The Polluter Protection Act is set for votes today, and conservationists are warning that its supporters will be held accountable if they succeed in passing the most anti-environmental bill of the year. This week in CIB.

Legislative Watch: Polluter Protection Act Votes Set Today

Both the House and Senate are scheduled to vote this afternoon on the conference committee report of HB 765, the 2015 “rules reform” bill now widely known as the Polluter Protection Act. The conference committee of House and Senate members knocked out some of the anti-environmental provisions which we talked about last week, but enough seriously problematic items remain that HB 765 still deserves its bad name.

Here are three of the worst provisions which remain in this so-called “rules reform” bill:

1. First, there’s the explicit “polluter protection” provision, which gives the entire package its derogatory name. Known euphemistically as the “environmental self-audit”, this provision actually excuses permit-holders who violate environmental limits from civil penalties for their offenses, if they self-report the violations. The practical impact is to encourage carelessness by air and water pollution dischargers, since it becomes simple to get off the hook with the equivalent of a ‘whoops, sorry about that.’ It further makes the polluter’s internal investigations “privileged” – meaning that it is protected from having to release them to a civil court review or the public – further weakening the state’s ability to detect, prevent, investigate, and penalize for illegal pollution.
2. The bill also further cuts back state protections for isolated wetlands and eliminates them for intermittent streams (waters which flow in an established channel but only for part of the year). Both of these types of waters (most especially the intermittent streams) are critical to protecting clean water in other streams and rivers across the state throughout the year.
3. It would require the state’s air quality protection agency to shut down many of the air quality permitting stations now in operation. Unfortunately, what we don’t know that we’re breathing in our air can indeed still hurt us. Plus, such willful blind spots in our monitoring network makes effective regulation that much more difficult.

For more details on these and other polluter protection items in HB 765, see here.

The original HB 765 was a one-page bill about transporting gravel, passed by the state House. Unfortunately, the Senate took that small bill and mutated it into a long and complex one including a broad variety of bad environmental items. The House did not go along with the revisions, and the two versions of HB 765 went to a conference committee of members from the House and the Senate. Unfortunately, that committee reported back a version still loaded down with egregiously anti-environmental provisions.

NCLCV urges its members and supporters to contact your legislators and urge them to vote “No” on the conference committee’s version of HB 765. One easy way to write is through the NCLCV action link here.

According to NCLCV Director of Governmental Relations Dan Crawford, HB 765 could be “the worst environmental bill of Gov. McCrory’s tenure.” That’s why, if it passes the House and Senate, conservationists will be asking Gov. Pat McCrory to veto the bill. You can urge Gov. McCrory to veto HB 765, known as the Polluter Protection Act, by calling 919-814-2000.

Campaign Watch: Primaries Moved Up to March

The primaries for state offices, federal offices and the presidential primaries in North Carolina will take place March 15 next year under legislation passed by the NC General Assembly and sent to the governor last week. That’s nearly two months earlier than usual.

If this bill is signed into law, the state’s whole primary election calendar moves up for next year. Significantly, the filing for federal and state offices moves up from February to December. Candidates not filing by noon on December 21 will miss their chance to run next year. The changes are an advantage for incumbents, and for candidates who have already decided to run and started their preparation well in advance. For anyone who’s still weighing the decision, however, time has suddenly become much shorter. A primary challenger starting from scratch with little or no money or name recognition has a steep hill to climb in an abbreviated time.

Supporters of the move called it a way to hold overall state election costs down, while moving the state’s presidential primaries to an earlier stage in which the state could have more influence on selection of the nominees. Skeptics suggested that the change for state elections could be motivated more by a desire to get the state legislative and Congressional elections going before the Supreme Court instruction that constitutionally-questioned district lines be reviewed can be carried out for 2016.

In any case, for those districts which are chiefly competitive in the primary (rather than the general election), the change amounts to incumbent protection.

Cynical observers of legislative politics are shocked – just shocked.

Coast Watch: Offshore Wind Power Options Advance

The federal agency in charge of reviewing offshore energy plans, including wind power, has released its findings that offshore wind energy can be developed safely in three areas off the North Carolina coast. The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM) revised environmental assessment applies to one area off the northern Outer Banks and two areas off Cape Fear.

“After considering public input and conducting a thorough environmental review, we believe that wind leasing and site characterization activities can be done in a manner that will continue to allow for other uses, and be compatible with the environment,” said BOEM Director Abigail Ross Hopper.

BOEM will hold a public meeting of its North Carolina Renewable Energy Task Force in Wilmington on October 7 to discuss its findings and its proposed approach for a public auction of offshore wind energy development rights in the designated safe areas.

Offshore wind is considered by many renewable energy advocates to represent North Carolina’s biggest untapped resource pool for safe, clean, and renewable energy.

That’s our report for this week.