Transcript: House Bill 969 Hearing – February 27, 2026

Environment and Transportation Committee Bill Hearing – HB 969

Electric Vehicle Fuel Sold at Retail – Equipment Requirements, Units of Measure, Sales Price, and Fees

Participants:

• Vice Chair Michele Guyton
• Delegate Nick Allen (Bill Sponsor)
• Lanny Hartmann (EV Driver, Howard County)
• Kevin George Miller (Managing Policy Advisor, Tesla)

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Opening and Sponsor Testimony

Vice Chair Guyton:
We’ll begin with House Bill 969. Delegate Allen, Electric Vehicle Fuel Sold at Retail – Equipment Requirements, Units of Measure, Sales Price, and Fees. Delegate Allen, you may proceed.

Delegate Nick Allen:
Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the Committee.

I’m here today to testify in support of House Bill 969, which is cross-filed in the Senate as Senate Bill 649 with Senator Shelly Hettleman. Those of you who have been on this committee for the last few years may recall that Senator Hettleman and I have been working on this issue for the last three sessions. First, this bill originally began as a task force, and then last year we had a rather ambitious version of the bill to try to implement some of the recommendations from that task force in order to create a regulatory structure for electric vehicle supply equipment. This year’s bill 969 is not a direct descendant of those bills. If anything, it’s more like a cousin, but the intent of these bills is largely the same.

Over the last year, our friends at the Maryland Department of Agriculture and specifically their Weights and Measures team have been working to implement a lot of those recommendations from that task force, including establishing a registration and inspection program for this equipment. Since this work is still ongoing, we want to avoid complicating things for the Weights and Measures team. So we decided to hold off on implementing more of those recommendations and in all honesty, a lot of those recommendations were very expensive, it required building proprietary websites and technology.

So what we want to do is wait until the program that they’re setting up at the Department of Agriculture is a little bit more mature. In the meantime, we consulted with the team at Weights and Measures to try to find out what we could do to support their work and better protect EV drivers on the road, because that was the original intent of all of this: to allow EV drivers when they pull off the road and pull into a station, a service station, in this case, not a gas station, to have the same confidence that every other driver has when they pull into a gas station, namely, that the charge port that they’re pulling up to is going to be functional, that it’s going to provide the electricity that they’re paying for, and that they are getting the actual product that they are paying for.

So what 969 does is actually pretty straightforward. It simply codifies certain requirements and standards that already exist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology Handbook that governs electric vehicle supply equipment. First, it requires that the owner of an EV charge port to display their name, contact information, etc., in a conspicuous place, so customers and in our case the Weights and Measures team know how to contact them in the event of an issue when they’re doing inspections. Second, it requires the electricity sold at these places is sold in units of kilowatt-hours.

These two things are literally the bare minimum in terms of standardization, but I think they’re going to go a long way. There have been some questions about why we need to codify what’s already in the NIST handbook, and I believe this is important for several reasons. First of all, I think we’ve all learned over the last year or so how fleeting guidance from the federal government can be at times. So in this case, if we’re codifying it within the state of Maryland’s code, then it gives a little bit more stability. Second, if the Maryland state government, in this case the Department of Agriculture, are going to have a role in inspecting and enforcing these basic standards, they should have the full force of COMAR behind them. And also, like I said, it grants them the stability and predictability when it comes to enforcing our standards in Weights and Measures.

So with that, I will turn it over to any other witnesses that we have. I thank you for your time, I respectfully ask for a favorable report. I look forward to answering all of your questions, Delegate Nawrocki, and I also want to say that we’ve been working with the Weights and Measures team from the beginning. I think there’s still some clarifying amendments they might be requesting. I’m in full support of those. There’s also some amendments on the Senate version. Originally, the bill as drafted had a provision in it that applied to the Comptroller’s office in the setting of a minimum price. We decided to hold off on that because we didn’t want to complicate things with Agriculture versus the Comptroller and also the Comptroller’s office is rather busy because it’s tax season. So I will leave it there for now, and I thank you for your time.

Committee Questions

Vice Chair Guyton:
All right, Delegate Nawrocki.

Delegate Nawrocki:
Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh, Delegate, with those amendments that are coming, potentially, would that give more flexibility, so this kind of create a sort of an electric sliding scale that you’re looking to do here? Is that what this is?

Delegate Nick Allen:
No. Not quite. (Laughter)

Vice Chair Guyton:
Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo.

Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo:
Thank you, Madam Chair. Forgive me while I finish laughing. All right, with that said. (Laughter) So I have a bill that’s being heard next week that maybe has some overlap with yours, and I look forward to comparing notes and making sure that we’re working together on some of this.

Delegate Nick Allen:
Absolutely.

Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo:
And I’m sorry, I didn’t know that you were working on something, not the same, but some overlap.

Delegate Nick Allen:
Next year, I’ll make sure we coordinate better.

Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo:
It’s my first year back, so I appreciate it. (Laughter)

Testimony: Lanny Hartmann (EV Driver)

Vice Chair Guyton:
All right, thank you. Seeing no more questions for Delegate Allen, we will move forward then with two virtual witnesses. Mr. Lanny Hartmann and Mr. Kevin George Miller from Tesla. Mr. Hartmann… you may begin whenever you like.

Lanny Hartmann:
Thank you, Chair Guyton and members of the committee. My name is Lanny Hartmann. I’m an EV driver from Howard County. And I appreciate Delegate Allen’s attention to transparency of EV charging costs to consumers.

The cost to use public charging is much more complicated than buying gas. For example, there can be session fees, just 50 cents just to start the charge, there’s an energy price, that’s the price per kilowatt-hour unit of energy. And then there can be time fees that run concurrently with that. A dollar a minute, for example. And the prices can change pretty drastically throughout the time of day. It can be twice as much per kilowatt-hour during the day than it is at night.

And then there are taxes, unlike gasoline, where the taxes are baked into the price that you see up on the board. Charging fees have a sales tax that is applied after the price that is advertised, and there’s also sometimes a county energy tax. In the state of Maryland, Montgomery County charges a two-cent per kilowatt-hour energy tax for public charging. And Howard County doesn’t have any, so that’s the equivalent of paying 20 cents tax for a gallon of gas at one county versus another.

So my point is that it could be very difficult to compare apples to apples in the best of circumstances.

This particular bill, I believe that the provisions in this with the labeling of the charging stations for contact information, as well as the unit of sales, are already covered by the handbook, and I believe that the national level is the place to set these standards. So therefore, I respectfully ask for an unfavorable report. Thanks.

Testimony: Kevin George Miller (Tesla)

Vice Chair Guyton:
Thank you. Mr. Miller, are you with us online?

Kevin George Miller:
Yes, indeed.

Vice Chair Guyton:
All right, you may begin.

Kevin George Miller:
Hello, my name is Kevin Miller. I am a managing policy advisor with Tesla and until recently was a senior advisor with the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. So I really appreciate the opportunity to provide testimony related to House Bill 969. We appreciate the committee and Delegate Allen’s focus on transparency, consumer protection, and ensuring consistent standards for EV charging. We support those goals, but unfortunately, provisions in House Bill 969 raise significant concerns, and we recommend an unfavorable report.

I’ll make three points. The first relates to one that Delegate Allen addressed, minimum pricing authority. So the summary of the bill references authority for the Comptroller to determine minimum price for retail electricity sold as a vehicle fuel. We recognize that it’s not in the operative sections, but we would respectfully urge the committee to strike that reference to minimum pricing authority from line 7 to 9 and ensure that no related operational language is added elsewhere in the bill, which would be inconsistent with Maryland policy and regulatory precedents set by the Public Service Commission.

With regard to pricing constraint restrictions, there’s language in 969 that electricity sold as a retail vehicle fuel be measured and sold in certain units, and there are undefined caveats to that, so we would recommend at the very minimum clarifying that operators may assess fees to ensure that drivers can have access to charging and not have to wait excessively long times. Pricing is used as a signal to optimize access to charging, and make sure that folks leave once charging is complete. So we want to make sure that everyone has access to charging infrastructure.

And last but not least, as it relates to mandatory posting of responsible persons, we absolutely agree that folks should know where and how to contact people, but this has already a requirement and is unnecessarily duplicative of contents in NIST Handbook 44. That’s not unilaterally set by the federal government. This dynamic set of requirements is overseen by the Department of Agriculture, and we would recommend removing that. And I conclude my testimony there. Thank you.

Committee Questions to Witnesses

Vice Chair Guyton:
All right, thank you so much for your testimony. We have a question from Delegate Anderson.

Delegate Anderson:
Yes, for Mr. Hartmann. Are you being assessed any taxes on your home charging?

Lanny Hartmann:
Not beyond what the normal electricity taxes are for residential electricity.

Delegate Anderson:
Okay, so you’re paying no road user fees on your home charging? Okay. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Vice Chair Guyton:
Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo.

Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo:
I want to follow up with that. While you’re not paying any user fees at the point of charge at home, the registration for electric vehicles is considerably higher to compensate for that. Is it not?

Lanny Hartmann:
That’s correct, Delegate.

Delegate Fraser-Hidalgo:
Okay, thank you.

Closing

Vice Chair Guyton:
All right, thank you. Seeing no more questions, we will conclude the hearing on House Bill 969.

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