Gov. Pat McCrory has acted to favor polluters over public health by signing the Polluter Protection Act. This week in CIB.

Executive Watch: McCrory Signs Polluter Protection Act

Gov. Pat McCrory on Friday left no doubt where he stands. By signing HB 765, the 2015 “rules reform” bill now widely known as the Polluter Protection Act, McCrory acted to protect polluters at the cost of greatly increased danger to the health, clean water, and clean air of all North Carolinians.

“We are greatly disappointed with Governor McCrory’s actions today. We had shared our concerns with the Governor, emphasizing that nothing in this bill was essential but much was harmful. We’re saddened to see our leadership give a green light to such egregious, anti-environmental actions,” said Carrie Clark, Executive Director of NCLCV.

McCrory acted in spite of receiving more than 8,600 emails and hundreds of phone calls from concerned citizens urging him to veto the bill. A joint letter to McCrory from 15 citizen conservation organizations (including NCLCV) explained the bill’s dangers and urged a veto. Major newspapers around the state joined in editorializing against the bill.

“This bill undoes so much of the progress our state has made in the last decade to clean up our air and water, build healthier communities, and create a stronger workforce. Now, using false claims that these regulations were holding back business, our Governor and legislative leaders have allowed polluters to have their way with our natural resources and the future prosperity of our state,” remarked Dan Crawford, NCLCV Director of Governmental Relations. “Governor McCrory has simply reaffirmed his position of siding with corporate polluters over the interests of North Carolinians and the future of our state.”

As previously outlined in CIB, here are three of the worst problems created by this bill:

• The bill’s “polluter protection” provision (known euphemistically as the “environmental self-audit”) excuses permit-holders who violate environmental limits from civil penalties for their offenses, if they self-report the violations. This encourages carelessness by air and water pollution dischargers. And it lets the polluters keep evidence of the audit discovering the pollution secret from civil suits and the public.
• The bill cuts back state protections for isolated wetlands and eliminates state protections for intermittent streams (streams which flow in an established channel but only for part of the year). These waters are critical to wildlife and to protecting clean water in other streams and rivers across the state throughout the year.
• The bill will require the state’s air quality protection agency to shut down about half of its air quality monitors, creating willful blind spots in our monitoring network and making effective regulation of air pollution much more difficult.

HB 765 helps to ensure that environmental protection will be a major concern in the 2016 election cycle getting underway now.

Judicial Watch: Judge Says DEQ Not Doing Its Job

U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Biggs last week denied motions by Duke Energy and the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to dismiss or postpone litigation by environmental groups seeking cleanup of water pollution from toxic coal ash.

The Judge was blunt in her evaluation of DEQ’s efforts, which the agency tried to claim were sufficient to shield it and Duke from the citizen suit seeking cleanup. “The Court is unable to find that DENR [now DEQ] was trying diligently or that its state enforcement action was calculated, in good faith, to require compliance with the [Clean Water] Act,” wrote Biggs. “The Court notes that its determination of [DEQ’s] lack of diligence has been further confirmed in the year since the Riverkeepers filed suit. [DEQ] has now been litigating its enforcement action for over two years” and has not “filed any motions requiring Duke Energy to clean up its sites.”

The Court ruled that the plaintiff citizen groups could proceed with all the case’s claims, including those related to unlawful coal ash seepage, prohibited leaks into groundwater and surface water, and dam safety violations.

Around the Globe: Canadian Elections Shift Pipeline Politics

The biggest election news last week came from our northern neighbor, Canada. In Canada’s national parliamentary elections, the Liberal Party rolled to an absolute majority of seats over the incumbent Conservatives, giving the Liberals national legislative and executive control. Its pick for Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, will assume that office and control of the government in just a few weeks.

Trudeau will oust Conservative Party leader (and current Canadian Prime Minister) Stephen Harper. Harper has been a leading supporter of the controversial international Keystone XL pipeline, which if built would transport oil from the Canadian tar sands deposits to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Trudeau is actually on record as supporting the pipeline as well, but has de-emphasized the importance of that issue in favor of broader concerns. Meanwhile, his party is split on the question, with its recently elected premier of the Alberta province a skeptic of the pipeline. Overall, the Canadian Liberals are calling for stronger environmental safeguards for oil development in their nation, pipeline or no.

The ousted incumbent Harper, in contrast, had made delays and uncertainty about approval of the Keystone pipeline a major point of friction between his government and the Obama Administration. As a result of the election changes, analysts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) project less Canadian pressure on the American administration for approval of the pipeline, and more likelihood of its rejection by the U.S. State Department.

For a review from the U.S. side of the possible effects of the Canadian elections on American politics regarding the pipeline, see the Los Angeles Times evaluation here.

Campaign Watch: Municipal Voting Underway

The looming weight of 2016 overshadows this fact in public awareness, but actual voting is underway now in multiple competitive elections around the state of North Carolina. Mayoral and/or city council seats are up for election in cities and towns including Fayetteville, Greensboro, Durham, Charlotte, Asheville, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and more.

As CIB has pointed out in the past, many key environmental policy and program decisions are regularly made at the local level. These include decisions on roads and public transit (including rail), parks and greenways, land use and zoning, and stormwater and water quality protection.

Even if local elections in your community have flown ‘under the radar’ this fall, it’s easy to check on what’s up for voting in your city or town over the next week. (Note: not all communities have elections this year. Some won’t come up until next year or 2017.) To find out which (if any) offices are on the ballot in your city or town this year, go to the state Board of Elections website and select your county.

If your community has elections, learn who’s running and vote! Your voice as a voter has an outsized impact on the local level compared to its relative weight on the national or even state level. The local park, stream, or woodland you save may be your own!

That’s our report for this week.