Gov. Kelly Ayotte on Monday vetoed House Bill 451, which would have established a statewide paint recycling program funded by an “assessment” on paint.
Merriam-Webster notes that for more than 500 years the word “assessment” has meant “to determine the rate or amount of (a tax).”
Gov. Ayotte correctly called the assessment a tax, and vetoed it. She might soon get a chance to do that again.
On Tuesday, the House Finance Committee narrowly voted to interim study House Bill 1602, a nearly identical mandatory recycling program for batteries. If the bill escapes the committee recommendation and makes it to the governor’s desk, she’ll be faced with another new tax.
Both the “Paint Product Stewardship Program Plan” in HB 451 and the “state battery stewardship plan” in HB 1602 would be run by private organizations. To sell paint or batteries in the state, manufacturers would be required to register each product. Retailers would be prohibited from selling any paint or battery not on the officially approved list.
To get its products on the approved list, a manufacturer has to agree to participate in and fund the recycling program.
Though these programs would be run by private groups, they would require state oversight through “rulemaking, plan reviews, regulatory enforcement, and evaluation, with administrative costs,” as HB 451’s fiscal note put it.
The cost of that bureaucracy would theoretically be covered by the tax. How high is the tax? Neither bill sets a rate. Both empower the recycling organizations to set it.
HB 1602 directs battery stewardship organizations to “develop a system to collect charges from participating producers to cover the full cost of plan implementation,” which raises interesting constitutional questions regarding the delegation of taxing power to private organizations.
Given the daily use of batteries in an enormous variety of consumer and commercial products, HB 1602 would leave no Granite Stater untaxed—by a private organization. That seems far more consequential than the similar but smaller paint tax bill vetoed earlier this week.
