At the Capitol In the News

An environmental policy group has given low marks to Indiana-area legislators for their voting records during this legislative session on some of the bigger environmental bills.

According to PennEnvironment, a Philadelphia-based group, Rep. Dave Reed, R-Indiana; Rep. Sam Smith, R-Punxsutawney; Rep. Jeff Pyle, R-Ford City; and Sen. Don White, R-Indiana; more often than not voted in ways that the group deemed unprotective of the environment.

Of the four, White scored the highest at 43 percent, followed by Reed at 33 percent. Pyle scored 11 percent, and Smith came in last at zero.

The percentage grades are based on a few select bills — nine bills in the House and five in the Senate, plus two political reappointments — and whether legislators voted the way the group thought they should have .

On its Web site, the group explained that the bills and reappointments of the secretaries of the environmental protection and conservation and natural resources departments it used in building the scorecard have the greatest impact on Pennsylvania’s environment and public health.

“In order to protect and preserve Pennsylvania’s environment, we need our elected officials voting for the strongest environmental protections possible,” said PennEnvironment director David Masur in a statement. “These scorecards detail the environmental voting records of elected officials so that citizens can hold those officials accountable.”

But local legislators said they don’t much stock in the scorecard.

Smith, for instance, said he has traditionally scored low with the group because it tends to represent the extreme in environmental issues and the group’s views often conflict with what is best for this area.

Smith said the score misrepresents his stance on the environment, pointing out that he’s done a lot of work on legislation related to acid mine drainage.

Reed, too, said the scorecard is misleading.

He pointed out that one of the bills used to calculate the grade was an amendment to special session House Bill 1, which, according to the group, diverted $25 million from alternative energy projects to help subsidize required improvement and coal-fired power plants. The group was opposed to the amendment.

Reed voted for it because he said that money would help coal plants install “scrubbers,” equipment designed to remove mercury from coal plant emissions.

He said that the state’s coal plants are almost exclusively located in the western end of the state, a fact he said the people in the eastern end of the state tend to forget.

“They need to remember that we would like to have clean air as well,” he said.

In a memo to fellow Republican senators, Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango, said these sorts of environmental scorecards “have too often been utilized to portray Republican candidates as ‘anti-environmental.’ Votes are apparently selected to ensure that certain legislators are portrayed favorably; other important and critical votes are therefore ignored.”

The memo includes a list of bills that were not used in grading legislators.

But Masur told the Gazette said that the group doesn’t include some bills in its grading because their fates have already been determined behind closed doors by House and Senate leadership. Votes on those sorts of bills tend to be unanimous and do little to help show where a legislator stands on environmental issues.

He also said that some of the other bills mentioned in the memo were voted on after the scorecard was put together. He said it will be updated online at www.pennenvironment.com to reflect some additional votes.