Senate Transportation presses for funding, reportbacks on municipal salt sheds in chloride bill

Chair Westman, chairing the Senate Transportation Committee, pressed the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and committee members Tuesday to make municipal salt sheds a funding priority as lawmakers consider a chloride-reduction bill that touches storage and application of road salt.

The director of DEC’s Watershed Management Division, Mr. LeFlame, told the committee the department supports the bill’s broader goals and emphasized that the draft law singled out salt piles located inside a chosen distance from surface waters. “The option there would be for a community or an applicator to move that over time, over the next 5 years,” Mr. LeFlame said, describing the bill drafters’ selection of a 100-yard distance as the threshold of greatest concern.

Committee members focused on how small and medium communities that lack covered storage or funds will manage a possible new cover or relocation requirement. The chair proposed an amendment, S.29, to the clean water fund priority language that would recommend the Clean Water Board include municipal salt- and sand-shed needs in its annual funding recommendations and would earmark not less than $1,000,000 for those purposes.

LeFlame told senators the department has preliminary remote-sensing data from the Lake Champlain Basin showing 122 communities with a total of 170 mapped piles; “119 of those already are on and include CAD and only 20 of them are within 100 yards of surface waters,” he said, but he cautioned that the data have not been field-verified. He and other committee members said the number of problematic sites is not large, but the costs to cover or relocate piles could be significant for smaller towns.

Senators pressed for more analysis before locking in a specific mandate. Chair Westman said the committee wants to signal that storage near water is a priority while giving the agency time to quantify the scope and cost. “We want to be able to say to communities ... that policy wise, we recognize the ... cost for small communities, and that there is a pathway to help them,” the chair said.

Members agreed they were comfortable with the proposed $1 million placeholder in S.29 as a signaling item to appropriators, but several asked that the amendment also require a report back from DEC with an estimate of how many covered sheds are needed and what covering or relocation would cost. The committee discussed asking Natural Resources for related work already required in the chloride bill and to coordinate a single report describing both scope and funding options.

No formal roll-call vote on S.29 was recorded in the transcript. Committee members said they would circulate an amendment for members to sign and asked staff and DEC to return with more precise cost estimates and a recommended grant mechanism.

The panel’s exchange leaves three near-term items: DEC will be asked to field-verify remote-sensing results and produce a cost/scope report, S.29 will stay on the table as a vehicle to signal a funding priority (the draft amount discussed was $1,000,000), and the committee asked that eligibility language include both salt and salt-sand mixtures. The committee did not adopt a final, binding appropriation during the hearing.

Ending: Committee members said they intend to press the agency for a written estimate and to work with Natural Resources to avoid duplicate reporting; staff were instructed to prepare a signed amendment for consideration and to coordinate timing so that appropriations would see a firmer estimate when the bill reaches that stage.