Legislative Watch: Hog Bosses Win Veto Fight; Bad Budget Blues
The environment had another rough week in the NC General Assembly, as we lost a close and winnable fight over special protections for corporate hog polluters.
Hog Bosses Win Veto Fight: We almost won the biggest environmental fight of the year (so far) in the General Assembly. Opponents and proponents of House Bill 467, the Hog Pollution Protection Act, were lobbying hard and counting heads last week as the key vote neared on overriding the Governor’s veto of this terrible bill. Its special favoritism to international corporate hog polluters and maltreatment of low-income neighbors seeking fair compensation for adverse impacts on their property and health turned stomachs across the state. Unfortunately, money spoke loudest to a majority of legislators in the end. The override passed, approving legislation to take away the right of neighbors in poorer communities to full and fair compensation for the nuisance of continued stench from concentrated hog and poultry wastes.
As NC Policy Watch’s Joe Killian put it, “The bill will cap the compensatory damages North Carolinians can win in nuisance lawsuits like those over fecal bacteria rampant in residential areas near hog farms.” NCLCV Governmental Affairs Director Dan Crawford rejected the argument that H467 was a pro-farmer bill, instead calling it “legislation written to help a company shirk its responsibilities to care for its neighbors – neighbors who have often been poisoned with toxic fumes for decades.”
Bad Budget Blues: The NC Senate leadership brought forth a real stinker of a budget proposal last week. As always, a budget bill is a lengthy and complex document, but some provisions in this version stood out as especially anti-environment in their impact. Among those are the elimination of 45 positions from the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and the imposition through 2020 of a moratorium on new wind energy projects.
As CIB as pointed out in previous articles, the anti-wind energy provision has no sound basis in science or policy. It’s merely the continuation of an anti-wind-energy crusade by some individual Senators under the discredited argument that wind projects necessarily conflict with military base uses. The U.S. Department of Defense itself has rejected that claim.
The DEQ staff cuts included what observers are calling particularly spiteful targeted job eliminations, including those of Chief Deputy Secretary John Nicholson and Senior Advisor for Policy and Innovation Mary Penny Kelley, as well as the entire division of Environmental Assistance and Customer Service (which leads waste reduction and recycling efforts in DEQ).
As has become the usual bad practice by the Senate leadership in recent years, the massive detailed budget document was revealed late Tuesday and pushed to a Senate floor vote less than two full days later. This turkey of a budget now flaps its way over to the House. Hopefully, it will receive more thorough analysis (and much amendment) there.
