The Sunday Observer: Paving over the locals for green energy but not for housing density

Legislature's endgame starts to take shape

We’re in the final week of the Legislature’s session when lawmakers must negotiate a complex deal to get out of town. Friday marked the last significant procedural deadline, for House bills to pass the Senate and vice versa. Nearly everything with a chance of passing has been approved by both the House and the Senate in some form, with final agreement by one side or the other held back as bargaining chips. Today we’re taking a look at some survivors and some things that got knifed in the final hours before the cutoff.

Paving over the locals for green energy

We’ll start at an obscure state agency that most people have never heard of. The Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, known as EFSEC, has been around since the 1970s, when building atomic power plants was a thing. The Legislature created it to permit nuclear and other major power plants in places where local officials and citizens might be inclined to use various environmental laws to block them. Because who wants to live in Springfield from “The Simpsons?”