Local governments and school boards are working with a Washington, D.C.-based interest group to ensure the two highly-contaminated nuclear sites in their areas receive Payments in Lieu of Taxes in the fiscal 2023 budget request the Joe Biden administration sends to Congress in several weeks.
The locals, with support of the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), are peppering the Department of Energy, Congress and the White House with letters to ensure those payments are included upfront for the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Although Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) were omitted for those sites in the 2022 budget request for the $7.5-billion DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), they were subsequently inserted into currently unreconciled fiscal 2022 spending packages passed by the House of Representatives and the Senate Appropriations Committee.
As of Friday, no final fiscal 2022 budget has passed and the government remained open thanks to a continuing resolution, the most recent of which was set to expire Feb. 18, Generally, the bill kept DOE spending at fiscal 2021 levels.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was chided last June when she appeared before Congressional panels with a fiscal 2022 budget request lacking federal compensation for local governments around two of the Department of Energy’s most contaminated nuclear cleanup sites.
“The PILT makes up for revenue lost due to ad valorem taxes,” when a community has in the case of Savannah River, a 310-square-mile area unavailable for economic development, said Gary Bunker, who chairs the Aiken County, S.C. Council, in an ECA press release Thursday.
“We have been working since 2015 with Congress, the DOE, and now three successive administrations to try to resolve this issue so that PILT for the Hanford communities can be predictable, sustainable, and reliable for all parties involved,” said Benton County Board of Commissioners chair Shon Small. “It seems that we bang our heads against the wall every winter during budget season, and it’s very frustrating.”
“[T]his is one of those things, we don’t have a political person at EM,” Kirshenberg said in reference to a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for environmental management. “A political person could speak to the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] folks.”
Kirshenberg believes most stakeholders in the weapons complex are pleased with having career-long federal manager William (Ike) White run day-to-day operations as a special adviser. The ECA director does not expect the Biden administration to nominate an assistant secretary anytime soon.
As for PILT, people around Hanford and Savannah River are not the only ones angling for more local funds in fiscal 2023.
Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) took to the House floor last week to urge more such funding for the DOE’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
“Through my role on the Energy and Water Subcommittee on Appropriations, I’ve gotten to know the good people of Pike County, Ohio, where the Department of Energy owns 3,700 acres of land where a uranium enrichment plant once operated,” Ryan said in a Jan. 20 press release. “And wouldn’t you know it, Pike County has one of the highest cancer rates in the entire state of Ohio. Yet, their PILT payments is a paltry $47,000 a year.”
