Abigail: “Hello. I’m here with Rowan Felton, the Commisioner of Environment and Conservation. At the end of the last session, a bill that would have extremely benefited the governor’s budget, and allowed the passing of other bills, had been failed. For the people who do not know, can you please recap what the bill entailed?”
Rowan: “So the bill would have implemented carbon pricing for companies that were producing oil, and it also would have implemented a midstream tax for imported oil for refineries.
That would have raised over half a billion dollars for the state of Tennessee. And you are correct, that money is being allocated to other priorities that the governor has such as education and infrastructure.”
A: “We’ve been recently told that the bill got passed the second the second session started, but what wouldn’t happened if it had gotten failed again?”
R: “So the state’s of Tennessee’s Constitution mandates that it has a balanced budget. So, without the funding from that bill, we would not have been able to passs any more bills that spent money. A large portion of the bills that passed would not have been signed into law by the governor without the passage of this bill.”
A: “How would this have affected you since as the Comissioner of Environment and Conservation?”
R: “ This would have directly affected my department because there were several well-written, very well researched bills that were spending a reasonable amount of money for what they were asking for, but that were expensive bills that needed additional funding compared to the original budget. That’s why we had to pass more dynamic legislation. It would have also significantly affected our education dynamic legislation, because that is also pretty expensive. We really needed this bill in order to be able to pay for those other bills.”
Department of Public Information 