Late Tuesday night, the NC House passed the conference report for H 765, Regulatory Reform Act of 2015. The Senate passed the same measure on Monday evening. The bill now heads to the governor’s desk.
As initially passed by the House in April 2015, H 765 was a one-provision, non-controversial bill about transporting gravel. The Senate overhauled the bill and turned it into a 58-page omnibus regulatory reform bill with many provisions that would be harmful to the environment if they become law. The final bill (now 71 pages) contains many of the provisions added by the Senate which have had no study of their impacts, costs or benefits. The House Environment Committee held a no-vote public hearing on the bill in July, but the process then went back behind closed doors. Some provisions were moderated or removed by the conference committee. More information about some of the environmental provisions that remain in H 765 can be found below this statement.
After the Legislature’s passage of H 765, Molly Diggins, state director of the North Carolina Sierra Club issued the following statement:
“It has become the annual practice of this legislature to eliminate or reduce environmental programs and protections, without evaluating the cumulative risks and impacts to North Carolina’s environment or public health. H 765 may be the worst example to date, both substantively and with respect to process.”
“H 765 contains measures that would, under certain circumstances, give amnesty to those who contaminate our land, surface waters and groundwater, while at the same time, allowing for pollution to be kept confidential. H 765 provides a clear path for polluters to avoid accountability. The public deserves the right to know about potentially harmful pollution in our neighborhoods.
“Among other damaging provisions, this bill would allow developers to destroy seasonal streams, which are so important to the overall quality of our state’s waters, without any state requirement for mitigation. Coupled with the effective repeal of the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) earlier this year, this General Assembly seems intent on subsidizing developers by removing protections that were put in place to protect the state’s lands and waters for future generations.”
More information about provisions in H 765:
- §4.1. Environmental Self-Audit. This provision excuses companies that violate environmental laws from civil penalties if they self-report violations, and it makes a company’s internal investigations privileged, inaccessible to the public or a civil court. It also denies neighbors and communities the information they may need to establish a claim of damages or a request for injunctive relief against a polluter.
- §4.7. Risk Remediation. This provision extends risk based cleanup to most kinds of soil and groundwater contamination, past, present, and future, allowing responsible parties to leave contamination in the ground and rely on land use controls instead. The conference report excludes both coal ash pits and hog lagoons, two of the highest profile sources of groundwater contamination. But if the risk-based approach isn’t good enough for those (and it isn’t), how is it safe for all the other, lower profile but equally dangerous sources of soil and groundwater pollution?
- §4.30 and 4.31. Stream protection. Half of North Carolina’s stream miles are intermittent – they only flow during wet parts of the year – and the rest are perennial. As amended by the Senate, H765 proposed to eliminate any state requirement for offsetting destruction of intermittent streams, and to double the destruction of perennial streams allowed without offsets. The conference report drops the perennial language, but still declares open season on intermittent streams, which are crucial for downstream drinking water quality, and are only partially protected by federal law.