By Cassie Gavin
Senior Director for Government Affairs
This week the N.C. General Assembly passed a state budget with bipartisan support and yesterday Governor Cooper signed it into law.
The budget is a mixed bag overall and for the environment. We are still reviewing the 600+ page bill but we’re pleased to see substantial funding for conservation, resiliency, and water infrastructure and investments in new staff at the Department of Environmental Quality to work on emerging compounds like PFAS. On the downside, the bill has provisions that N.C. Sierra Club opposes such as one that would ease billboard relocations at the expense of local government control and another that may politicize the Office of Administrative Hearings, which decides many environmental cases.
We were hoping to see a ban on the use of toxic PFAS-containing firefighting foam for training in the budget, which was in a previous version, but there is a study instead. But note that HB 355, “Firefighting Foam Registry/PFAS Ban,” is still eligible to be considered this year or next. Notably, the anti-tree ordinance bill (HB 496), which was in a prior version of the budget, is no longer in. And in other good news, controversial and harmful provisions on wetlands, stormwater and riparian buffers were removed.
There are far too many environmental provisions to describe them all here but below is a sampling of some positive and negative budget items of interest:
Positive:
- $20M to the Division of Mitigation Services to create a statewide flood resiliency blueprint that identifies flood risk and data gaps and makes recommendations to reduce flooding.
- Allows DEQ to allocate the remainder of the Volkswagen Settlement funds ($67M) that is required to be spent on clean transportation investments like EV charging stations.
- Authorizes Bakers Lake State Natural Area in Bladen County.
- $103M for local assistance for stormwater infrastructure which is helpful to water quality.
Negative:
- Amends a dam safety exemption to allow dams that are less than 20 feet high or have an impoundment capacity of less than 15 acre-feet to be exempt from safety requirements if an engineer conducts a dam failure analysis. This could increase the risk of small dam breaches and associated flooding.
- Prohibits DEQ permitting funds from being used for enforcement, public outreach, and management positions, unnecessarily limiting the agency.
- Waives water quality certification for stream debris removal projects, which can have water quality impacts.
Learn more about environmental provisions in the budget at N.C. Policy Watch.
What’s next? Despite passing a budget, the legislature has not adjourned for the year. There won’t be any sessions Thanksgiving week, but the legislature is expected to return before the end of the year for more work.