Concern that local use of home heating oil and natural gas could be curtailed is one reason state Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, has voted against S.2649B in the Senate’s Budget and Revenues Committee.

The legislation is sponsored by Sen. Liz Krueger, D-New York City, and would require the governor to submit an annual list of fossil fuel-related tax expenditures, including recommendations regarding continuation, modification or repeal of such expenditures; and to provide for the expiration of all such spending within three years unless the spending is renewed through legislative action. Krueger said in her legislative justification that the state is spending more than $1.5 billion a year on fossil fuel-related tax expenditures, spending she said distorts the market and subsidizes the use of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels.

“Some of these tax expenditures may serve a compelling public interest such as offering heating assistance to low-income New Yorkers,” Krueger said in her legislative justification. “However, a significant proportion of the spending serves to prop-up outdated industries or reward energy inefficiencies leading to a double cost to taxpayers once for the direct tax expenditure and again for the environmental damage resulting from the continued burning of fossil fuels.”

The legislation would require evaluations each year of all fossil fuel-related tax expenditures and recommendations to continue the program, change the program or end the program. Those decisions would be made in consultation with the state Energy Planning Board.

Krueger’s legislation was introduced in the 2017-18 and didn’t make it out of committee.

“I have a number of issues with this,” Borrello said. “First and foremost there’s a lot of unknowns here, particularly how this will impact home heating, which is particularly in my area natural gas, and how it will impact businesses. Also, there is a bit of hypocrisy here. The governor has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to run transmission lines to old-fashioned coal-burning plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio so how would that impact it. He knows the intermittent nature of renewable energy requires fossil fuel backup, but rather than doing it with natural gas in our own state he’s relying on old-fashioned dirty coal plants.

So those transmission lines I’m guessing would no longer qualify for any of these tax expenditures of any kind, so I feel it’s going to be problematic for the governor because he understands the fact, behind closed doors, that he needs fossil fuels to continue these projects. … To me, this is a dangerous precedent that is being set.”

Sen. James Tedisco, R-Glenville, also voted against the legislation, though it was advanced to the Senate’s Finance Committee.

In other business, the committee unanimously approved several pieces of legislation, including:

¯ S.5744A, sponsored by Sen. Brian Benjamin, D-Harlem, to create a tax credit for businesses that employ someone who completes a judicial diversion substance abuse treatment program or graduates from a drug court.

“I think we need to be incentivizing transition,” Benjamin said. “Some folks make a mistake and they’re trying to get their lives back together. We should help that and our tax law should benefit that. I’m a big supporter of programs like this, workforce development, particularly populations we want to transition into being taxpayers.”

¯ S.4671A, which extends the zero percent franchise tax rate to all manufacturers in New York state. The rate is only extended to the Class C corporations currently.

“This accounted for only 25% of manufacturers in New York state,” wrote Sen. Anna Kaplan, D-Great Neck. “While this was a significant help to those manufacturers, it left 75% of manufacturers still paying the higher rate, putting them at a competitive disadvantage with manufacturers located in states with no income tax…. According to a study conducted by The Beacon Hill Institute in November 2017, “the elimination of the PIT for pass-through manufacturers would Increase private sector jobs by 3,455 the first full-year and by 4,850 in 2022. The increase in economic activity sparked by extending the zero-percent tax rate to income from pass-through manufacturers would mitigate the loss of revenue to New York state and boost local tax collections.”