gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- State legislators have passed and sent on to the governor a bill that would give regulators until mid-January of 2011 to propose new anti-pollution rules for the Falls Lake watershed.
The bill, pushed by state Sen. Josh Stein, D-Wake, also establishes minimum erosion-control practices for the watershed that local officials have said are generally in line with what Durham regulations already require.
Legislators moved it through the House and Senate late last week after an omnibus environmental bill that included basically the same provisions, House Bill 1099, stalled because of major water-rights disputes involving the Catawba and Yadkin river basins in the south-central part of the state.
Stein and other legislators agreed to pull a different bill off the shelf, Senate Bill 1020, and amend it to include only the language specific to the Falls Lake watershed. It cleared the House on a 96-7 vote and passed the Senate 36-0.
"Cleaning up Falls Lake was too important to run the risk of getting it held up due to other controversial issues," Stein said, explaining the rationale for the last-minute change in strategy.
Stein added that the bill as passed included tweaks requested by state Sen. Floyd McKissick, D-Durham, the N.C. Farm Bureau and a member of the House.
Durham County leaders had been expecting some sort of late-session maneuver owing to the pressure for action coming from officials in Raleigh and other parts of Wake County.
Falls Lake is the sole source of drinking water for Raleigh and several other Wake communities.
There thus had been "a very strong push for action to be taken on this," Durham County Manager Mike Ruffin told County Commissioners earlier this week.
The Falls Lake bill's march through the two chambers eliminated the need for legislators to act this session on the original measure, said Bill Holmes, spokesman for House Speaker Joe Hackney, D-Orange.
Hackney and Senate leaders appointed a conference committee to settle the chambers' differences about the Catawba and Yadkin disputes, in time for the 2010 session of the General Assembly.
Durham County officials as of Monday hadn't quite caught up with the late-session change in strategy. Believing House Bill 1099 was still their main worry, they grumped that Durham legislators had been left off the conference committee.
Ruffin and County Engineer Glen Whisler said Monday the most significant complaint their government had about the bill was that it didn't give state regulators until nearly the end of 2011 to finish work on the Falls Lake rules.
But Stein "was very adamant about the January deadline," Ruffin told commissioners.
The erosion strictures in the bill require designers of sediment-control basins to account for the runoff of the so-called "25-year storm," which in reality is any storm so heavy that it has only a one in four chance of happening in any given year.
Legislators spelled out an efficiency standard for basins and also developers have to place temporary ground cover on project sites within two weeks of clearing flat areas, within 10 days of clearing moderate slopes and within a week of clearing steep slopes.
