That effort, the Transportation Climate Initiative, is not on Lamont’s agenda this year as lawmakers begin a short legislative session that will last until May 4.
Despite the short time frame to act on the state’s budget and a few more big-ticket items such as crime and health care reform, lawmakers and lobbyists who are engaged on environmental issues say they are preparing to push aggressively for a short list of policies this year. At the top of their list are items such as reducing truck emissions and new regulations to cut down on trash filling up the state’s landfills and incinerators.
“Climate and waste are the two big areas that our lawmakers have got to take seriously this session,” said Lori Brown, executive director of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters. “We were really distraught that not enough was done on climate last year.”
Brown pointed to the anticipated closure of Hartford’s MIRA Plant, one of Connecticut’s largest waste-to-energy incinerators, as evidence that the state is becoming more serious about cleaning up its air and trash issues. Still, she said the plant’s closure will force officials to make new decisions on where to send trash, as well as where to place new pollution-emitting plants in the coming years.
Here are some of the policies related to climate change, recycling and other environmental issues that lawmakers have suggested could become law this year:
Emissions reductions
With talks over joining a regional climate initiative scrapped for now, the leaders of the General Assembly’s Environment Committee said they would instead focus on reducing carbon-spewing emissions through new regulations placed on vehicles purchased or registered within the borders of Connecticut.
On Thursday, Lamont proposed legislation to adopt California’s emission standards on medium and heavy-duty vehicles — essentially those vehicles ranging in weight from a typical delivery truck to an 18-wheeler. Under the Clean Air Act, states may either adhere to federal standards or tougher rules set by California to regulate vehicle emissions.
Connecticut already requires emissions testing for light-duty trucks such as a household pickups, however, vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds are exempt from testing.
California adopted the stricter emissions standards for trucks in 2020, requiring manufacturers and dealers to begin selling zero-emissions trucks in 2024, and gradually phasing in higher quotas for zero-emissions sales until 2035.
That effort overcame opposition from the trucking and oil industries, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Both industries were key opponents to the TCI initiative, which they successfully depicted as a gas tax at a time when inflation was already increasing prices at the pump.
In addition to a focus on truck emissions, Democratic lawmakers have also proposed amending the state’s Clean Air Act to encourage the sales of more electric vehicles, while Lamont’s administration is seeking to phase-out greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by mid-century, at an estimated cost of $5.5 billion.
Environment Committee co-chair, Sen. Christine Cohen, D- Guilford, said last week she was confident lawmakers could build enough support to enact some combination of those proposals and “address a lot of things that could have been addressed in the TCI had it gotten over the finish line.”
Extended producer responsibility
While any effort to reduce emissions by regulating gas-guzzling vehicles and power plants is likely to spark a partisan showdown, both parties have expressed interest in cleaning up Connecticut’s environment through rules known as extended producer responsibility.
The concept basically requires manufacturers or distributors — the producers — of certain hard-to-dispose of products like mattresses or tires to bear greater responsibility for their discarded products, so they do not end up clogging landfills and recycling centers that are not equipped to handle them.
Connecticut already has five EPR programs for mattresses, mercury thermometers, architectural paint, household electronics and rechargeable batteries. The programs are largely popular with local officials, because they remove some of the burden caused by illegal dumping on public lands and at municipal landfills.
For example, a bill that would have created EPR programs for tires, propane cylinders and smoke detectors last year received support from more than a dozen towns along the Lower Connecticut River Valley, after leaders in the area complained about products being dumped along the river.
The Environment Committee’s other co-chair, state Rep. Joe Gresko, D- Stratford, said the legislation, which he sponsored, failed to get enough support to overcome opposition from the tire industry.
However, he said there was less opposition to an EPR program for propane cylinders, and he would likely file two separate pieces of legislation this year to cover tires and propane tanks, hoping one would pass.
“The industry has to stepped up, and we’re hoping to pass something that will be accepted by the industry and be convenient to customers,” Gresko said.
Bear hunt
The legalization of bear hunting is an idea that has swirled around Hartford for years, only to fail in the face of opposition from animal-rights groups.
However, run-ins with black bears continued to attract headlines in nearly every corner of the state last year — even prompting state wildlife officials to urge that residents take in their bird feeders — so it’s possible that calls for a hunting season could resurface this session.
One of the chief proponents of a bear hunt in Connecticut, state Sen. Craig Miner, R- Litchfield, did not return calls seeking comment on the issue. Miner is one of the GOP’s ranking members on the Environment Committee.
The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection has remained open to the idea of allowing hunting as a way to cull Connecticut’s growing black bear population, which is leading to more encounters with humans.
“The DEEP is interested in the full suite of options available to help address a growing bear population and the habituation of bears,” agency spokesperson Will Healey said in a statement. “Hunting is one possible tool in the toolbox. Another is increasing our educational efforts to help residents get accustomed to living around bears.”
DEEP estimates there are about 1,200 black bears living in Connecticut, Healey said.
Among Connecticut’s neighbors, New York, New Jersey and all of the New England states except for Rhode Island have a bear hunting season, which typically occurs during the fall.
Single-use plastics ban
The leaders of the Environment Committee said they also hope to resurface legislation from last year that would have phased out single-use plastic straws and polystyrene foam containers from restaurants by 2023.
The bill would have also required school districts to phase out the use of foam lunch trays.
The legislation was passed by the Environment Committee on a party-line vote in 2021, but failed to gain traction in either the House or Senate after facing opposition from Republicans and the restaurant industry, who argued that the proposed ban would come at the wrong time for restaurants already reeling from the pandemic.
To ease those concerns, Gresko said he and other proponents of the legislation would likely give the restaurant industry more time to phase out the use of single-use plastics and polystyrene foam containers.
“We were in the middle of a pandemic and the restaurant industry was hurting as it is,” Gresko said. “If we push the date [of the ban] far enough out for them to use up the products that they have, that allows them to explore other options.”
Scott Dolch, president of the Connecticut Restaurant Association, could not immediately be reached for comment on Friday.
The legislation was also estimated to cost between $2 to 2.8 million for school districts around the state to phase out the use of single-use polystyrene lunch trays.
Environmental justice
One of the legislature’s top proponents of Connecticut’s decades-old environmental justice laws, state Rep. Geraldo Reyes, D-Waterbury, said he will seek further enhancements to the law after passing legislation in 2020 that requires low-income communities to have greater say in the placement of polluting industries like power plants and landfills
DEEP policy dating back to 1993 has been to prevent any community from having to “bear a disproportionate share of the risks and consequences of environmental pollution.”
Reyes, however, has faulted the agency for failing to prevent the expansion of a garbage transfer station in Waterbury’s South End in 2018, despite the “noise, garbage and filth that was already down in that district.”
“The environmental justice law failed us in Waterbury when we went to use it,” Reyes said.
Reyes said he has since proposed updates in every session to the state’s environmental justice laws, with varying success.
“Every year I put in, sometimes it gets through and sometimes it doesn’t,” Reyes said. “I will always continue to advocate until I believe the state of Connecticut gets it right.”
This year, Reyes said his efforts will focus on giving DEEP “more teeth” to impose fines and corrective actions on polluters who are found to have violated the environmental justice law.
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