S 112 Devastates Local Env. Regs and Repeals Protest Petitions‏; NC Communities Loose More Power to Rich and Powerful

 

Below is a link to the legislation that just passed the House.   If the Senate concurs (it apparently passed a slightly different bill) it goes to the Governor who reportedly has been involved in the development of this bill and supports it.   

http://ncleg.net/Sessions/2013/Bills/Senate/PDF/S112v6.pdf 

Environmental overrides are on pages 9-12 under CLARIFY LOCAL GOVERNMENT PREEMPTION
Protest petition repeal is on page 12 under PROTEST PETITION

 From an article by Katherine Watt in 2010 "Shift Power Back to Communities":

As economic models shift from global growth to local and notions of wealth shift from global dollars to local, healthy, renewable stocks of life-supporting materials, decision-making power also has to shift. 

Barring the shift is the American legal tradition that people have no actual power as community members. Few people living where the consequences of major environmental and labor decisions hit home would ever have freely voted to foul their own nests, but we aren’t free. Those destructive choices are made for us. 

Two crucial judicial opinions illustrate the smothered debate about municipal subservience. In 1868, Judge John Forrest Dillon wrote: “Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.” 

Thomas Cooley, a Michigan Supreme Court judge, believed in an inherent human right to local self-determination, in line with the revolutionary ideals of the Declaration of Independence, writing in 1871: “Local government is a matter of absolute right; and the state cannot take it away.” 

Until now, Dillon’s Rule has dominated, shackling American communities. 
 
When we reverse the actions that the current nutzoz in power at the state level are making we must be sure to go all the way to give local communities the power necessary for self determination, until then we are being coerced by powerful corporations and extremely rich and very shortsighted people.

Comments

In additiion to doing away with protest petitions this could greatly impact our watershed protection and related ordinances.

 

 

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