The head of the organization that oversees recycling in four Blair County municipalities mandated to operate curbside programs prefers a Senate proposal for extending the life of a recycling fee collected by the state over a pair of recent House proposals.
The Senate version would amend Act 101 to eliminate a 2020聽鈥渟unset鈥澛爁or the $2-per-ton surcharge that provides grant funding needed by organizations like the Intermunicipal Recycling Committee.
A Republican House proposal calls for extending the sunset for just one year, while a Democratic House proposal calls for extending the sunset by three years.
The House proposals would delay, but retain the sunset at least partly as an incentive to revisit the law to discuss potential reforms of Act 101.
IRC Executive Director John Frederick favors the Senate version, because it would eliminate the difficulties that the sunset threat has created for organizations like his throughout the state. 鈥淭he problem with renewing it every few years is that the Department of Environmental Protection (which administers grants funded by the fee) finds itself every few years planning to end the grant programs,鈥� Frederick said.
The DEP always prepares for the worst, always assumes the sunset will actually occur, and so shrinks the funding it doles out in the years that precede the sunset to create an orderly closeout, Frederick indicated.
The approach of the 2020 sunset, coupled with the General Assembly鈥檚 withdrawal of $9 million from the recycling fund to balance the general fund budget, has basically frozen the grant program for two years, which has made it difficult to make ends meet for the IRC, Frederick said.
Such a threat has played out at least three times now, Frederick said. 鈥淚t just seems as if we have a few years of grants and a few years of uncertain planning to close the program down,鈥澛爃e said.
Frederick nevertheless credits the thinking behind the House proposals. Lawmakers may want to retain it as a tool for聽鈥渁ccountability,鈥澛爏o they can be聽鈥渞esponsible stewards,鈥澛爃e said. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 want to fund something in perpetuity without studying the positives and negatives,鈥澛爃e said. And聽鈥渋t鈥檚 a great idea to incentivize tweaks (to Act 101) that make sense,鈥澛爃e added.
Still, lawmakers sometimes underestimate the difficulty of coming to agreement on changes, which means that even with the artificially induced urgency of some later sunset, those tweaks aren鈥檛 necessarily going to be easy to achieve, he said.
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