Elizabeth Dunbar reports for Minnesota Public Radio September 27, 2019 6:55 p.m.
Xcel Energy will retire their last two coal-fired power generating stations. The Allen S. King station will retire in 2028 and the Sherco 3 station will be retired in 2030. William Lager | MPR News file
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission on Friday rejected Xcel Energy’s purchase of a natural gas power plant in Mankato, Minn., saying it wasn’t in the public’s interest.
Xcel had wanted to purchase the Mankato Energy Center, saying it would help with the utility’s planned early retirement of coal plants in the state.
But the Minnesota Department of Commerce, Xcel’s large industrial customers, the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota and others raised questions about the cost of the plant and said it could hurt Xcel’s utility customers.
Still, other groups backed Xcel’s plan, including several clean energy groups and the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
They had argued having the gas plant in Xcel’s control would give both the utility and Minnesota more flexibility in the transition away from the fossil fuels contributing to climate change.
“Any decision about it has input from people,” said Kevin Lee, an attorney for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. “That’s decisions like retirement dates, things like operational control. I can imagine a scenario in 2040 or 2045 or 2050 where you keep the gas plant, but maybe you only use it one or two days a year.”
Instead, he said, the Mankato Energy Center will be owned by someone else and could keep burning natural gas long into the future.
Kevin Pranis of the Laborers’ International Union of North America said having Xcel in control of the plant might provide opportunities for union workers leaving jobs at retired coal plants.
“Minnesota is going to be going through a really challenging transition,” he said. “This was an important asset that would have facilitated that.”
But Citizens Utility Board executive director Annie Levenson-Falk said the PUC’s decision protects Xcel’s customers.
“This purchase was not in customers’ interest. For Xcel to spend $650 million of ratepayer dollars to purchase the plant would present too much cost and too much risk,” she said.
The Republican from New York had called the charges against him ‘meritless’ but is scheduled to change his plea Tuesday afternoon
Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) leaves a courthouse in New York after a pretrial hearing on his insider-trading case on Sept. 12. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Renae Merle and Mike DeBonis report for the Washington Post September 30, 2019 at 2:10 p.m. EDT
NEW YORK — Rep. Chris Collins is resigning from Congress and expected to plead guilty to insider-trading charges on Tuesday, following allegations last year that the Republican from New York schemed with his son to avoid significant losses on a biotechnology investment.
Collins, President Trump’s first congressional supporter, allegedly tipped off his son to confidential information about an Australian biotechnology company, Innate Immunotherapeutics, that he learned as a member of its board. Collins and several others used the information to avoid more than $700,000 in losses, according to prosecutors.
He is scheduled to change his plea Tuesday afternoon in a Manhattan federal court.
Collins’s son, Cameron; and another family member are scheduled to change their pleas on Thursday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) received a letter of resignation from Collins on Monday, a senior Democratic aide said. The resignation will be effective when the letter is officially filed at a scheduled House session Tuesday.AD
Collins’ attorney did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment.
Collins, who once called the charges against him “meritless,” has since 2013 represented New York’s 27th Congressional District, which encompasses suburban and rural areas stretching east of the Buffalo metropolitan area.
Collins won reelection last year after initially suspending his campaign, then reversing that decision despite pressure from Republicans to step aside and allow another GOP candidate on the ballot. Collins was sworn in for a fourth term in January but was not seated on any House committees pending resolution of his indictment.
Several candidates have announced campaigns to challenge Collins in 2020, including GOP state Sens. Chris Jacobs and Rob Ortt as well as Democratic lawyer Nate McMurray, who came about 1,000 votes shy of unseating Collins last year. Should Collins resign, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) would set a special election for the coming months.AD
Despite Collins’s close reelection race, the 27th District is considered reliably Republican — Trump won it by 24 points in 2016.
Collins was among Trump’s earliest endorsers and continued speaking out on his behalf after being indicted — including as recently as last week, when the congressman issued a statement criticizing Democrats’ announcement of a formal impeachment investigation of Trump. The White House and fellow Republicans, however, have kept their distance from Collins.
Collins was indicted in August 2018 and had been fighting the charges. Innate Immunotherapeutics was developing a new therapy for multiple sclerosis. Collins served on the company’s board of directors and was its largest shareholder, according to a federal indictment.
According to prosecutors, while at the June 2017 congressional picnic at the White House, Collins received an email from Innate Immunotherapeutics’ chief executive alerting the company’s board that an eagerly anticipated drug trial had been a failure. Minutes later, Collins responded to the email: “Wow. Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???”AD
Collins immediately tried to contact his son, who owned millions of Innate Immunotherapeutics shares, according to the indictment. Within a few minutes, Collins and his son called each other six times before connecting and talking for six minutes. During that call, Collins told his son about the failed drug trial, according to the indictment, which cites phone and bank records as well as texts.
With that insider knowledge, Collins and his family were able to avoid significant losses before the news became public and the company’s stock price fell more than 90 percent, prosecutors allege.
Lincoln Financial Field – Philadelphia Magazine photo
The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Lincoln Financial Field. The former Aramark Tower.
Together, those Philadelphia landmarks are worth $794 million, according to city assessment records. But they are among the nearly 23,000 properties in Philadelphia exempt from paying property taxes because they are owned by nonprofit or government institutions.
In sum, the $29.6 billion value of all exempt properties account for 17% of the city’s total real estate value, according to an Inquirer analysis. Their combined tax breaks equal about $414 million annually.
It’s not unusual for cities like Philadelphia, with a high concentration of universities and hospitals, to have a large amount of untaxed property. Adam Langley, who studies tax exemptions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Massachusetts-based think tank, said he often cites the city when referring to places with lots of tax-exempt properties.
Still, Langley said, Philadelphia is “kind of an outlier” because it does not seek payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreements with its largest nonprofit institutions, a step that has enabled other cities to recoup millions in extra revenue.
When he ran for mayor four years ago, Jim Kenney said the city should pursue PILOTs or comparable service agreements. Now, as Kenney asks voters in November for a second term, other types of tax exemptions have come under scrutiny from City Council, activists, and residents, and property reassessments have led to tax hikes for thousands of homeowners in the last two years.
And some of the same activists who have urged the city to eliminate or reform its 10-year tax abatement for new construction or rehabilitation have called for PILOTs for institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, which owns at least $3.2 billion in property and has a $14.7 billion endowment.
But no negotiations for PILOT agreements are underway, said Jim Engler, Kenney’s chief of staff.
What kinds of properties are tax-exempt?
State law dictates that churches, cemeteries, hospitals, institutions of learning, charities, and government-owned properties are exempt from taxes, as long as their revenue goes toward the support of the institution or charity. Many argue that they help the city in other ways, as large employers, tourist attractions, or health-care providers.
Government properties — owned by the city, state, and federal governments, housing authorities, SEPTA, and other agencies — account for nearly 40% of the value of all tax-exempt properties, the records show. The remaining exemptions are for nonprofits.
Educational institutions in Philadelphia own about a quarter of the value of tax-exempt properties, the Inquirer analysis found.
Jessica Lewis says shucking an oyster is like picking a lock.
“You can’t really muscle through it,” she said, running a small knife around the edge of a closed oyster shell. “You press down, and then you just wiggle, and pop it open.”
Jessica Lewis, executive chef, prepares oysters at Spirit & Tales. Photo: Kara Holsopple/The Allegheny Front
Lewis is the executive chef of Spirits & Tales at the Oaklander Hotel in Pittsburgh. She says the restaurant goes through 300 to 400 oysters a week, from the East and West coasts. But regardless of where they’re sourced, the top and bottom shells will end up as a part of a restoration project in the Chesapeake Bay.
Lewis and her staff toss the spent shells into a 35-gallon barrel with a screw-on lid, located in the trash area on the ground floor of the building. About once a month a truck picks up the old shells from this and six other participating restaurants in Pittsburgh and drives them more than 250 miles to a staging area just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland.
“So here you’re looking at about 7,000 tons of clean shell,” said Karis King, with Oyster Recovery Partnership, a nonprofit which works to increase oyster numbers in the Chesapeake Bay. She’s standing at the base of a mountain of gray shells.
They’re dumped with a front loader into a machine that’s like a modified potato hopper, which helps sort the shells. While on the sorter, the shells are washed with water from the nearby Choptank River, a major tributary of the bay. Smaller fragments of broken shell fall away, as a conveyor belt deposits the half shells into wire cages or piles where they’re cured for a year.
“Even with all the shell that we do recycle, and also purchase from shucking houses, we still don’t have enough to do large scale restoration, at the rate that we could,” King said.
Nature is “out of whack”
A look back in history explains the scale of the problem, says Stephanie Alexander, manager at the Horn Point Lab oyster hatchery.
“When John Smith sailed up in the 1600s, he was running aground on oysters,” Alexander said.
That’s before these waters were overharvested, and before there was agricultural runoff and soil erosion from development.
“We’ve pretty much wiped the oyster out to less than one percent of historic levels,” she said. “So we started this restoration effort where we’re using a hatchery to produce spat on shell to put back into the bay, so we can kind of help jump-start Mother Nature.”
The concept is pretty simple: Scientists here at the lab produce baby oysters from adults harvested from the bay, nurture the microscopic larvae with a custom algae diet, then get them to attach to the recycled, treated oyster shells. That’s the “spat on shell.”
It’s a lot harder than it sounds. Even in the lab, with its high-tech tanks, instruments and network of pipes, nature is in charge.
Alexander says it was a slow summer for the project. Increased rainfall caused a drop in salinity in the bay, stressing the adult oysters, and making them less likely to spawn, or produce eggs and sperm.
The water in the bay is also warming, which could make it harder for the spat on shell they release to grow a second shell, and over the years, form the clusters that create oyster reefs.
“When one thing gets out of whack, everything else is going to kind of follow,” Alexander said. “So we’re trying to get the oysters back into balance, so then, hopefully, everything else will follow.”
Vacuum cleaners of the bay
Over the last two decades, the lab and Oyster Recovery Partnership have planted 8 billion oysters on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, with the help of other partners like the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Throughout the summer spat on shell are released from a boat on sites where they’re most likely to survive. Alexander says that’s critical.
“Oysters are the vacuum cleaners, or the kidneys, of the bay,” she said. “They just suck the water in. They decide if it’s food or not food. But no matter what it is, they remove it from the water column, and that’s how they clean it.”
Because of this superpower, oyster aquaculture is a best management practice identified by the regional partnership that oversees cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
Some of the spat raised at the Horn Point Lab will make its way to oyster farmers, and those are the “oysters on the half shell” that are served in restaurants. But the majority of the spat will help rebuild oyster reefs, creating habitat for fish, and restoring the ecosystem.
Back in Pittsburgh, Jessica Lewis is educating diners and trying to convince other Pittsburgh restaurants to join the oyster shell recycling effort that feeds the conservation work. She hopes they’ll see the value in giving back.
“With climate change, and all those scary things, it’s like a bright light shining through–that we did something good,” she said.
Her pitch: Every shell counts.
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This story is part of our series, Wild Pennsylvania, which is funded by the Richard King Mellon Foundation. To check out other stories in the series, click here.
This story is produced in partnership with StateImpact Pennsylvania, a collaboration among The Allegheny Front, WESA, WITF and WHYY to cover the commonwealth’s energy economy.
CNN — The trade war with China has been particularly painful for American farmers, but a separate issue is currently straining their support for the administration: biofuel.
The leaders of 23 corn grower organizations sent a letter to President Donald Trump on Friday, arguing that his administration’s biofuel waivers have reduced demand for their crops.
“Frustration in the countryside is growing,” the letter reads.
In August, the Environmental Protection Agency granted 31 waivers to small refineries, temporarily exempting them from biofuel laws. The waivers free refineries from having to blend biofuels like ethanol into their gasoline.
Corn growers immediately voiced their concerns and Trump later tweeted that a “giant” ethanol package was in the works.
“The Farmers are going to be so happy when they see what we are doing for Ethanol,” Trump tweeted.
But, a month later, they appear tired of waiting for the details to be finalized. In the letter, growers said that that a rising number of ethanol plants are closing or reducing production, costing more than 2,700 jobs. If refineries are using fewer soybeans and corn, it drags down the price farmers can get for their crops.
“Clearly, this has eroded support for the administration right now,” said Ron Heck, an Iowa soybean farmer who serves as secretary of the National Biodiesel Board and sits on Trump’s Agricultural Advisory Committee.
Farmers have generally stood behind Trump and his mission to get a new deal with China, even as Beijing has put tariffs on a variety of American-grown agricultural products. China was the biggest market for soybeans, but exports have plummeted. A record amount of soybeans are sitting in storage.
Trump appropriated $28 billion to farmers hurt by Beijing’s retaliatory tariffs, but the aid package isn’t meant to make up for their entire losses.
But to many farmers, including Heck, the short-term pain is worth what he believes a new trade deal with China will provide in the future by addressing unfair trading practices. But the issue with ethanol is different. He blames the EPA for causing the problem.
“The trouble is with the EPA. So we’re giving Trump a reasonable amount of time to fix this, and if he doesn’t, there will be some farmers who will say he didn’t deliver on his promise,” Heck said.
The Clean Air Act requires transportation fuel to contain a minimum amount of renewable fuel. But under the Renewable Fuel Standard program, small refineries can apply for a temporary exemption if it demonstrates that meeting the requirement would cause an economic hardship. The Trump administration has approved 85 waivers in total.
A spokesman for the EPA said the agency “will continue to consult with our federal partners on the best path forward to ensure stability in the Renewable Fuel Standard.”
“The President will always seek to engage with stakeholders to achieve wins for the agriculture and energy sectors,” he added.
Earlier in the week, farm groups applauded the Trump administration for signing a new trade deal with Japan. It will open up markets for US beef, pork, wheat and other agricultural produce.
“This is a huge victory for America’s farmers, ranchers, and growers, and that’s very important to me,” Trump said at a press conference Wednesday.
But while American pork producers say they’re happy about the deal, it only gives them about the same level of access to the Japanese market as they would have gotten under the Obama-era Trans-Pacific Partnership in the first place. Trump pulled out of the 11-country deal as one of his first acts as President, opting for a bilateral agreement instead.
Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden and his sister Valerie Biden Owens attend a ceremony to name a national road after Joe Biden’s late son, Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III, in Kosovo on Aug. 17, 2016. (Visar Kryeziu/AP)
When then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son joined the board of an obscure Ukrainian gas company half a decade ago, it was a stunning coup for its owner, a former Ukrainian minister working to remake the company’s image as he faced a money-laundering investigation.
For Hunter Biden, the job came with risks: Ukraine was in the throes of political upheaval, and there was building scrutiny of former government officials profiting in the lucrative gas industry. His father was the face of the Obama administration’s effort to get Ukraine to crack down on corruption.
The region was so unsettled that one of Hunter Biden’s investment firm partners at the time — former secretary of state John F. Kerry’s stepson — believed that joining the board of Burisma Holdings was a bad idea and ended his business relationship with Biden and another partner, his spokesman told The Washington Post.
Now, more than five years later, with Joe Biden running for president, Hunter Biden’s decision to get involved with the Ukrainian firm is the backdrop of an extraordinary whistleblower complaint against President Trump that is reshaping the 2020 political landscape.
Revelations that Trump, along with his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, pressed the Ukrainians to pursue investigations into Burisma and examine the role of the Bidens have triggered an impeachment inquiry in the House, with allegations that Trump withheld U.S. support for Ukraine to ensure Kiev investigated his potential rival in the presidential election.
No evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the Bidens has surfaced. Giuliani’s primary allegation — that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to quash a probe into the former minister and Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky — is not substantiated and has been widely disputed by former U.S. officials and Ukrainian anti-corruption activists.
Still, Hunter Biden’s decision to associate himself with the company has raised an uncomfortable question the Biden campaign is struggling to explain: Why didn’t the vice president take steps to head off a perceived conflict of interest between his efforts to crack down on corruption in Ukraine and his son’s work for a gas tycoon investigated for abusing his position as a government official?
“Why didn’t Joe Biden tell Hunter, ‘Come off it. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ ” said Oliver Bullough, a British journalist on the advisory board of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, or AntAC, a nonprofit in Ukraine.
For some Ukrainians, Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma undermined his father’s calls to end corruption in Ukraine. It also raised concerns that prosecutors would avoid pursuing alleged wrongdoing by Zlochevsky out of fear that the former minister had high-level connections in the United States — the critical backer of the Ukrainian government at the time.
Ukrainian businessman and founder of the Burisma Holdings company, Mykola Zlochevsky, during a media conference in February 2012. (Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP)
Inside the vice president’s office, there was discussion about whether Hunter’s position on the board would be perceived as a conflict of interest, according to several former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
One former adviser was concerned enough to mention it to the vice president, according to an adviser, but the conversation was brief, and other aides said they didn’t want — or see a need — to raise the issue.
Former U.S. officials who worked with Biden maintain that his son’s activities in no way influenced his actions regarding Ukraine as vice president.
“Is there an appearance issue?” a former adviser said. “Of course there’s an appearance issue. But did it actually create wrongdoing? No.”
At the time, the White House said that Hunter Biden was a private citizen and that the vice president didn’t endorse any company in Ukraine. While vice president, Joe Biden did not comment publicly on his son’s role at Burisma.
What specific duties Hunter Biden carried out for Burisma are not fully known. A lawyer for Hunter Biden, George R. Mesires, declined to say how much his client earned, or whether the vice president’s son knew the company’s owner was in the crosshairs of authorities when he joined.
