What The Frack, Vermont? Rising Tide VT Continues Stalwart Pipeline Opposition

BURLINGTON – Anna Rose of Rising Tide VT is perched on a table next to an LCD projector in the meeting space of the Vermont Workers’ Center, giving a presentation about America’s system of fossil fuel pipelines on a mild March Thursday evening in the Old North End of Burlington. “Our government and our systems are failing us, miserably,” she says matter-of-factly to the thirty or so activists and community members gathered together in assorted chairs before her.

Rose and the rest of Rising Tide VT, an environmental and climate justice organization with philosophical and political roots in Burlington’s branch of the Occupy movement have been waging a patient but persistent campaign to prevent the construction of the Addison County Natural Gas Pipeline since early 2013. Frequently referring to the Vermont Gas Systems (VGS) project as the “fracked gas pipeline,” due to it’s payload of natural gas obtained through the process of hydraulic fracturing in the gas fields of Canada; Rising Tide has been reaching out to communities along the proposed route of the pipeline: south Williston to Middlebury and eventually Rutland. The extent of their outreach efforts is palpable: driving down from Burlington along Routes 7 and 116, their signature red, black, and white yard signs proclaiming “Stop the fracked gas pipeline!” are a ubiquitous sight on the roadside.

“The backbone of this campaign has been the hundreds and thousands of Vermonters turning up to hearings and meetings [over the years],” says Rose as she recounts moments where opposition activists, landowners, and local environmentalists jammed into the normally stale hearings held by the Public Service Board (PSB). In some instances, such as a public comment session at Middlebury High School, hundreds of pipeline opponents outnumbered supporters by nearly ten to one hoping to push the PSB to deny the Certificate of Public Good (CPG) required for construction to move forward. That same year, organizers from Rising Tide marched on the Department of Public Service’s Montpelier offices and attempted to present the Board with a giant rubber stamp, a bitter symbol of what many believe to be blatant disregard for the voices and concerns of everyday Vermonters.

Distilling the opinion of many within Vermont’s environmental and climate justice movement, Will Bennington of Plainfield put the situation bluntly to attendees in Burlington, “the system is designed so that we can’t win if we play by their rules,” he said. Alex Prolman, another volunteer with Rising Tide, laid out the conflict of interests that many pipeline opponents have been struggling against. “Currently the Department of Public Service is tasked with advocating for ratepayers and it’s clear that they understand their jobs and their purpose as providing as much support for corporations as possible,” said Prolman. “They’re very clear about that in the things that they say that justify their arguments to the Board,” he continued.

This conflict has led to a slow ratcheting up of opposition to the Department of Public Service itself. After receiving the coveted CPG, Vermont Gas began the process of either buying out landowners along the route, or by threatening to seize the land required through Eminent Domain proceedings. Fast forward to 2016 and Rising Tide finds itself once again marching on the Public Service building in Montpelier, this time to disrupt Eminent Domain hearings with dozens of singers that packed the conference room and generated headlines across the state.

In the midst of the contentious hearings, Department Commissioner Chris Recchia is facing an additional public backlash in the wake of a damning report from Vermont Public Radio. The report by Taylor Dobbs reveals the scrubbing of criticism from Recchia’s self-evaluation requested by the legislature. The goal of the report had been to determine if the Department needed any internal reforms in order to best serve the public. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report concluded that no reforms were necessary.

“Of course he’s going to omit this stuff, he’s slick. He’s really slick,” said Monkton landowner and longtime pipeline opponent Jane Palmer. “He seems like a kind of down-home, goofy kind of guy but he’s really slick and he knows how to manipulate things,” she said. Palmer, who was arrested in 2014 for refusing to leave the South Burlington headquarters of Vermont Gas, was surprised that lawmakers in Montpelier would give Recchia what amounts to a free pass on accountability. “As [my husband] Nate pointed out, he would have gotten much better grades in high school if he had been able to self-evaluate.”

With the VPR report coming on the heels of multiple disruptions of Eminent Domain hearings; Recchia and the PSB have made further headlines as they consider locking the public out of the remaining hearings. The Board claims they fear for the safety of the hearing’s participants. Representing several landowners in the proceedings, attorney Jim Dumont disputes the legality of closing the hearings to the public. “[Closing the hearings] would be inappropriate under the First Amendment, Chapter 1, Article 6 of the Vermont Constitution, and the Open Meetings Law,” said Dumont in a written statement to the Public Service Board. “I think it ill serves reasonable public debate about this terribly important subject to suggest that their actions have been tainted by threats of violence,” he said.

When asked about the possible closure of the hearings, Anna Rose was more disappointed than surprised. “The fact that they don’t want the public at the public process raises some serious questions about who should be making decisions that concern people’s lives and people’s families,” said Rose. “It’s really quite troubling.”

Rose also questioned the credibility of the Department of Public Service, particularly regarding the creation of a just and equitable energy system that meets the needs of Vermonters. “I think it’s becoming clear to people across the state that the governing bodies that are making these decisions lack any legitimacy to do so,” said Rose. “We need to have a way of approaching not just what energy we’re using, but how we’re deciding what energy we’re using.”

Recchia’s hubristic self-assessment, when taken with the Board’s move to close the hearings, only adds fuel to the fire of Rising Tide’s trenchant criticism. “What we need is for the Public Service Board and the Department of Public Service to be abolished,” says Prolman emphatically, before expounding on the need for a more democratic energy system that would provide utilities but be held directly accountable to everyday Vermonters.

When asked if they thought Commissioner Recchia should resign, Prolman and others delighted in the idea but stressed that this would only be a first step towards dismantling what they feel is the deeper issue of a profoundly unjust system. “Even if Chris Reccia isn’t there we have state institutions, that because of the way they’re structured, are going to keep creating the same results over and over again,” said Prolman. “Hell, yeah, I think Chris Recchia should resign,” he said. “[But] if he’s gone in any capacity, without commensurate, significant, structural overhauls to the Department of Public Service- we’re going to keep seeing the same thing.”

Preparing for the late drive back to their Monkton farmhouse with her husband, Jane Palmer quietly summed up why so much attention and criticism has been leveled at the PSB in recent months. “It just isn’t the way it’s supposed to work and people who’ve worked with the Board and the Department years ago have said ‘this is not the way it’s supposed to work,” she said. “This has gotten corrupted. That’s what’s happening now.”

Oscillating wearily in a wheeled office chair at the end of the community forum in Burlington, Anna Rose paused when I asked her about what needs to happen for Department of Public Service to be a just and equitable agency. “On one hand, Recchia is literally is just doing his job. [But] his job is to obfuscate and do whatever the Governor wants him to do,” she said. “I think we need to ask hard questions about what will it take and how many people have to be burned and screwed over before we can organize and enact a wholly different system of making decisions in Vermont. Recchia on a very personal level has hurt a bunch of people who are saying ‘this guy should be out of office, this guy shouldn’t be here anymore.’”

Rising Tide Vermont is planning Week of Action for early June. Visit their website for more information.

Dylan Kelley is a freelance journalist, photographer, and radio producer focusing on independent news stories spotlighting human rights, civil liberties, and the working class.