Senate concessions convince DENR to support regulatory bill

State senators who have been promoting a wide-ranging bill to reduce regulations scrambled on Wednesday to plug holes that state environmental regulators had unexpectedly poked in the legislation the day before.

As a result, bill sponsors agreed to ease up on some provisions in the bill, satisfying concerns the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources had expressed in a memo made public on Tuesday. The agency issued a new memo Wednesday saying it could support the bill with those changes.

The new version was preliminarily approved in a 30-14 vote along party lines in the Senate. A final vote was delayed until Thursday to give legislators time to digest the more than 50-page proposal, which hadn’t surfaced until this week when it was written into an unrelated one-page House bill.

Still, more than half of the proposals have been grafted from other bills either this year or last that never made it into law.

One lawmaker questioned what happened behind closed doors overnight to get DENR on board.

Sen. Josh Stein, a Raleigh Democrat, noted that on Tuesday DENR was opposed to a provision cutting back on air quality monitors, but on Wednesday no longer had a problem with it, even though that wasn’t one of the provisions that had been changed.

The bill addresses a range of issues, but most of the attention was on environmental regulation of water and air quality. Sen. Trudy Wade, a Republican from Greensboro and House Bill 765’s main sponsor, said it would “increase government efficiency, reduce unnecessary burdens on citizens and business, and protect private property rights.”

One provision would give polluters some legal protection if they disclose environmental violations before they are discovered by regulators. Wade said that provision offers stronger environmental protections than the current DENR policy on self-auditing. Current law apparently protects from criminal penalties polluters who disclose. The new bill takes that away.

At DENR’s request, the provision was toned down to exclude self-reported violations at coal ash basins, and make the entire section of the bill subject to the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The bill’s sponsors also agreed to use DENR’s definition of isolated wetlands and to study, rather than enact, controversial sections affecting coastal stormwater rules and the authority of local communities to impose more stringent stormwater and buffer restrictions.

Republicans knocked back six attempts by Democrats to salvage current regulations.

DENR legislative affairs director Matthew Dockham wrote that the Tuesday’s concerns were the result of the department’s quick look at a bill that had just emerged the day before.

“Based on these efforts and the changes we believe are being offered to the bill today, the Department can support this bill and believes that it accomplishes the goal of responsible regulatory reform while facilitating the continued protections of our state’s environmental resources,” Dockham wrote.

This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Senate concessions convince DENR to support regulatory bill."