Meetings
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[Anne Watson (Chair)]: We're on. Okay, great. Welcome everyone. This is the conference committee on H740, is May 22. And just in case, we may know each other, but it might be just good to do one whip around of our names and where we represent. And then I'm going to ask person from James to tell us about what you're thinking. Sounds good. So I'll start. Anne Watson from the Washington District.
[Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: Terry Williams, we're all in Lisbon. Seth Bongartz from Bennington District.
[Anne Watson (Chair)]: Sarah Tory from Washington 2. St. John Barry.
[Kathleen James (Representative, Bennington-4)]: And Kathleen James from Bennington 4. Okay. Great. So we appreciate the work you did on H740, and we took a look and walked through some of your changes and really appreciated some of them, but we had a thought. So we appreciated in particular the language you added around individual addresses, so making sure that it's clear that when we go down to the smallest geographic level practicable, we're certainly not seeking individual customer information. And we had a committee discussion as well about the repeal of the clean heat standard and all of that associated language. And we talked a little bit as well about the funding and about the timeline. And one of the things we had hoped to bring to you today was a conversation about trying to possibly increase the one time funding that the Senate bill had provided. As you know, our bill that had $500,000 but it was all contingent, you all stripped out the contingency language and found $300,000 in the budget, appropriated in one time funds, that's great. We hope to talk about finding some more money, but we've been conferring with our colleagues on house appropriations, and since our committee met yesterday, and have been told that that's probably a blind alley. So that thing that we had requested of you yesterday is probably a no go, but we did have another idea. The registry part of the bill, the first half of the bill, amends 10 BSA section five eighty two by adding to the rulemaking part of the statute. And if you remember, the timeline for the rulemaking is that ANR will complete the rulemaking in 2027. I believe they told us in testimony that the first data would be gathered in 2028 and available in 2029. And we had also heard, I'm sure that you did, was that the new and more granular data that would be gathered through this new registry could be useful, or could at least inform the larger, broader greenhouse gas inventory that ANR also works on every year. So in looking at that statute, we noticed that it currently says that the greenhouse gas emission inventory and forecast shall be updated and published annually until 2028. So considering the timeline of the new registry, we thought it might be useful to push that data out until 2030, so that we can give this new registry time to get the rules done, get up and running, have data feeding into our broader work, and just make sure that something doesn't time out before we have a chance to come back and take a look at the new data. So that's our proposed amendment for you. We did email it out just, I think seconds to, you know, a few minutes before the meeting, that's our proposal.
[Anne Watson (Chair)]: Like your chair, I don't think
[Terry Williams (Vice Chair)]: you want to mention one thing also. This section in statute, 10 BSC five eighty two is, I don't think James mentioned it, is the only other section in statute referenced in the Affordable Care Act.
[Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay. That's it. Seems good to me. Okay. Great. Do we have this report in which we could potentially stop? I mean, I'm good at this. It seems a lot.
[Kathleen James (Representative, Bennington-4)]: It'd be great to get some of you to tell me.
[Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yes. Let's take a brief recess. Well, just for a couple of minutes.