It took an NC Senate committee all of 45 minutes to approve a massive roll-back of environmental protections across the state. The Commerce Committee was voting on a "substitute" bill which was unveiled just hours before the meeting. The substitute bill is much larger in scope than the original measure (which was available to the public before the meeting). Now you see it; now you don't.
The main meat of the new law is more of that "conservative big government" bullshit: it would ban local governments from enacting ordinances and rules stricter than federal rules. Federal rules -- on asphalt plants, for example -- are so lax, so permissive, that many local communities have passed their own rules governing where those particular plants can set up their smoke stacks.
Not sure yet how this law will impact Watauga's own Polluting Industries Ordinance, but the bill does away with riverbank buffers along the Neuse and Tar-Pimlico. Buffering of our own New and Watauga rivers was very much a part of the Polluting Industries Ordiance, after the experience in the Seven Oaks neighborhood with Maymead asphalt, which wanted to wash their trucks out into the New River.
"The bill would also permit demolition crews, including those working on old power plants, to dispose of potentially toxic materials on site, instead of transporting them to a landfill."
Of course, we can thank our own "enlightened" Dan Soucek for cosponsoring this abominable act. When will people wake up?
ReplyDeleteLet's hope they wake up before 2014 and vote these guys out. I'm not a big fan of name-calling but the "Clown College" moniker is looking more appropriate every day. Except that it's not just laughable; the future of our state is at stake and the legislature seems to want to turn this state from one of the most educated, prosperous and progressive in the south to one of the most backward and polluted. People like Soucek who moved here from up North because they heard it was a great place to live should consider that they are dismantling many of the policies and institutions that made it that way.
ReplyDeleteAnd any of these legislators who claim to be libertarian-leaning or "freedom-loving" should take a long hard look in the mirror and think about the fact that their measures taking away local control and micromanaging from Raleigh are the antithesis of both of those things.
So Soucek is one of them Yankee outside agitators Jesse Helms used to warn us about....here I thought he was a patriotic Amerkin who loves Jaysus and was just another a cog in the righteous Franklin Graham fundraising juggernaut.
ReplyDeleteHe is the new chairman of the Ethics Committee. It seems that you libs are in the minority.
ReplyDelete