Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy
Late Friday afternoon, just as we were in the middle of writing this week’s Broadside essay, Gov. Chris Sununu announced his veto of House Bill 142, relative to the Burgess Biopower plant. You’ll have to wait a week to get that essay. This veto is big news.
HB 142, as we wrote here, would have forgiven $50 million in overpayments the Burgess plant owed utility ratepayers, and would’ve given the plant further favorable regulatory treatment.
It was the last in a string of bills over several years to prop up a small North Country employer for the purpose of subsidizing—at most— a few hundred jobs. Keeping the plant afloat has cost New Hampshire ratepayers somewhere north of $200 million, it is estimated. That’s money Granite Staters were not allowed to spend on themselves because politicians wanted to spend it on a politically favored industry.
In Washington, such schemes are rightly called corporate welfare. That’s what they are here, too.
As we wrote last year, the subsidy scheme for the Burgess Biopower plant was a jobs program, not a green energy program. And it was a very expensive jobs program.
If the plant did actually support 240 jobs, as supporters claim, then $200 million in subsidies comes to $833,333 per job saved. How is this a good deal for anyone?
At that price, the state could’ve bought each one of those 240 people a home and a college degree and had money left over.
New Hampshire’s unemployment rate is 1.7%. Employers—especially those in growing, rather than dying, industries—are desperate for employees. Many are offering signing bonuses and high wages. There may never have been a better time to look for work in New Hampshire. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up one unprofitable employer never made sense, but it is especially foolish now.
Gov. Sununu’s veto ends a corporate welfare scheme to forcibly transfer wealth from ratepayers to a single unprofitable power plant. That’s good for ratepayers, good for New Hampshire and good for individual freedom.
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