I tend to look at a lot of things in life from a process perspective, and politics is certainly no exception, and from that perspective I am deeply disappointed by what has happened on the Energy Bill, even more so than regarding the fate of the actual bill in some ways.
What I saw at first was encouraging. This was an issue that was very easy to support, with a bill that had a lot of positives going for it and an opposition that was a relatively easy mark. I mean, c’mon, who’s NOT for reducing energy bills, reducing carbon emissions and creating new high-tech jobs, right? Well the Gov, that’s who. He’d rather create jobs in China.
So this environment created a lot of political frustration, and not just for the same old usual suspects. I attended a meeting in Norwich a while back where there were about 25 people ready to lend a hand to support the override cause. That’s a pretty good turnout. There were other meetings around the state. This cause was a rallying point around which Vermonters were engaging, and they were engaging on the side of Dems. This seemed very hopeful for developing into a surge of support for the next elections. There was a real opportunity to build an expanded grassroots network, drawing people from VPIRG, Sierra Club and the Step It Up campaign, among other contingencies, onto a Dem bandwagon.
Alas, I’m afraid that opportunity has been at least partially squandered, and this is where my biggest disappointment arises. Unfortunately, no VT politician saw the possibilities in this moment. Nobody from the Leg rallied the grassroots troops. Nobody connected with the budding “movement” and engaged them. This was an opportunity for a Howard Dean, People-Powered moment, but that lesson from that campaign seems to have been swallowed back up by the politics-as-usual school of thought.
Instead, the volunteer movement was left out to dry. Letter writers now have their contributions to the movement in local papers supporting the energy Bill, including the VY tax adjustment. How do they feel now? See them hang in the breeze below?
This letter writer from South Royalton
“Currently, Entergy only pays one-third the tax rate of what is proposed for other power generators in Vermont. There is nothing unfair about requiring Entergy to pay the same tax as other generators, especially because they have upgraded the facility and increased its output by 20 percent.
“Vermont Yankee currently pays a property tax rate of only .001 cents per kilowatt-hour. Other energy generators, such as wind farms would be required to pay a rate three times as high. While most Vermonters are paying more in taxes, Vermont Yankee’s tax bill has actually gone down since 2001.”
“The governor’s continued use of IBM’s name as a concern about the tax, as though a parity tax on the nuclear power plant is somehow going to carry over to all large corporations in Vermont, is simply deceptive. The last I checked, IBM wasn’t producing energy or plutonium.”
“All H.520 proposes to do is to tax Vermont Yankee at the same rate applied to large-scale wind projects. No more, no less. Seems more than fair to me considering we will still have to deal with Yankee’s nuclear waste for millennia.”
I have a hard time picturing a progressive or even a moderate Democratic Gubernatorial victory in 2008 given the vacuum of leadership evidenced by this affair (and others).