Middlebury voters have the chance to decide whether to approve an easement agreement that gives Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) use of town land for $1, or reject the agreement so the selectboard can renegotiate the easement and receive fair market value for the use of town land. Leading up to the vote there has been a lot of misinformation floating around in support of the current easement agreement.

One argument is that the money the town would receive for the company’s use of town land won’t cover the cost of holding the vote. While some believe that democracy is not worth the cost and inconvenience, since the vote is being held in the town office building and won’t cause the Town Clerk to close her office for the day, the cost of holding the vote is much less than the potential financial gain for the town.

Another argument is that the fracked methane gas that VGS offers is the only option for heating large spaces. The reality is that there are garages in Addison County today that are heating their businesses with advanced wood heat (pellet stoves) and these systems easily heat large spaces even when big overhead garage doors have to be regularly opened and closed during winter. While the older models had reliability issues, today’s modern pellet stoves are much more reliable and they support Vermont’s forestry industry, helping to capture and re-circulate much of the money spent on fuel within our community rather than sending it out of state, or in the case of Canadian-owned VGS, out of the country.

The argument that fracked methane gas is better for the environment than fuel oil is also false. When all the fugitive leaks of methane from the wells, to the pipelines and the end user are taken into account, the science says that in most cases gas is as dirty as coal and sometimes more so. While gas was first promoted as a bridge fuel back in 1988, the time to get off the bridge has come.

Some think that if the company has to pay for the land easement, they will choose not to install the pipe to supply gas. VGS is a regulated business that is not allowed to mark up the price of their gas but is guaranteed an approximate 9% return on their infrastructure costs along with a 22% recovery of the income tax costs. As the monopoly gas company in our state, it would simply be a dumb business decision not to install more pipes when they are guaranteed a profit.

Others point to the lack of precedent for charging VGS the fair market value of an easement. Even though this is the way it has always been done in the past, if our community is not able to break precedent and change when the times call for change, we will be unable to adjust to the rapidly changing world and we have much larger problems than we think we have.

Nor do all utilities need to be treated the same. There is no law or regulation that requires the town to have to charge other utilities for easements in the unlikely event that they ask for one, just because it may choose to charge VGS for this one.

It has also been claimed that if VGS has to pay for the easement, then the Town will have no say down the road should it need to move the gas line for some reason and would have to move the line at its own expense. This is not a given. Such future scenarios are entirely negotiable, and the town can simply ensure that the agreement stipulates that VGS is responsible for the cost of moving the line if it becomes necessary just as the current easement agreement stipulates.

It is often suggested that the taxes VGS pays to the town for their pipeline infrastructure more than covers the additional funds the town would get from charging for easements. VGS pays taxes to Middlebury based upon the value of the transmission and distribution infrastructure they have installed within the town borders. They also get to depreciate the value of that infrastructure over the course of 30 years. This means that while the rest of us pay higher taxes every year, VGS pays less taxes every year for 30-years, despite the fact that their pipelines have the potential to stay in service for 60 years or more as evidenced by the lines they installed in northern Vermont back in the 1960’s that are still in use today. VGS gets a sweetheart deal when it comes to paying taxes; they can afford to pay for special land easements on town property that don’t run along the normal road rights-of-way.

The one argument in favor of approving the current easement agreement that actually does stand up to scrutiny is that to not do so will be anti-business and bad for the economy. It is true that the more fossil fuels we burn the more likely we are to see weather events that destroy and damage our homes, roads, and bridges, and the more tropical diseases we are likely to see pop up in our population. Repairing such damage and attending to such diseases creates lots of economic activity. Since only a few people think that this is the kind of economic activity we really need more of this is not a good argument. In fact, there does not appear to be any good arguments in favor of supporting the current easement agreement, but there are plenty of bad ones. Please remember to vote at the Middlebury municipal building by the downtown traffic circle between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 1. Thank you.

Ross Conrad

Middlebury