BRATTLEBORO — Despite Governor Scott's $8 million commitment to restoring Vermont's waterways and funding clean water initiatives in his recent budget proposal, representatives in the Vermont Legislature have so far failed to live up to their responsibilities to help ensure we all have clean water.
The budget passed by the House has stripped the governor's $8 million for clean water and spent the money elsewhere.
We hope this choice was made because the Legislature plans to identify a new source of funding for clean water and that lawmakers don't want to take money from the many other state priorities.
Water-quality advocates, including the Connecticut River Conservancy, have been working for years now to advocate for a stable, ongoing source of clean-water funding.
The Senate bill, S.96, as it currently stands, only develops a cumbersome additional bureaucratic process to manage the new clean-water funding that we expect to see come out of this legislative session.
Without a significant source of additional funding, there is no point in passing this bill. Why create additional complicated administrative processes when there is nothing to administer?
Thousands of clean-water projects that have already been identified are waiting for funding before they can proceed with design and implementation. All of these projects would result in cleaner rivers and lakes throughout Vermont.
For the past three years (since the Vermont Clean Water Act was first passed), the Legislature has failed to provide a long-term funding mechanism for clean water. Legislators have kicked the can so far down the road that it is now off the road in a polluted ditch.
Vermonters want and need clean water. In addition to the obvious benefits of funding the 4,000 projects in the state's database, the Legislature can help Vermont's economy in a number of ways by providing funding for these projects.
Millions of dollars would be spent locally, through the hiring of Vermont businesses to help implement these projects. For parcels along our polluted lakes, dropping property values would stabilize, and we would continue to develop our recreation economy.
Many of our legislators used clean-water funding as a central tenet of their re-election campaigns. It is time - past time, actually - for our legislative leaders to find the funding to protect and restore our vital waters.
Make the right choice this year.