Colberg vetoes again

PALMER — A grant for an energy conservation campaign to target Southcentral has the Mat-Su Borough Assembly debating what the borough’s proper role is in promoting awareness of energy consumption.

The resolution in question passed the assembly Sept. 15, but Borough Mayor Talis Colberg vetoed it Tuesday. That would be Colberg’s second veto in four months on the job.

The resolution handed $100,000 to the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, which plans, with its partner groups, to put up an Alaska-specific website where residents can enter facts about their energy consumption. The site would then offer tips on how to conserve. REAP hopes to get utilities onboard so — with users’ permission — the site can also track how those conservation efforts pan out.

Chris Rose, REAP’s executive director, said at the meeting when the resolution passed that the hope is to eventually set up competitions among communities in Southcentral. Wasilla, for example, would be pitted against Palmer to see which could conserve more.

“This is really going to be the beginning of what we think is going to be a statewide program,” Rose said.

The resolution was on the assembly’s consent agenda — a segment of the agenda of each assembly meeting wherein a block of ordinances and resolutions is passed, usually with one vote.

According to the resolution, community outreach and education on energy efficiency is required as a part of the borough’s overall energy efficiency and conservation strategy, which is a requirement to receive an energy efficiency and conservation grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Borough planner Emerson Kruger said at the September meeting that the borough put in for such a grant — $250,000 to complete three projects making the main borough building in Palmer more energy efficient — and has to put up matching funds. Spending those matching funds on the REAP project, he said, could fulfill the community outreach portion of the plan.

Rose said REAP is putting up $25,000 and could conduct the campaign with that money and the borough’s $100,000. He said REAP is seeking other funding sources but, as yet, hadn’t found any.

Colberg wrote in a memo accompanying the veto that he had a number of reasons for vetoing the resolution. One, he wrote, is that the borough has more pressing concerns.

“The voters just turned down a bond to make repairs on existing schools. School maintenance is still an obligation that will need to be addressed in some manner in the future. In contrast, a south central Alaska media campaign to raise consumer awareness is not an essential borough function,” he wrote.

He also pointed to borough libraries, which have budgets of $120,000 to $280,000; funding levels he said is a struggle to maintain.

“It is not the job of the government to tell people how to think. We can and should provide support to libraries so people can have access to ideas and make their own decisions,” Colberg wrote.

He also objected to the process used to pass the resolution, saying that a consent agenda, which doesn’t require a public hearing, isn’t the place for “allocating $100,000 to one special interest group.”

At least two assembly members agreed with Colberg. At the September meeting, Cindy Bettine and Mark Ewing both voted against the grant to REAP.

“I’d like to see you gain some money from them and then come back to us,” Ewing said to Rose. “For the borough to be the primary funding source at this time, I don’t know if that’s correct.”

In an e-mail sent after Colberg’s veto, Bettine said she agreed with a lot of the mayor’s reasoning. Both she and Ewing said the program is a great idea and that they’d love to see the borough sign on eventually, though maybe not for this amount of money or at this time.

“I just don’t think that’s what the borough is, that’s not one of the basic functions that we should be doing here,” she said at the September meeting.

Assemblyman Pete Houston, one of the proponents of the resolution, said in an interview Thursday that he thought the borough should definitely be involved.

“I think it’s important for the borough to take the lead, partly because nobody else seems to be and partly because that’s part of our commitment, our plan. We set that as a goal,” Houston said. At the September meeting, Rose responded to the idea the borough doesn’t need to take the lead.

“Somebody wants somebody else to go first. And what we’re wanting to do is use the borough’s leadership to leverage more funding and move forward,” he said.

Houston said it was his understanding that the $100,000 comes out of a portion of the borough budget set aside for grant matches.

“It wasn’t specified at budget time what particular grant it would need to be, we just reserved money so we would be able to match grants as they came out,” Houston said. “If it wasn’t this grant, it would be some other.”

He said he felt the borough had fulfilled its public hearing requirement at budget time when the money was set aside as grant matching funds, but said he’d welcome another chance for the public to weigh in.

The vetoed resolution will be back before the assembly on Nov. 3. The last time Colberg wielded his veto pen — to strike down the ordinance putting a sales tax proposal on the most recent ballot — his veto was quickly overturned. The sales tax eventually failed at the polls.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.