Placing the Arkansas Energy Office under the control of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality would be a better alignment for the nine-person office's mission, Gov. Asa Hutchinson said Monday during an announcement outlining his desired state government restructuring.
Hutchinson said he would push for the state Legislature to introduce a bill that would restructure some governmental agencies in the name of efficiency. The two items announced Monday -- he added that more would come -- were a proposal to move the Arkansas Energy Office and another proposal to reduce the number of detention facility review boards.
Hutchinson said the energy office has done "great" in its current position as a subset of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. But in recent conversations with Economic Development Commission Executive Director Mike Preston and others, Hutchinson said he thought the mission of the energy office fits better with the Department of Environmental Quality.
The energy office has nine employees, a budget of about $8.6 million and focuses largely on energy-efficiency projects, including projects for individual homeowners, and securing funding for them. Only about $140,000 of its budget comes from the state, Hutchinson spokesman J.R. Davis said. Most of the office's funding comes from federal grants.
"It's just a better alignment at the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality," Hutchinson said.
Messages left at Arkansas Energy Office were not returned Monday.
Preston said he thinks the proposed change to the energy office is a "wise move."
"It's not always about dollar deficiencies, but where you can have better synergy," he said.
The energy office and the Economic Development Commission have worked together on matters related to utilities and on some economic development projects, Preston said, given the role energy costs may play in a company's decision to stay in or leave Arkansas.
But Preston noted the energy office's nonbusiness programs with homeowners, and he said the energy office often works with the federal government, which the Department of Environmental Quality does more often than the Economic Development Commission.
Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality Director Becky Keogh believes that the realignment -- which would add the energy office as a nonregulatory division of the department alongside the air, water and land resources divisions -- would be beneficial for environmental and energy projects, as well as in handling the $13.9 million the state expects to receive in the federal consent decree against Volkswagen, said Donnally Davis, a department spokesman.
The consent decree was a catalyst for the proposed change.
Hutchinson noted that of the overall $2.7 billion Volkswagen settlement, Arkansas will get about $13.9 million to be used for reducing nitrogen oxide emissions in the state -- energy-related funds that could be administered through the Department of Environmental Quality.
Arkansas' share of the Volkswagen settlement is $13,951,016.23, which it won't receive until a mitigation plan is approved by a court-appointed trustee, according to the department.
Volkswagen must pay into an environmental trust fund after the discovery last year that the company installed a device in its vehicles that caused them to underreport nitrogen oxide emissions, which contribute to the formation of ground-level ozone and can be harmful to health in high enough concentrations.
Arkansas will seek public input in the plan, which must be based on one of 10 "eligible mitigation actions." Those actions include reduction for certain freight trucks, buses or other equipment.
States must recommend a potential trustee to manage the Environmental Mitigation Trust this week and must undergo a process after that to become a beneficiary of the trust, before having 90 days to develop a plan for using the funds.
A Section on 11/22/2016