A proposal to reroute fees on power generation designed to help reduce energy costs to ratepayers to help address waste has been killed by the legislature's Environment Committee.  The proposal would have diverted $8 million a year in expected rebates on customer’s monthly energy bills from the expected closure of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, MIRA. 

The funding would have gone to the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection for a grant program to help towns come up with solutions for reducing their solid waste streams. 

Brookfield state Representative Steve Harding says it was a last-ditch attempt to manage the impact of closing one of the state’s largest waste-to-energy plants.  DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes submitted testimony that they used nearly all of the initial money allocated for the grant program, showing that municipalities need additional resources to come up with better methods of sorting and reducing the trash they currently send to incinerators like MIRA. 

Harding was concerned that Connecticut's energy utility companies would have been required to pay rebates to customers if they fail to get at least 4 percent of their power from waste-to-energy plants.