Legislative Watch: Legislators Go Home, Leaving a Mess
The good news is that the state legislature has gone home for now, and some of the worst bills did not pass in the closing days of the session. The bad news comes from a bad budget, another unwarranted assault on wind energy—and that the General Assembly plans to come back to town in just a month.
Budget: As expected, the General Assembly last week overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of their bad budget bill, and the budget is now final. In summary, here are some of the major environmental notes on the budget:
- The NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), already understaffed and struggling to fulfill its mission, was hit with another nearly $2 million in cuts, including loss of leadership team and regional staff working environmental assistance and customer service programs. There were no added staff positions to handle the growing permit processing and monitoring demands.
- Both the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund were cut from current funding levels.
- Funding for the energy center at N.C. State was eliminated.
- Problematic “special provisions” included the allocation of $250,000 for the state Dept. of Agriculture to join a wasteful national lawsuit against the Obama Administration’s Clean Water Rule; and set aside $1.3 million for what’s being called “Son of SolarBee” (another boondoggle effort to treat Jordan Reservoir water “in-lake”, instead of cutting pollution at its sources).
- Another complicated provision buried in the budget may make it more difficult for the state Dept. of Transportation to negotiate more in-state passenger rail service with Amtrak without legislative authorization.
- The proposal to lift the 10% cap on state funds as part of passenger light rail projects did not make it to the final budget, although the House had proposed it.
- A proposed Senate provision which would have strongly discouraged the use of state Transportation planning funds for bicycle transportation projects was reduced to a mild extra reporting requirement.
- The Senate’s proposed four-year moratorium on wind energy projects was not included in the final budget, but unfortunately that recurring bad idea resurfaced as part of a major renewable energy policy bill.
Clean energy: HB 589, “Competitive Energy Solutions for NC,” is the major solar energy compromise bill which passed the House in early June with bipartisan support and the backing of both Duke Energy and the renewable energy industry. From there it went to the Senate, which true to form messed it up. It came back to the House larded with additives to discourage solar and slap a four-year moratorium on new wind energy projects. The House rejected the re-write, and the matter went to conference committee. Last week, in the last hours of the session, another “compromise” emerged: the House bill, but with an 18-month moratorium on new wind projects tacked on. During a post-midnight vote-fest, both chambers approved that version by broad margins—but not without House critics panning the Senate’s puzzling obsession with trying to kill wind power.
For a glimpse into the origin of the Senate’s anti-wind madness, see here.
Billboards: In a rare outright victory for local control and the environment, the House voted to reject HB 581, “Revisions to Outdoor Advertising Laws,” the latest in a years-long series of bad giveaways to the billboard industry. In the end, it wasn’t even that close, with a strong bipartisan majority dumping the bill by a 48-67 margin. HB 581 would have gutted local efforts to control the relocation of billboards to areas not zoned to allow them, allowed more cutting of trees in the public right-of-way just to keep billboards visible, and made it easier to replace ordinary billboards with glaring, distracting, quickly changing electronic billboards. Many thanks go to leaders from both parties who spoke up to send this bad bill down, including Representatives Chuck McGrady, Pricey Harrison, Ted Davis, Becky Carney, Jay Adams, Joe John, Brian Turner, Mary Belk and Grier Martin.
“Regulatory reform”: There’s both good news and bad news here. On the upside, a clutch of anti-environmental provisions such as repealing the Outer Banks plastic bag ban and gutting stream buffer requirements across the state were not adopted. Unfortunately, a collection of bad bills to do that and more are still alive, and available for renewed consideration when the legislature returns—which brings us to our final legislative note for this week.
They’ll be back: Instead of the usual adjournment until May 2018, the legislature will be heading home for only a month. Two more sessions have already been set for this year: one starting August 3 for consideration of vetoes, conference reports, other bills still eligible for a vote, and assorted similar matters; and another session starting September 6 to consider redistricting and essentially anything else that strikes the legislative leadership’s fancy.
Hmm, what’s that word? Oh yes. Sad!
