinnett and
Cobb have generous rebate programs to cover part of the cost to homeowners, and
DeKalb mandates new efficient fixtures every time a water account is turned on for a new
customer. But the state has stopped short of taking a step that could bring immense water
savings quickly.
Another piece that is missing from what is being offered to downstreamers, both in GA
and in the other states, is an assurance that water will not be moved from one river basin
to another in a way that can damage either basin. Fortunately, a large number of
legislators, over one third of the members of the House, and over two fifths of the Senate,
have signed bills that will finally regulate the practice of Interbasin Transfers of Water,
assuring that fairness to all users will govern water sharing arrangements, not merely
convenience to the nodes of growth. HB 1301 and SB 462 are then Water Basin
Protection Act, reasonable and necessary regulation for a practice that can pose serious
threats to water supply and water quality to all downstream users, in any state.
The General Assembly has done some of the work in managing Georgia’s water. Now it
is time to finish the job.
SB 486 -- Return of the Undead! Bill to Harm Environmental
Protection, Defeated in 2009, Back Again.
In 2009, right before “crossover day,” the last day a bill can pass either Chamber, Sen.
Ross Tolleson of Houston County introduced SB 229, which would require that any
administrative law judge who heard an appeal of a permit decided by any of the
regulatory agencies of the Department of Natural Resources, had to “defer” to the
judgment of the bureaucrat. Of course, having anyone be a “judge” in such a rubber
stamp operation is useless. The function could be filled by a clerk, or a timestamp
machine.
The bill was written by the King and Spalding Law Firm, and was lobbied by Joe Tanner
and Associates. The people who would “win” if it passed were clients of the giant law
combine, coastal developers and coal power plant promoters, like LS Power, of New
Jersey, which wants to put a coal plant in SW GA.
The bill shot from the Sen. Natural Resources Committee and onto the floor at the last
possible moment. Then Judiciary Chairman Preston Smith, joined by several other
lawyer members of the State Senate, rose to speak against the measure, eloquently and in
defense of the principle of rule of law, not rule of men. When the vote was finally taken,
26 Senators voted Yes, and 25 voted No. Since 29 votes are required to pass a bill, it
failed.
Because the fail failed on Crossover Day in 2009, a vote to reconsider it was
meaningless, since that would have postponed the vote until the next day, when passage
meant nothing.
Since then, Cobb Electric Membership Corporation, an electric so-called “co-operative,”
has begun a heavy push to get a permit for an 800 Megawatt Coal Plant Washington in
Washington county. The permits that EPD is granting for that project are highly dubious
in their consideration of the amount of water available to run the thirsty monster, and
challenges to those permits are very likely to be successful, before an impartial judge.
Therefore, getting rid of the impartial judge is an important matter for the Cobb EMC
people, who have filled the Capitol this session with a beefed up squad of lobbyists.
This year’s version of the “Judge, what Judge?” bill, SB 486, is apparently headed for a
showdown on Wednesday, March 17, in the Senate Natural Resources Committee.
Perhaps St. Patrick’s Day will be a good day for the Green Team.