The Governor’s Commission on Climate Change came out with its final report Friday, as you surely noticed.

It lists six items that the commission urges the governor to do immediately, among them is beefing up energy efficiency, that little old item that hogged so much of the spotlight during the legislative session and refuses to go away.

One of the other items is a collaboration between the state and the University of Vermont and other state colleges on climate change issues. The state would use the colleges’ expertise, the colleges would use the state as a laboratory, or something like that.

This one caused a tussle on the commission because some wanted it to be the focal point of the commission’s report and some thought that if it the final report focused on a collaboration and not on specific ways the state could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that the specifics would get lost. The administration, particularly Agency of Natural Resources Secretary George Crombie, was a big backer of the collaboration idea; so was commission Chairman Ernie Pomerleau.

I always love a good tussle, so I became intrigued about the genesis of this idea. I asked ANR for correspondences between UVM and the agency just to see what I’d learn about it. E-mails back and forth contain a few interesting items I’d like to share with y’all.

- First, there’s no doubt ANR was working out the details of this thing, rather than the commission. E-mails about the agreement are between UVM President Dan Fogel and ANR Deputy Secretary John Sayles. Crombie, Pomerleau and the governor’s staff (Chief of Staff Tim Hayward, Administration Secretary Mike Smith, press secretary Jason Gibbs and aide Dennise Casey) are all included on the e-mail exchanges.

- The e-mails also offer a little insight into worries about whose feathers might get ruffled, the way they did on the governor's scholarship proposal last year. Fogel says in an Oct. 12 e-mail to Sayles (and copied to the rest of the crowd):

" ... we see an opportunity to draw good lessons from the experience with the
Vermont Promise Scholarship proposal." (you might recall a protracted
disagreement between the governor and the legislature on that one) "In a
nutshell, we think we need to be as inclusive as possible in the very early
stages of the work on this agenda. We should therefore probably avoid, in the
draft, statements that suggest that the General Assembly will not be a partner
in this project (e.g. statements like point 11 and 13 on the draft, as
transmitted by you at 3:23 p.m. yesterday, that the blueprint for the transition
to a green economy will be drawn up without legislation.")

Fogel also worries over whether legislators will object to UVM"s higher profile in the agreement over Vermont State Colleges.

Sure enough, the final wording of that section of the report includes everybody except your grandmother, calling the agreement:

"a strategic partnership among the State of Vermont, including its agencies,
departments, the General Assembly and the Office of Governor; the University of
Vermont among the nation’s leading centers of environmental education and
research, and Vermont’s other premier academic and research institutions; and
the private business and non-governmental sectors."

- Fogel also offers some insight into how the thing was going to be publicized, indicating there was going to be a news conference that was postponed. In the Oct. 12 e-mail, he says:

"We may want to consider, for example, having the initial press conference
feature the Governor and the Chair of the GCCC rather than the Governor and the
president of UVM, but of course I will defer to the Governor’s best judgment on
this."

In an Oct. 13 e-mail, Fogel refers to plans for a public announcement of the agreement "in 10 days or so." He worries in that e-mail about whether the public debut of the agreement "is a great leap forward or will seem, in retrospect, to have been a misstep."

What’s all that mean? Well, the fact that ANR worked the agreement out and the import Crombie gave it by calling it the "commission’s signature proposal" in an ANR press release issued Friday indicate that this is what the governor is going to focus on. No matter that the commission’s report ended up treating the UVM agreement equally with a handful of other priorities, this is the one the administration cares about.

And all the fretting wasn't about the substance of the agreement (who's opposed to "working together?"), but the politics of the agreement.

- Terri Hallenbeck