An eleventh-hour effort by an environmental group to derail the governor's nominee to the board of trustees for the Efficiency Maine Trust failed today, after members of a legislative panel concluded there was no reason to oppose the nomination. The Natural Resources Council of Maine claimed that Brewer engineer and businessman Don Lewis should not serve on the board because of a conflict of interest.
Over the weekend, the Natural Resources Council of Maine notified the LePage administration that Don Lewis' nomination to the board of the Efficiency Maine Trust was problematic. The group said that Lewis's involvement in a company that manufactures and sells high-efficiency equipment for industrial, commercial and residential customers could be a problem for the candidate.
Specifically, the NRCM and others were concerned about the company's heat pumps for hot water heating, since Efficiency Maine has an active program to promote high-efficiency heat pump hot water heaters. Reasoning that Lewis might be trying to get on the board to add his company's system to the list of approved heat pump rebates, Pete Didisheim of the NRCM told members of the Legislature's Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee that the public trust was at stake.
"Representatives of energy company vendors, by their very nature of representing a technology in the energy field, do have a potential conflict of interest, and can be perceived as expressing, through budget allocations, decisions that are made routinely by the Efficiency Maine Trust Board," Didsheim said.
Lewis said he would recuse himself from any board vote that could result in his company receiving a financial benefit. "I think that anybody who would think that I would be going on one of these boards to feather my nest certainly doesn't know me," Lewis said.
Lewis's nomination was approved in an 11-0 vote. He will join 50 other nominees for confirmation votes by the Maine Senate Tuesday.