Battling the frigid temperatures

Nebraska and areas all over the United States experienced some of the coldest temperatures on record last week. These extreme temperatures caused greater energy needs throughout the country, straining the power grid. This caused the last-resort need for rolling blackouts, or load shedding, a process by which power is intentionally and temporarily cut to a specific area to avoid a total blackout of the system.

Public Power districts in Nebraska are part of the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) sharing power with a number of other states, including Iowa, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Some of these states had unusually cold temperatures and rare amounts of snowfall causing them to draw more power from the pool than normal for this time of the year.

Late last week, I introduced a Legislative Resolution that will recognize the need for understanding recent power outages, and calls the Natural Resources Committee to report the circumstances and practices that led to them. As chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, this is an important issue to me. No Nebraskans should go without power, especially for extended periods of time in these extreme conditions.

Every ten years, the legislature establishes a redistricting committee to adjust congressional and state legislative district boundaries in Nebraska based on the new census data. This committee, which consists of three senators from each of the three congressional districts, has the ability to introduce and has jurisdiction over legislation relating to redistricting. LB107, the redistricting bill for this year, had a hearing last week. This year however, due to COVID-19, it is possible that census data may be delayed and not received until this year’s session is over. If that is the case, the legislature may need to reconvene in the fall to complete redistricting.

The legislature debated one of my bills, LB148 on general file. LB148 transfers a number of environmental programs dealing with water sustainability, mobile home parks, swimming pools, and recreational camps from the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to the Nebraska Department of Environmental and Energy (NDEE). These responsibilities are already being performed by NDEE by an agreement with DHHS, this bill just formally transfers these powers in statute. This bill was voted on and advanced to Select File.

One of my other bills, LB507, which would prohibit the use of treated seed corn in the production of ethanol if the resulting byproduct has no land application and cannot be fed to livestock, was voted out of committee and placed on General File as a committee priority bill. 

I appreciate hearing from constituents on issues affecting District 23 and encourage you to contact my office on legislation at 402-471-2719 or bbostelman@leg.ne.gov.

This article originally ran on columbustelegram.com.