April 17, 2015. A continuation of the previous post. Not a complete list, but hopefully most of the significant bills.
Amend Environmental Laws. In the category of you just can’t have too many — there are actually three “Amend Environmental Laws” bills this session (so far). As noted in the previous post, House Bill 157 (Amend Environmental Laws) has already been enacted into law and House Bill 593 (Amend Environmental Laws-2) amends laws allowing reimbursement for third-party damage claims as a result of leaking petroleum storage tanks. I missed House Bill 576 (Amend Environmental Laws-1); at the moment, the bill amends solid waste laws to allow the white goods tax (currently used by local governments to manage discarded refrigerators and other large appliances) to also be used for programs to manage discarded electronic devices. Amend Environmental Laws-1 may also pick up additional provisions as it moves through committee.
Contaminated Sites. House Bill 748 (Establish Contamination Source Removal/Disposal Bd) creates a new full-time (salaried) board to take over DENR’s responsibility for cleanup of contamination at pre-1983 landfills and other contaminated sites. The “pre-1983 landfills” are unlined waste disposal sites — in some cases, simply dumps –that stopped operating before 1983 to avoid having to comply with federal standards for waste disposal facilities. Many have groundwater contamination. A 2007 state law gave DENR responsibility for assessing and remediating the sites. Many of the landfills had been operated by local governments, so the 2007 legislation freed local governments of the potential environmental liability in return for a state solid waste disposal tax to fund cleanup. House Bill 748 expresses concern about the slow pace of remediation. It will be interesting to get more of the back story on the bill. The concern may be as much about unspent funds earmarked for the cleanup as it is about unremediated contamination; a pot of money always attracts attention. Reality is that contaminated sites require a lot of assessment work before actual cleanup can begin. Most state-funded remediation programs have had a slow start up before making significant outlays for remediation.
Also, a note that House Bill 639 (Risk-based Remediation Amends) proposes the same amendments to remediation laws that appear in the Senate regulatory reform bill. You can find a description of those provisions in an earlier post.
Fracking. House Bill 773 would strengthen requirements for public disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluid.
Riparian Buffers. House Bill 760 is the House regulatory reform bill. The environmental provisions include significant changes to state laws allowing use of riparian buffers to protect water quality. It isn’t clear exactly how broad the bill’s restrictions on local government buffer ordinances are intended to be. The bill amends a law written to allow state delegation of riparian buffer programs under the nutrient sensitive waters (NSW) rules to local government, but some of the bill language could be interpreted to prohibit local adoption of riparian buffer ordinances for any other purpose:
Units of local government may impose restrictions upon the use of riparian areas as defined in 15A NCAC 02B.0202 only within river basins where riparian buffers are required by the State.
Local riparian buffer ordinances are sometimes adopted in response to other state/federal water quality mandates — such as Phase II stormwater permit conditions, water supply watershed regulations and endangered species management plans. So a local buffer ordinance may be needed to meet a water quality standard or permit condition, but not specifically required under state rules applicable to the entire river basin. Assuming the bill did not intend to prohibit use of riparian buffer ordinances to meet other state and federal water quality mandates, it would be helpful to make that clear.
In areas covered by the NSW buffer rules, the bill exempts residential lots platted before the buffer rules went into effect — even if the property could be developed for its intended purpose in compliance with the buffer requirement. (There are already exemptions and variances that cover previously platted lots that cannot be developed in full compliance with the buffer requirement.) The buffer rules are part of broader water quality strategies designed to meet federal Clean Water Act requirements. The Clean Water Act requires the state to adopt a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) –in effect, a cap — for any pollutant causing impaired water quality. A number of state water bodies, including the Neuse River and Falls Lake, have impaired water quality due to excess nutrients — particularly nitrogen and phosphorus. The nutrient management rules provide the regulatory underpinning for TMDLs that set nitrogen and phosphorus reduction targets for those rivers and lakes. The rules include riparian buffer requirements as a critical tool in reducing the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that runs off the land into surface waters. One question may be whether such a broad exemption from the buffer rules will allow the state to meet the federally-approved TMDLs.
The bill would also require that riparian buffers on shorelines bordered by coastal wetlands or marshland be measured from the waterward edge of the wetland. The term “coastal wetland” includes both wetlands that regularly flood on the tides and wetlands that flood on wind tides and seasonal high tides. Under the provision, the “buffer” would often consist of wetlands with a frequent, direct connection to coastal waters; in some cases, the buffer would effectively be in the water. The change would seem to defeat the purpose of having a buffer to allow polluted runoff to infiltrate through the soil rather than go directly into the water.
Stormwater. On the face of it, House Bill 141 (Stormwater/Flood control) authorizes cities to use existing stormwater management programs to address flood risk by purchasing properties at high risk of flooding, elevating existing structures, and retrofitting structures to reduce flood risk. The bill seems intended to allow cities in more populated counties to expand the purpose of existing stormwater programs to include flood management as well as water quality protection. (The bill would limit the new authority to cities in a county with a population of 910,000 or greater and at least one city with a population of 500,000 or greater.) One possible pitfall — the bill could be interpreted as limiting the authority of other North Carolina towns and cities to take similar actions through flood hazard mitigation projects. For example, the small coastal town of Belhaven has done a major flood hazard mitigation project to elevate structures in areas repeatedly flooded due to hurricanes. House Bill 141 may need to be clarified to avoid undermining cities and towns’ existing authority to reduce flood hazards.