Vermont’s appointed Public Service Board should be sacked, its power reined in and synchronized with core values.
How is it that the PSB rationale to approve Vermont Gas’ Phase One is the equivalent of “eating our neighbors’ dogs can stave off hunger for some Vermonters and will temporarily support economic growth here”? This basis to justify cost savings is a direct contradiction to the reasoning for our legislation that outlaws fracking in Vermont.
Maybe we wouldn’t eat our own dogs, but taking on our neighbors’ is good enough for us, and better than investing in a safe, humane, planet-nurturing future. This decision at hand, after all, gives us a real watershed to choose our core values: We could be putting good will, neighborly peace measures and our own futures in a sustainable ecology right up there as “what’s good for all, is the best practice to support corporate profit.”
We know who has ultimately lost out in this short-view decision: It is the have-nots first as well as the planet and a future sustainable economy, and then all of us battle it out for the last gasp. Corporations will survive on paper with the right to speak.
This is the time for our elected leaders to intercede in the dumb-doings of “appointed power.”
Bill Schneider
Middlebury