Action and inaction
Published January 19, 2018
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, January 17, 2018.
There’s a good reason why former Greensboro Mayor Bill Knight doesn’t see his neighbor and state representative, Pricey Harrison, around that much, as he complained in a letter to the editor last week. The legislature is gradually turning itself into a full-time, permanent branch of government.
Legislators returned to Raleigh last week, four months ahead of their normal schedule. While they had a chance to address some pressing issues, they mostly failed.
The House unanimously passed a bill dealing with potentially harmful chemicals in state rivers and allocating funds for additional monitoring of air and water quality. This was a responsible first step, both in responding to concerns about GenX in the lower Cape Fear River and looking more broadly at unregulated chemicals.
One of its sponsors, Rep. Jon Hardister (R-Guilford), called it the “product of the House Select Committee on North Carolina River Quality, which has done extensive work on this topic. ... Our goal is to determine the best ways to ensure the safety of our water supplies.”
Unfortunately, the Senate doesn’t share that goal. It sent the bill to its rules committee, the legislative equivalent of dry dock. Maybe senators think the Cape Fear currents will simply carry GenX, an unregulated but possibly carcinogenic substance released from the Chemours plant in Fayetteville, past Wilmington and into the Atlantic — out of sight and mind.
The bill would have appropriated about $2.3 million — some of it transferred from a canceled Jordan Lake clean-up scheme — to the Department of Environmental Quality for manpower and equipment to protect the public. Even that amount of money would barely offset budget cuts that the legislature imposed on DEQ this year — let alone deeper cuts from previous years.
North Carolina is playing with fire by weakening environmental protections. Will everyone in the state have to draw drinking water from plastic bottles before the Senate acts?
The legislature also did nothing last week to provide money to meet its mandate for class-size reductions. Compliance will require large expenditures by local school systems to create more classrooms and hire more teachers in the primary grades. If reducing class sizes is a worthy step, then it’s worth the state paying for it. If the legislature waits until May to deal with this issue, counties won’t have much time to set their own budgets. Some will have to consider property tax increases to pay the costs out of local funds. Others simply will force local school boards to cut spending elsewhere.
