Legislative Watch: Menaces in the Latest Special Session

The Thing that Wouldn’t Go Home is set to return to Raleigh this Wednesday for the latest in a seemingly endless series of “special sessions.” The NC General Assembly plans to take up an anti-environmental agenda that includes possible veto overrides of bad bills passed earlier, as well as new efforts to further gut state protections for clean water, clean air, and public health.

Here are some of the most worrisome of the agenda items expected during the special session starting Wednesday, October 4:

Veto overrides:

SB 16, the so-called “Business Regulatory Reform Act of 2017.” In general, when anti-environmental legislators label something a “regulatory reform” effort, they’re talking about yet another move to gut safeguards against pollution. Rep. Pricey Harrison calls SB 16 “a 16-page grab bag of deregulation provisions” and notes that she “argued against the bill because it loosens water quality rules and imposes limitation on local governments’ power over landfill permits.”

HB 56, “Amend Environmental Laws,” features anti-environmental items including repeal of the popular Outer Banks plastic bag ban, which protects sea turtles and other marine life. It also weakens protections for riparian buffers, which help filter out sediment and other pollutants from runoff to state waters. In his public veto message, Gov. Roy Cooper called HB 56 “cynical legislation that fails to address the concerns of families in the Cape Fear region [regarding GenX contamination] and does nothing to protect drinking water statewide going forward.”

Possible new legislation:

Rep. Harrison notes that a third anti-environment regulatory bill, HB 162,”Amend Administrative Procedure Laws,” could come to a vote as well. This bill would prohibit state environmental agencies from adopting rules designed to protect the public from pollution hazards any time the cost of complying with those rules would exceed a designated artificial ceiling. In calculating that cost, the agency would not be allowed to take into account the value to public health and natural resource protection of the rule, or the damages which would occur from letting the problem pollution go unchecked. If that sounds foolishly short-sighted, congratulations — you’re seeing the obvious more clearly than many state legislators.

Environmental reporter Lisa Sorg explains how the bill “clearly favors industry over the workaday folks” since “it’s easy to ring up” heavy expenses “because it’s costly to clean up polluted sites, even to bare minimum industrial standards. And the bill doesn’t account for the financial benefits of a rule.”

Conservationists encourage legislators to avoid these so-called “reforms” and head back home early this week instead.

Next: Governor Cooper declares Clean Energy Week in North Carolina >>