Legislative Watch: Recovery Bill Ignores Resiliency Measures
Last week, legislators approved more funding to address the immediate impacts of historic hurricane damage, but continued to ignore the steps needed to reduce future disasters.
Gov. Roy Cooper had proposed a funding package that included pollution-preventing measures such as:
- An expanded hog farm buyout program to move operations off land likely to flood repeatedly
- Incentives to replace hog farms’ storm-vulnerable open sewage lagoons with more environmentally friendly options
- Improvements to municipal water and sewer systems that failed during the storm
Legislators didn’t fund these or other resiliency-building ideas, despite their obvious advantages to both the health of people threatened by the resulting pollution, and the health of the state’s budget threatened by repeated multi-billion-dollar storm recovery bills.
Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Guilford) called the absence of resiliency funding in the bill “a lost opportunity.” She added, “We do not want to keep rebuilding in harm’s way. It’s dangerous and it’s expensive.”
As the Fayetteville Observer said, “The extent of the river pollution raises serious public policy questions that need to be addressed. It is urgent, and procrastination should be punishable by losses at the polls.” The paper added, “It should be clear to all our regulators and public officials that we need to make further investments in our sewage-treatment facilities to prevent this kind of toxic release in future storms. It’s going to cost money, but considering the public health risks, we don’t have much choice.”
It’s past time for legislators to wake up to the new climate change realities. The writing is on the wall—and the wall is about to wash away.
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