Legislative Watch: Senate Keeps Politicizing Clean Water
Demands by the NC Senate’s leadership continue to polarize and politicize environmental cleanup efforts, including toxic contamination in drinking water supplies.
Bad environmental behavior by the Senate set up two unnecessary and messy fights in the House this week. First, the Senate took decent legislation which the House had passed to get started on GenX cleanup, and converted it to yet another partisan slap at the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). The House version of HB 189 would make a $2.3 million down payment on the equipment and DEQ staff training tools needed to address emerging water pollutants like GenX.
Predictably, the Senate majority leadership last week rolled out an entirely different bill under the same number. The Senate version cuts out the new equipment authorization, and requires spending most of the new funds on what critics are labeling as wasteful busy work instead of useful tasks like testing wells and other air and water pollution levels.
Some of the funding would be specifically directed to the “NC Policy Collaboratory” (a controversial new entity under the control of a former aide and ally of Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger). In essence, Gov. Roy Cooper’s DEQ would be blocked (once again) from most meaningful work on the GenX and emerging pollutants issue.
In the second controversy of the week, Senate and House majority leadership rolled out legislation which would begin a genuine fix for an education system funding problem the General Assembly created in 2016 through an unfunded mandate to local school systems to shrink K-3 class sizes.
Unfortunately, the bill was as usual revealed whole by a small cadre of top legislative leaders without public debate, and contained two major controversial items which had nothing to do with fixing the education funding problem. One of these was the latest change to a partisan revamp of the state’s administrative machinery for managing elections.
The other was a provision to hijack the environmental mitigation fund established by the Cooper Administration in negotiation with the sponsors of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Instead of mitigating local impacts of that pipeline, the funds would be redirected to other state uses. The purpose of the change is clearly to deprive the Cooper Administration of spending authority. If the communities in eight counties which would be impacted by the pipeline suffer more as a result, that’s of secondary concern to the bill’s backers.
Over vigorous objections of concerned legislators, both of these environmentally problematic bills were passed by the Senate and sent (or sent back) to the House. We will watch for the House response this week. Will the majority in that body once again knuckle under to extreme anti-environmental demands?
