Timothy Egan is a state representative serving on the Committee on Resources, Recreation & Development.
There’s a general sense in New Hampshire that our state is lagging well behind other New England states on environmental stewardship, especially when it comes to landfill management. The New Hampshire Legislature is trying to catch up, but there was one unfortunate failure. The most important environmental bill in years was killed by special interest lobbying.
HB 1454 would have helped ensure that new landfills constructed in New Hampshire would be sited in places that minimize risks of contamination of our water bodies. The bill was modeled after a bill enacted in Maine and other states and is working well in those states.
The bill was approved overwhelmingly by the NH House and Senate but then vetoed by Governor Sununu. In his short veto letter, he said he opposed the bill because it would raise property taxes. There is one fundamental problem with this argument: it’s not true. The governor unfortunately relied on a discredited study commissioned by and paid for by the solid waste industry.
HB 1454 would protect about 14% of New Hampshire’s land area which would be vulnerable to landfill accidents. Enacting the bill would be like taking out insurance so that any new landfills would be sited only where risks from accidents are small. And best of all, this insurance would come at no cost to the state or to taxpayers.
Last month the NH House voted overwhelmingly to override the veto, but four NH Republican senators went along with the governor and changed their vote, causing the override to fail in the Senate. The bill has already been refiled in the NH House, and supporters this time around are determined not to let the solid waste industry and their high-priced lobbyists kill the bill again.
Some of the senators that opposed HB 1454 point to the passage of HB 1420 as proof that the Legislature is doing something about landfills. This bill prohibited the Department of Environmental Services (DES) from issuing permits for new landfills until DES issued an updated Solid Waste Plan, something it had not done for the last 19 years, despite state law requiring it to do so every six years.
HB 1420 had the intended effect. It lit a fire under DES to comply with state law. The result is DES issued a draft plan in early August, invited public comments on the draft throughout August, and just last week issued a final updated Solid Waste Plan. This may sound like good news, but it isn’t.
DES received 400 pages of comments on the draft from some 80 parties. DES says it read all the comments, which is undoubtedly true. But the final version is virtually identical to the draft in all substantive ways, so it is also true that having read the public comments, DES ignored them. And it gets worse. Even the Solid Waste Working Group that was empaneled to advise DES (including members of the solid waste industry) has been critical of the final report.
Commenters pointed out that DES’s draft barely addressed what virtually everyone in the state acknowledges to be the two main problems our state faces — the fact that about half of the trash landfilled in New Hampshire comes from out-of-state, and the risks of PFAS contamination from landfill accidents, and leachate transport and disposal.
Moreover, there was general agreement that the draft was a compendium of decent goals, but it was not a plan. It’s not rocket science. A plan has to include the actions needed to achieve your goals. DES’ draft and final version include no specific actions that need to be taken, and no metrics to determine whether goals are being achieved.
So, where are we? Because the governor’s veto was not overridden, and because DES has not come up with an actual “plan”, our state is virtually no closer than it was 19 years ago to solving our problems with solid waste management. It’s a shame that some New Hampshire government officials seem perfectly okay with allowing our state to become the garbage dump for all of New England, and don’t seem to care that HB 1454 represented an excellent opportunity to prevent another landfill disaster like what has happened at Coakley.
So what can we do about it? We can elect government officials who value the health, welfare and quality of life for all New Hampshire residents more than any fealty to big corporate interests. We can demand of our legislators that they enact sensible legislation to protect the environment and public health. And we can ask government officials to tell DES to go back to the drawing board, listen to the public, and come up with an actual “plan” to manage our most pressing solid waste management problems.