By Ginger Harris
The 2010 session of the Missouri General Assembly opens January 6 and ends in mid- May. Many bills have already been pre-filed, starting December 1, 2009. The Sierra Club will again have a presence in the Capitol in Jefferson City, working in cooperation with other organizations that advocate policies that help protect the environment. The Club will again cooperate in the hiring of one or more lobbyists under an umbrella group called Missouri Conservation & Environmental Alliance (MCEA), consisting (so far) of the Missouri Sierra Club, Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE), MissouriVotes Conservation (MVC), Missouri Parks Association, Missouri Recycling Association, Missouri Audubon, Missouri Conservation Federation, Green Building Council, and hopefully a “transportation caucus” of Scenic Missouri, Missouri Bicycle & Walking Federation, St. Louis Regional Bicycle Federation,Trailnet and others.
Some of the legislation we will be trying to enact in 2010 includes energy efficiency incentives; green building codes; “complete street” guidelines to assure that road rights of way serve all users from motorized vehicles to pedestrians; additional funding for public transit and for state parks; improved and better funded regulation of toxic emissions; incentives to recycle materials; and improvements to sand & gravel mining rules. If bills are introduced to allow companies that pollute excessively to evade regulations and fines by “self-auditing” but not disclosing their emissions to their workers or the public, our lobbying alliance will oppose such bills.
Likewise, if bills are introduced to forbid county health departments from regulating the health impacts of “factory farms” (CAFOs), we will work to keep such bills from passing.
The 3 broadly environmental organizations (Sierra Club, MCE and MVC) are sponsoring Environmental Lobby Day in the Capitol on February 3, 2010. If you would like to consider attending, let us know, so that we can contact you with the details as soon as we know them.
If you would like to join our Legislative Committee or our legislative alert system to keep abreast of our lobbying efforts, please email your email address and phone number to Missouri.chapter@sierraclub.org.