WASHINGTON -- A regional convenience-store group is pushing back hard against a proposal from the Trump Administration to sell off or close the U.S. petroleum supply reserves.
As part of its proposed fiscal 2018 budget, the Trump Administration would sell off half of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve (NGSR) to trim government spending. The U.S. government created the SPR in 1975 to cushion the fuel market against supply disruptions. The Obama administration formed the NGSR in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy to protect the fuel supply from disruption in New York and New Jersey.
Sal Risalvato, executive director of the New Jersey Gasoline, C-Store and Automotive Association, Wall Township, N.J., blasted the Trump reserve plans in a statement, saying they would “undo the protections we have put in place.”
“This short-sighted proposal from the Trump Administration puts millions of New Jerseyans at risk,” said Risalvato, whose association represents around 1,000 small businesses in the state of New Jersey. “I am not aware of any projections for the future that call for lower sea levels and weaker hurricanes.
“The only protection we have from a Sandy repeat (or worse) is this Northeast reserve, and now the president wants to take this security away,” he continued. “How does he expect to get to and from his Bedminster golf course every weekend if the roads are jammed with motorists stuck in gas lines?”
Risalvato said that plans to cut the SPR in half “will jeopardize our energy and economic security for a few drops in the bucket, or should I say a few drops in the barrel.”
“The SPR is exactly what it says it is: a strategic asset that is to be used only in limited, emergency situations,” he said. "It was created to safeguard us during wartime, natural disasters or conspiracies by overseas oil producers; it was not meant as a onetime sugar rush to fill a structural budget deficit.”
Risalvato said “a dangerous attitude [is] emerging among some of our elected leaders” in the Trump Administration's proposals for the reserves.
“It seems that when they find a reserve, whether it be a financial reserve or a petroleum reserve, which has been responsibly put aside to prepare for the worst, their first instinct is to find out how they can raid it and spend it all off right now rather than make the hard decisions that they need to make if our future is to experience any prosperity,” he said.
Risalvato called on New Jersey’s elected officials, including Gov. Chris Christie, to oppose the Trump budget’s proposal for both reserves.
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