Another Dirty Water Gift to Developers
Yes, it’s a trend: Developer-legislators are giving themselves another weakened limit on water pollution. The latest “regulatory reform” bill would let more development intrude into supposedly protected vegetated buffer zones alongside rivers and streams, without adequately controlling the results.
The latest pro-polluter change proposed to North Carolina’s water pollution control laws was included in what has become an annual ritual of passing a package of unrelated weakening changes to regulatory laws (especially environmental protection regulations). These bills go by the sanitized name of “Regulatory Reform Act of [this year].” This year’s version, HB 600, with the weakened limits on development intrusion into vegetated riparian buffers, passed the House last week just before the ”crossover” deadline to keep bills alive for approval later in the session.
As noted by NC Conservation Network’s Legislative Update for 5/5/23, “Section 2 of this bill decreases the amount of stormwater runoff that must be treated in order for a development to encroach on a vegetative buffer. Current law requires runoff from the entire development to be treated; this section would change that to only the runoff from the encroachment area.”
The effect of this change will be to reduce the incentive for new development to stay out of the supposedly protected green buffer zones along streams and rivers. Instead, developers will be able to slash into that buffer zone and only “treat” the dirty runoff attributed to the slashed area within the buffer zone itself. The runoff from the far greater extent of newly cleared, graded, and developed areas outside the buffer zone is ignored.
This marks at least two separate bills (reported on by CIB and elsewhere this session) which weaken controls on dirty runoff from new development, and which include as primary sponsors contractor/developers in the legislature. Both HB 579 and HB 600 include among their primary sponsors contractor/developers Rep. Mark Brody (R-Union) and Rep. Jeff Zenger (R-Forsyth).
Are we electing legislators to watch after the public’s interests—or their own?
