Fuel industry warns Vermont committee H.740 could create another imperfect emissions dataset
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Summary
At a Feb. 5 House Energy and Digital Infrastructure hearing, a fuel-industry witness told lawmakers that existing DMV and tax data reliably track gallons at import but lack county-level or end-user burn information, raising confidentiality and allocation concerns for a proposed greenhouse-gas registry.
A Vermont House committee heard Feb. 5 that data currently used to measure fuel flows into the state are reliable for aggregate volumes but insufficiently granular for allocating greenhouse-gas emissions by county or end user.
An unidentified fuel industry witness who identified himself as a Climate Council appointee and trade association representative told the House Energy and Digital Infrastructure Committee that ‘‘we know definitively what was sold in Vermont’’ because distributors report gallons and pay excise taxes when title crosses into the state. He added that the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Taxes collect related records but those data sets ‘‘don’t show what county it’s sold in’’ and do not track which gallons are ultimately burned in Vermont.
The witness described two different reporting pools: motor fuels (reported to the DMV at the moment title transfers on import) and heating fuels (reported at retail to the Department of Taxes). He said the DMV data show total gallons—‘‘280,000,000 gallons of gasoline and 60,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel’’ sold annually in Vermont in his estimate—but cautioned that delivery patterns make geographic assignment difficult. ‘‘You could have a 9,000 gallon tanker truck going to Montreal, stopping by Enosburg and dropping off 2,000 gallons of gasoline, then stopping by Colchester and dropping another 4,000 gallons off,’’ he said, noting there is no simple way to allocate those gallons to a single county.
Committee members also pressed on the differences between motor- and heating-fuel reporting. The witness explained that, unlike motor fuels taxed at title transfer, heating fuels are taxed at retail and that retailers maintain delivery tickets and audit records that would show addresses for delivered gallons—but that those records are confidential and produced only for audits. He warned that creating a public, county-level registry without careful design could impose competitive or confidentiality risks on small dealers.
On the bill’s drafting, the witness asked the committee to be precise about what the registry should collect and said rulemaking will be necessary if the legislature grants authority: ‘‘If we're going forward with the registry, a better set of data than we currently have in our hands, we want to know going into this what we're trying to collect,’’ he said. Representative Kathleen James, the committee chair, said the bill’s purpose is to give the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) authority to begin a rulemaking process and that the legislature is not designing the detailed program in statute.
The committee did not take a vote. Witnesses offered to submit written materials and drafting suggestions; the chair directed staff to post testimony and to work with ANR on the rulemaking timeline as part of next steps.
