More rights for corporate hog farms, fewer rights for voters, and no rights for local governments to protect trees. Two weeks ago, the General Assembly crossover madness kicked forward some very bad bills for North Carolina’s environment, while others ran into turbulence. Crossover is the deadline legislators set for when most bills must have passed one chamber to survive and potentially become law.
To begin, legislators advanced yet another bill to help ensure that the interests of the factory hog farm industry outweigh the rights of everyone else. Senate Bill 605, the “North Carolina Farm Act of 2021,” has multiple provisions that are of environmental concern, and it passed the state Senate on a 28-21 vote on May 5. CIB has previously reported on the bill’s provisions regarding hog waste “biogas” permits.
One of the bill’s other problems worth special note is the provision which would make it more difficult for employees to bring a claim for retaliatory discrimination against an employer. How did this get into the Farm Bill? Good question — and it’s one that reports connect to an effort to shield agricultural employers of migrant labor from claims that they fired people because of minimum wage violations.
Meanwhile, local governments who want to conserve trees in their jurisdictions enjoyed no such legislative favor. House Bill 496, “Property Owners’ Rights/Tree Ordinances,” would bar cities, towns, and counties from adopting tree conservation ordinances without the express approval of the General Assembly. Not only would this bill prohibit new local tree ordinances, but it would also invalidate most existing tree conservation ordinances around the state. That means local government ordinances requiring new developments to set aside tree-save areas on forested land would be thrown onto the sawdust heap, their air and water pollution control benefits lost.
And finally, two key voter suppression bills have run into enough turbulence that they have been pulled from the calendar, but are still alive: House Bill 782, the so-called “Election Certainty Act,” and Senate Bill 326, the “Election Integrity Act.” These bills have slightly different provisions, but both would invalidate mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to three days later.
According to Democracy North Carolina, this change would likely result in thousands of properly submitted mail-in ballots being rejected, due to mail delivery delays beyond the voters’ control. Had that elimination of the long-standing three-day grace period for mailed ballot receipt been eliminated in 2020, over 11,000 valid ballots in North Carolina would have been thrown away.
These bills are part of a national strategy to silence voters by adding more restrictive rules on the voting process. These efforts have nothing to do with eliminating non-existent “voter fraud.” Instead, they are aimed at making it harder for people who are less familiar with the voting process to cast a valid ballot. Disproportionately, these are new voters, especially the Black, Brown, and Indigenous voters who have more recently begun to vote in numbers sufficient to change many election results.
NCLCV Executive Director Carrie Clark does not mince words about the purpose of this legislation. She says, “Last year, a record number of our fellow Americans turned out to vote, with an unprecedented number voting by mail. Apparently, that’s a problem for our anti-environment state legislators. As a result, they’re moving to put up more barriers to voting by mail, setting the deadline to request ballots a week earlier and requiring ballots be received at local boards of elections by 5 p.m. on Election Day. Why? To protect their polluter pals. If we want a government that protects our right to clean air, clean water, and clean energy, we must protect our freedom to vote.”
While a vote on S326 was delayed last week, the proposal is far from dead in the current General Assembly. NCLCV encourages concerned citizens to contact their legislators in opposition to this bad bill. Click here to send your senator a message!
