By Cassie Gavin
Senior Director of Government Relations
This week was the busiest legislative week yet this year with lawmakers voting on hundreds of bills, including some that are helpful and some harmful to our environment. Your House member needs to hear from you on two of these that committees approved this week!
Opportunity for Action: Please reach out today and ask your House member to protect water by opposing H 489 “Building Code & Development Reg Reform” and to protect trees by opposing H 496 “Property Owners’ Rights/Tree Ordinances."
H 489, “Building Code & Development Reg Reform,” would be harmful to sediment control efforts that are all about protecting water quality. Land development comes with impacts that must be managed, including the potential for sediment to run offsite, destroying streams and polluting rivers. H 489 would undercut local sediment programs by capping permit fees, transferring liability to uninformed homeowners, and erasing core responsibilities of developers and builders. The bill is scheduled for a House vote Monday evening.
H 496, “Property Owners’ Rights/Tree Ordinances,” would prohibit communities from adopting tree protection ordinances that regulate the removal of trees from private property without the express authorization of the General Assembly. This would make it more difficult for local governments to protect large historic trees, tree buffers, and natural flood and erosion control on private property.
House sends Senate helpful bills to address PFAS, lead and heirs property
The House unanimously passed H 355, “Firefighting Foam Registry/PFAS Ban,” which bans the use of firefighting foam containing PFAS chemicals for training. NC Sierra Club has long advocated for a total ban on PFAS foam, but this bill is a great step forward.
Ever since it was discovered that Chemours was releasing chemicals into the Cape Fear River, a drinking water supply, Rep. Ted Davis (R - Wilmington) has had an interest in addressing PFAS chemical contamination. That led to him to sponsor H 355 and to work on the bill with co-sponsor Rep. Pricey Harrison (D - Greensboro), who has been a leader on this issue. Water contamination in Greensboro was linked to the use of firefighting foam for training. It is heartening to see bipartisan cooperation on this issue, which we hope will continue on the Senate side.
When the bill was up for a vote in the House, Rep. Davis described how the measure would help firefighters who suffer from higher cancer rates than the general population and he noted that there are choices of firefighting foam that don’t include PFAS. Banning the use of PFAS foam for training will help reduce the release of toxic chemicals into the environment and our water.
In more good news, the House passed H 272, “Revise Health Standard for Lead," sponsored by Reps. Warren (R - Rowan), Lambeth (R - Forsyth), Adcock (D - Wake), and Potts (R - Davidson), with a vote of 114-1. The bill would update the state childhood lead poisoning prevention law to better ensure that young children are not exposed to hazardous lead in drinking water.
And the House passed H 367, “Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act," sponsored by Reps. Szoka (R - Cumberland), K. Hall (R - Rockingham, Surry, Stokes), White (R - Johnston), and Turner (D - Buncombe). This bill would help co-tenants of a property potentially retain and even conserve it by addressing heirs property issues. Black families and farming families often face heirs property issues that complicate land ownership. H 367 is supported by a broad range of groups from the NAACP to Audubon. It passed the House 80-28.
S 605 Farm Act update: Senate vote expected Monday evening
This week, multiple Senate committees approved the Farm Act even after community members who live near hog farms and are opposed to the bill turned out to speak against the measure. They complained about water contamination and other environmental problems associated with industrial hog farms that this bill will not help address.
New bill to give DEQ authority to deny permits on environmental justice grounds
Democratic Reps. Pricey Harrison, Kandie Smith (D - Pitt), Robert Reives (D - Chatham, Durham), and Charles Graham (D - Robeson) filed a groundbreaking bill this week to address environmental injustice. H 784, “Environmental Justice Considerations," would explicitly give DEQ the authority and responsibility to deny environmental permits that would have a discriminatory impact on minority or low-income communities. It would also require the agency to consider cumulative impacts on public health and the environment, and strengthen requirements for the agency to hold public hearings in these communities and respond to feedback received at those hearings. Passage of this bill would be a big step forward.