Recently the media reported that fifteen Vermont ski areas would receive $5 million from Efficiency Vermont to help them purchase more than 2,000 energy efficient snow-making guns, replacing older, less efficient ones, and saving the ski resorts millions of dollars.
Efficiency Vermont, which is funded with a tax – although it’s called a surcharge - on Vermonters’ electric bills, was set up by the legislature in 1999 with the goal of reducing Vermonters’ energy use. One of its major tools is to subsidize residential and business purchases of more energy-efficient equipment.
It’s difficult to know for certain whether specific energy efficiency investments, like the ski resorts’ snow guns, would have been undertaken without Efficiency Vermont’s subsidies.
But if Efficiency Vermont gives you $100 to replace your old refrigerator with a newer, more efficient model - and you would have bought the newer model anyway without the subsidy - it would seem a poor use of $100 of taxpayer money.
The challenge is to identify those energy efficiency investments that would not have been undertaken without those subsidies. Even more fundamental is determining which spending choices would actually be the best use of taxpayer dollars, an issue the legislature constantly grapples with.
Now, suppose a state legislator proposed taxing every Vermont family $25 to raise $5 million and giving that money to Vermont ski resorts to help them purchase new snowmaking gear.
Most likely this policy would be controversial. Legislators would probably find it difficult to justify a handout of $5 million of taxpayers’ money to the ski industry and many would probably argue that there would be much better uses for it.
Perhaps it could be spent on reducing even more electricity us e somewhere else, or to reduce some other non-electric energy use.
Or even greater environmental benefits might be achieved, say, by using the money to reduce the pollution that’s causing the blue-green algae blooms in St. Albans and Missisquoi Bays.
Or the $5 million could be spent on some non-environmental problem, such as improving child protective services or hiring more state police.
When the state set up Efficiency Vermont, it sounded like a good idea. The Public Service Board was given oversight of their programs – and approves consumer surcharges. Plus, leaving the decision- making to experts instead of legislators does take some politics out of the process but it also injects another, different kind of political calculus into it.
As messy and political as the legislative process is, it does have certain benefits – and one of them is determining the merits of competing uses of public money.
We should be questioning the wisdom of spending five million of our dollars to subsidize ski resorts, and we should also be asking whether other recipients of Efficiency Vermont’s spending are getting money for doing things they would have done on their own.
And when spending decisions like this are made outside of the legislative process, it’s hard to ask those kinds of questions – and even harder to get answers.
