Legislative Watch: House Budget Contains Pros & Cons

The NC House last week approved a version of the biennial budget kinder to the environment than its Senate counterpart—but it could be better.

As expected, the final House budget 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 adds $7 million for the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund.
• The House budget removes the rail “transit cap” imposed two years ago on the use of state funds for light rail public transit projects.
• The House budget also dropped the Senate’s proposed new disincentive to the use of state transportation planning grants to study building new greenways and bike paths.

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 accelerate beach erosion and barrier island habitat loss.)

In the ‘glass half empty’ category:

• The Senate earmarked $2 million to waste on a legal fight against the Clean Water Rule passed under the Obama Administration. (Gov. Cooper and Attorney General Stein had earlier pulled North Carolina officially out of the multi-party lawsuit challenging that rule.) House appropriations leaders initially left this out of the budget altogether, accurately concluding that it was a waste of money to pay private lawyers to buy the state back into a suit likely to be mooted by the Trump Administration’s decision to dump the Clean Water Rule of its own accord. However, anti-environmental voices persuaded a majority of House members to allocate $250,000 to this particular rathole anyway.
• The House declined to support Gov. Roy Cooper’s requests to add five badly needed staff positions to the Sedimentation Control program. The House budget instead cuts two currently vacant positions, compared to the Senate budget which cuts three.

The Senate this week will certainly vote to reject the House budget, and both chambers will then appoint conferees to a committee which will hammer out some compromise version for consideration by both chambers. We’ll be watching and urging legislators to pick the more environmentally friendly alternatives.

Next, the U.S. takes one small step – or more like one giant leap – backwards on climate change >>