Stakes Rise on Farm Bill Language

Following the catastrophic Supreme Court decision on wetlands, the stakes are suddenly even higher on a terrible provision buried in this year’s hash-together of a Farm Bill in the North Carolina General Assembly. 

SB 582, the “North Carolina Farm Act of 2023,” is this session’s version of the biennial collection of statutory changes allegedly related to benefiting the agribusiness industry. CIB looked at the bill earlier in this session due to its damaging provision which would open a loophole for increased methane gas pollution from hog farm waste. Since that time, the bill has passed the Senate and is now under consideration in the House. 

The buried landmine for our environment that we’re looking at this week is a provision that removes from state regulation all wetlands which are not included in the federal definition of “waters of the United States” in Section 15, page 20 of the bill’s latest edition. That change would strip out much of North Carolina’s remaining wetlands from the umbrella of state protection. Combined with the catastrophic Supreme Court decision de-regulating destruction of streams and wetlands without a “continuous surface connection” to “navigable” waters, this is a recipe for massive loss of clean waters in our state. 

Even the Supreme Court’s extreme pro-polluter majority decision asserted that the states were where regulation of the more broadly defined wetlands belonged. However, it seems that the pro-polluter leadership of the NC General Assembly believes that protection of clean water doesn’t belong anywhere. 

North Carolina’s state legislators must pull back from leaping over this cliff of environmental destruction, and if they refuse, a veto is in order. We cannot allow this kind of destructive change to move forward without a full and focused spotlight on the threat it would produce to our clean drinking water supplies, fisheries, and wildlife.

As Grady O’Brien notes in this week’s edition of the NCCN Legislative Update, “Wetlands are critical for improving water quality, mitigating flooding, and providing habitat. With less protection for wetlands, our citizens are at greater risk of having their homes damaged by floods and water quality degraded by pollutants. North Carolina should leave its broad state-level definition of wetlands in place in order to exercise its ‘primary authority to combat water pollution by regulating land and water use’ as the [Supreme Court’s] decision states.”