EV Club Offering Testimony on Transportation Committee Bill 416
Used EVs
This bill proposes to loosen restrictive rules for vehicles eligible for the used incentive. We support doing this but feel it could go further. This is the new language:
“A used battery electric vehicle, plug-in hybrid electric vehicle or
fuel cell electric vehicle that is eligible for a rebate or voucher under the
program shall (A) have a selling price at the point of sale of not more
than thirty-five thousand dollars, and (B) not be older than seven model
years old.”
The language omits any discussion of the fact that a used vehicle is not eligible if it was not eligible when new. We feel this restriction is not necessary and needlessly restricts the vehicle pool. This is an excerpt from EV Club testimony.
“Vehicle prices fluctuate and the MSRP cap has changed twice, creating inconsistency. Furthermore, for the standard rebate, the MSRP cap functions as a proxy for an income cap. It gets you to roughly the same place without the overhead and intrusiveness of income verification. But for Rebate+, there is income qualification. If a vehicle that was not eligible when new meets the proposed model year and cost parameters, there should be no other restrictions.”
Community+
There is language in Bill 416, as well as Bill 5153 that discuss enhanced incentives for non-income qualified individuals living in EJ communities. These folks are currently eligible for the Rebate+ incentive. DEEP has discussed introducing a new tier of incentive called Community+ that would apply to this group of people and set the incentive higher than the standard incentive but lower than Rebate+. The language in the bills is vague. We support doing this as it strikes a balance between addressing pollution hot spots, individual income levels, and managing the finances of the program.
Fleet Incentives
The bills carry forward language that has existed for about 5 years concerning offering incentives to business, non-profit, municipal, or tribal entities. The number of incentives would be capped at not more than 10 incentives in one year and 20 in total. This incentive was never actioned. The finances were not there to support it. But with the program expenditures down considerably (Q4 was 72% lower than Q4 2024) due to reduced numbers of incentives and the reduced amount for some incentive levels, perhaps there will be room.
Public Benefits Charge
We have written about how changes were made, why, and how it is undercut enrollment in managed charging. There are a couple of bills to dispense with it altogether, even in its shrunken form. To this point, this isn’t going anywhere.
Shoreline East
SB 22 and SB 12 propose to increase funding for Shoreline East to pre-pandemic levels. Shoreline East requires higher subsidies than the state’s other rail lines, but the funding half-measures we have been living with place it in a doom loop. The EV Club supports funding Shoreline East.
Shoreline East Diesel
The CT Department of Transportation announced that it plans to pull the electric train sets from Shoreline East and replace them with diesel. This would avoid paying Amtrak for the use of the overhead power lines and would save a projected $8.8 million dollars. To us, it is a good example how easy it is to ignore the non-binding resolutions the state has passed.
While it sounds like the arrangement with Amtrak is sub-optimal, this short-term budgetary priority ignores the longer-term public health cost of burning diesel fuel. Also, if the state is serious about promoting transit-0riented development, who would rather live near noisy, dirty diesel?