Witnesses describe New Hampshire Green Snow Pro certification and limited-liability rule at S.29 hearing

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 11 heard testimony on S.29 about New Hampshire’s Green Snow Pro certification program, a voluntary salt-reduction initiative that ties limited liability to contractors’ training, documentation and best practices.

Ted Diers, assistant director of the water division at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, told the committee the program began after state and EPA sampling around the I-93 expansion found four streams exceeding state chloride water-quality standards. “We did a TMDL, which is a total maximum daily load,” Diers said, describing the exercise used to identify sectoral sources of salt; his office’s analysis showed the Department of Transportation accounted for about 9% of salt use, municipalities about 25% and the remainder largely from private parking lots and driveways.

The nut of the Green Snow Pro model, Diers said, is to pair training and best management practices with a limited-liability provision so contractors who follow the program are not made uniquely vulnerable to lawsuits for using reduced salt. “They felt they could still protect public safety, but the act of intentionally using less salt… left them open to vulnerability to lawsuit,” Diers said. He described the law as modeled on existing ski-area protections but stressed the statute does not eliminate liability for negligence.

Aubrey Velker, the program’s salt-reduction and Green Snow Pro coordinator at…