Daily Journal - Blunt Visits Madison County

News Article

By Kevin Jenkins

When U.S. Senator Roy Blunt, R, visited Black River Electric Cooperative in Fredericktown Sept. 20, the focus of conversation was expected to be on the "ENFORCE the Law Act" he had recently introduced in the U.S. Senate "to help ensure the executive branch faithfully executes the law."

The subject immediately turned to complaints about regulatory overreach by the Environmental Protection Agency.

BREC Marketing Manager John Singleton introduced Blunt to the small group of local businessmen and community leaders, saying, "The senator has been outstanding when it comes to supporting issues that make sense for the cooperatives and we certainly appreciate that.

"One of the things we're facing day in and day out right now are the EPA proposed regulations and we appreciate your support. We know you have been right in there with us. You know, these cooperatives in general have already submitted more than a million comments opposed to these EPA regulations.

"From Black River's point of view, with 24,000 members, we've already had 12,000 comments submitted to the EPA. We really feel like with the senator's help and Congress' help, we certainly hope that the EPA will rethink some of their positions and not have these onerous, somewhat arbitrary, regulations placed on us as rate payers."

Sen. Blunt said in response, "We should be more concerned about this than most people because we're more coal dependent than most people. We're the fifth most coal dependent state in the country and, actually, I've been talking to them in Farmington a little about water and municipal issues there."

Blunt said two proposals EPA has out about energy and power and the other on water were the worst.

"They go way beyond any reasonable standard of what the country should be talking about -- let alone doing," he said.

Blunt said the biggest danger to economic growth for the area is over-regulation.

"It's the one people see as the biggest obstacle to us just taking advantage to some pretty big things that are about to happen," Blunt said. "We've got all this new American energy all around where we are. It's highly accessible to us as it is to the rest of the country. We could be energy independent if we wanted to between us and our two neighbors -- our biggest and our third biggest trading partner, Mexico and Canada.

"World food needs are going to double in the next 55 years, between now and 2070. We happen to be in the most food producing contiguous part of farmland anywhere in the whole world -- the Mississippi Valley. And then you combine that with great farmers, but also great ag research and this could be a big opportunity for us. I think people are ready to make things again."

Blunt said he believes utility bills will have more of an impact on where companies want to put their industrial locations than anything else.

"If you double the utility bill, a lot of things simply won't happen that would happen otherwise," he said. "The opportunities are there -- biomass -- look where we live here, particularly this part of Missouri.

"Europe wants to be 20 percent dependent on renewables for their energy by 2020. If you can figure how to get it on the water quick enough, this is a very competitive place to go with parts of that industry that we really known just what to do with. All this is out there, but just because it's logical, doesn't mean it's going to happen."

Blunt said that even a handful of regulations and bad decisions such as taxes, high utility bills and poor transportation systems could send possible opportunities in the opposite direction.

"We'll over-regulate ourselves and not have a good cost/benefit analysis. That's the one where it seems the regulators are not just out of control -- they're unaccountable. They're less accountable in the second term of a presidency than they are the first because nobody in the whole chain of command has to respond to anybody they work for again."

He said one thing he's been in favor of "for a long time" is an end date on every piece of federal regulation that has an economic impact.

Blunt said in 2009 he had opposed cap and trade, an environmental policy tool that places a mandatory cap on emissions.

"That's mostly because we [the state of Missouri] are the most impacted by anything that goes after coal-based utilities," he said. "It passed the House, but between the time it passed the House and got to the Senate, people figured out that actually this is something they should care about. This was about their utility bill. It was never going to pass the Senate.

"That's probably one of the best examples of regulation. I think that would be the same with a lot of these regulations. If you had to go home and defend the impact of what some of these regulations have for the benefit you get, most members wouldn't be willing to do that."

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