After clearing the slate and starting over again, local lawmakers are confident the newest version of a bill aiming to promote ethanol will be passed this year.
Sen. Dan Zumbach, R-Ryan, who chairs the agriculture committee and also sits on the natural resources and environment, rules and administration and transportation committees, recently updated county and city officials along with members of the business community on the state of a bill that was proposed last year.
Zumbach, who has lived in Delaware County his entire life and has around four decades of farming experience, said legislators had drafted a bill last year that ultimately was not well received by many of the major players in the fuel industry, but he said that criticism has helped to craft a strong bill that will be more beneficial to all involved.
“We found out that the bill we had last year was not right and all the players involved in the fuel industry shared their concerns with us,” Zumbach said.
Rep. Carrie Koelker agreed and said, when introduced last year, it was an unpopular bill to say the least.
“I’ll just say it — it was kind of a horrific bill, but it was a start,” Koelker said.
However, Koelker said with the amount of legwork that has been done off-session, mostly by Zumbach, the bill is now gaining a lot of traction among lawmakers and stakeholders.
“We sat down and talked about what can we live with and what we can’t, so those conversations have been held locally because that was a big concern of ours,” Koelker said.
Rep. Steve Bradley, R-Cascade, also gave accolades for the work put in by Zumbach.
“I think we have a lot of things covered in this bill,” Bradley said.
Zumbach said any good piece of legislation takes time to get right, and starting with a clean slate certainly helped.
“That bill literally got wadded up and thrown into the wastebasket so we could start over,” Zumbach said.
Given that fuel plays an enormously important role in the lives of any Iowan, from the student driving to school to retail business selling it to the farmer growing it, Zumbach stressed these changes will be impacting everyone.
“The goal of the bill is to do two things: one — create a better and broader market for our corn and soybeans grown here in Iowa. Let’s develop that market right here in Iowa and let’s promote it,” Zumbach said, “and two, we want an available fuel that’s high quality being sold at the lowest price possible for the consumer.”
But in order to accomplish either of those goals, Zumbach said they had to make it work for the processors and retailers.
“One of the biggest hurdles we had was with the retailers — if they now had to promote E15, some of their infrastructure isn’t set up to deliver it and it’s expensive to get it all updated,” he said. “We became very aware of that and created some exemptions.”
If a new gas station is being constructed, it will be required to include ethanol infrastructure, but Zumbach said that is something that has been practiced without any sort of mandate for more than a decade anyway.
“If you’re a small mom-and-pop gas station here in rural Iowa and you don’t have the traffic that station out by the interstate does, there’s no way you could ever justify updating all that equipment — there just isn’t enough volume to justify that quarter-or-half-million-dollar upgrade,” he said. “If they can show it’s a hardship, they can get an exemption.”
Zumbach said one of the aims of the proposed changes is to promote E15 as the fuel of choice.
“We’re not going to put any restrictions on how (gas stations) have to sell it,” Zumbach said. “If you pull up as a customer, that gas pump can have zero ethanol, E10, E15, E18 — they can advertise it how they choose as long as they are still following federal law.
“But they are incentivized to sell E15.”
As for biodiesels, Zumbach said there was less pushback from retailers on that proposal as fewer infrastructure issues exist compared to regular diesel.
Moving forward, Zumbach said while the bill isn’t in “hardcore ink” just yet, it’s very close to being finished.
“It took us a while to get to this point,” Zumbach said. “Do we have everyone on board? No. But do we have the vast majority of folks on board? Yes.”
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