Legislative Watch: House Committees Improve Budget
The NC House appears to be moving toward dumping some of the worst anti-environmental provisions included in the Senate’s version of the coming biennium’s budget.
House budget subcommittees last week began revealing and approving the House leadership’s version of the budget. The environmental sections included several positive changes from the Senate’s atrocious version:
Drastic cuts to the already understaffed Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) were removed.
The proposed four-year moratorium on new wind energy projects in North Carolina was dropped.
The House budget draft adds $7 million for the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund
The House budget draft removes the rail “transit cap” imposed two years ago on the use of state funds for light rail public transit projects.
The Senate budget established a new “Coastal Storm Damage Mitigation Fund” to be used for cost-share funds for projects like ‘beach nourishment,’ artificial dune systems, and other supposed beach protection measures. The House added a limitation to bar those funds from supporting hard structures like rock/concrete groins. (Such “beach hardening” structures have been shown to actually accelerate beach erosion and barrier island habitat loss.)
More details on the House/Senate comparison can be found here.
Under the schedule announced in the House, its full committees are to consider and act on the budget today (Tuesday, May 30) and Wednesday, with the full House to begin floor consideration on Thursday, June 1. As minority party legislators strenuously noted last week, this accelerated schedule still leaves much to be desired in terms of public transparency. At that, it’s still better than the Senate’s process—low bar that that represents.
Conservation advocates should keep in mind that whatever the House passes for a budget is not the final word. Instead, the Senate and House versions will go to a conference committee of members from each chamber appointed to negotiate a compromise version.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that for the first time in several years we will have the active support of the governor’s office in pressing for a better result on environmental budget items.
Conservationists’ voices will be needed to help ensure that our environment and public health will be kept in mind during the budget negotiation process.
