(Photo: National Park Service)
Details of the destructive 131-page power grab bill enacted last week by state legislators over a gubernatorial veto continue to emerge.
As reporter Peter Castagno of the Port City Daily reported, one of the changes buried in the bill is a provision designed to help eviscerate environmental protection rules for our state’s endangered coastline.
At issue are a series of basic rules adopted by the state Coastal Resources Commission to protect fragile coastal habitats and regulate improper sand removal and development in vulnerable areas.
Unfortunately, developers don’t like the rules, so they helped convince a group controlled by Republican legislators known as the Rules Review Commission to try and nix them. And now, with the matter having gone to the courts, legislative leaders slipped a $250,000 appropriation in the power grab bill to hire a big law firm to help with the effort.
The bottom line: The power grab bill is an example of the legislative process at its worst. And the provision allotting funds to help developers kill environmental protection rules makes clear the substance is even worse.
For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.