Transportation and Climate Initiative MOU due this week, Mills Administration still participating in the coalition, and Mainers need to know this fee is just a tax with a different name
AUGUSTA —Maine People Before Politics is calling upon members of Maine’s Legislature to put in a bill to require that Maine’s participation in the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) be subject to a majority vote of the state’s Legislature.
“As the bill submission deadline for the first session of the 130th Legislature approaches, we urge Maine’s Legislators to ensure the Maine people have a voice through their elected Representatives and Senators on whether Maine joins ten other states in implementing what amounts to a regressive tax on gasoline and diesel fuel,” stated Julie Dumont Rabinowitz, executive director of Maine People Before Politics.
“Frankly, with the massive reduction in driving from remote working during the pandemic, as evidenced by the Dec. 1 report from the Department of Administrative and Financial Affairs regarding the significant reduction in emissions due to 85 percent of state workers now telecommuting, TCI is absolutely unnecessary in Maine if the goal is to reduce driving. We should no longer be participating in TCI. But the actions of the Mills Administration and TCI’s supporters have revealed the real goal is money—billions of dollars every year to fund a host of other projects. That is why Mainers must have a say,” Rabinowitz stated.
“Today we are reminding the Maine people, first, the Transportation and Climate Initiative is a scheme created by states with failing mass transportation systems to find alternative funding from people who never use those systems. Second, the Mills Administration continues to participate in this program. Third, Maine’s participation, without a bill like the one we are urging the Legislature to pass, can be instituted in simple rulemaking. Last, both the Mills Administration and the Maine organizations supporting this tax on rural Mainers are deliberately obscuring Maine’s level of participation or omitting key information from polls and data they are submitting to policymakers,” Rabinowitz stated. “Mainers deserve the truth.”
How TCI Works
Under TCI, states will auction off permits that limit the amount of gasoline and diesel fuel to be sold. The revenue generated by the permits, estimated to be $7 billion annually, will be passed to the states to be used to support low-carbon transportation programs, for example, the expansion of public transportation options and electric vehicle use. The amount of fuel that can be sold under the permits will drop each year to reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuel.
“TCI’s supporters describe the program simply as a fee that would be absorbed by fuel distributors. However, the benefits they claim are only achieved when the costs are passed onto the consumer in the form of higher gas prices,” Rabinowitz said.
She continued: “As it stands, the Mills Administration can implement this ‘cap-and-invest’ program under the rulemaking provisions authorizing the Department of Environmental Protection and the Department of Transportation to curb carbon emissions. If this were a traditional tax instead of a ‘permitting fee,’ it would have to be voted on by the Legislature. However, since this program is specifically designed to raise prices at the pump so as to achieve the benefits touted by the coalition, it should be treated like a tax and all Legislators should be on record as to whether they support it.”
Maine continues to participate in the coalition, which is expected to release its MOU this week. Supporters anticipate that a core group of states will begin to implement TCI immediately and others will join in the coming months.
Supporters Masking Maine’s Participation in TCI and How It Would Work
“Having a bill before the Legislature will require that Maine’s participation in TCI undergo a public hearing, rather than be adopted under routine technical rulemaking,” noted Rabinowitz. “Too many organizations involved in TCI, including the Mills Administration, are trying to hide what it is and what it will do: raise the cost of driving, farming, transporting goods and food, and doing business in Maine.”
Governor Mills, in her Climate Action Plan, claims to only want to monitor the program on page 105, but supports a transportation emissions-reduction strategy that echoes the policy goals of TCI without referring to it by name: “By 2022, create policies, incentives, and pilot programs to encourage the adoption of electric, hybrid, and alternative-fuel medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, public transportation, school buses, and ferries” (p. 10).
Numerous organizations, including MPBP, however, have pointed out the unequal nature of TCI, where rural residents would pay proportionately more and receive less in return, effectively subsidizing public transportation and people who can afford to purchase electric vehicles. This has caused supporters to change tactics, calling for TCI to become more equitable in its implementation. No details have been forthcoming on how that would be accomplished.
At meetings of the Governor’s Climate Council and its working groups, supporters urged inclusion of the TCI as a revenue generation to be used to fund their other initiatives—which collectively carry a price tag of tens—if not hundreds—of millions of dollars.
It is clear from the November 12 Climate Council meeting that the Mills Administration wants to downplay where it stands on TCI. About an hour into the meeting, after a council member called for them to support TCI to raise revenue but acknowledged “the third rail politics around that particular discussion,” the moderator indicated that the references to supporting TCI were deliberately downplayed in the report, stating, “And the language there reflects the language that was, uh, painfully but artfully created in the Transportation Working Group. So that’s the language in this document.”
Other organizations, in polls designed to show public support for the initiative and to pressure participating governors, are omitting the key TCI policy to raise gasoline prices.
Last week, the group Our Transportation Future published a poll purporting that most people surveyed support the TCI, although it did not ask any questions that indicated TCI would raise gas prices and did not ask how voters felt about paying more for gasoline or diesel fuel [see excerpts from the press conference included with this release].
This misleading poll is being used by Maine organizations to justify the adoption of TCI by the Mills Administration, including the Maine Beacon, a publication of the Maine People’s Alliance. Maine members of Our Transportation Future include the Natural Resources Council of Maine, Environment Maine, Maine Conservation Voters, and the Acadia Center.
As part of the excuse for not including the gas price information in the poll, members of the panel claimed during a press conference that the price increase is not known and therefore it would not be appropriate to ask voters about it.
Rabinowitz concluded, “The press conference last week illustrated the scam these organizations are trying to pull on Mainers, using people’s reasonable desire to live in a clean environment to trick them into stating that they support policies that would disproportionately and negatively affect them. If an organization can claim that the TCI would save lives, then the voters deserve to be given the same data used to make those assessments. This debate needs a public forum and public accountability. Anything less is disrespectful to the Maine people who would foot this bill.”
The 11 participating states are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia. Governor Sununu of New Hampshire withdrew his state from the coalition.
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Excerpts from the Our Transportation Future Press Conference, December 9, 2020
Barbara Moran from WBUR asked the first question (23 minutes into the conference):
“I noticed that the polling questions didn’t indicate that there might be a cost increase at the pump for consumers, so I’m wondering if we need to take this sort of positive response with a grain of salt given that people may not be familiar with the fact that there may be an increase in gas prices with TCI, so can your talk about why you didn’t include that as part of the questioning?”
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, answered, “First of all, we didn’t have the details in hand to give people accurate estimates, but . . . when you do give people a sense of what things will cost, support does drop. . .”
In follow up questions, the panel was asked whether people understood TCI, and the response indicated that people were not screened for understanding exactly what TCI was and only may have learned about it from the questions.
At 31 minutes into the conference, Lisa Prevost from Energy News Network asked, “Returning to the issue of costs, why didn’t you at least ask voters if they would support TCI if it resulted in higher gas prices?”
Leiserowitz responded, “I’ll have to turn that over to our colleagues at Climate Nexus, we didn’t consider that.”
Phoebe Sweet, with Climate Nexus, then answered, “I’m not sure I have much to add there, we didn’t consider it.”
Alli Gold Roberts, director, state policy program, Ceres, then went on to explain that they couldn’t ask about raising gas prices because how much the prices will be raised are unknown, “ . . . It’s not clear what the gas price, or pump increase would potentially look like, depending on how the design of the program, whatever the cap level of what the state decides. . . It’s a complicated question to put in a poll because it’s not a clean ‘this is what the price would look like’ at any exact time across the board.”