Emergency coastal rules draw little notice during hearings
From Trista Talton at CoastalReview.org
Rules the state’s lead environmental agency says are critical to its day-to-day operations drew little to no public comment during a series of hearings hosted in three coastal counties this week.
Fewer than 20 people turned out for public hearings the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management held Tuesday and Wednesday in Dare, Carteret and Onslow counties.
Even fewer spoke on the record to share their thoughts about 16 rules the Coastal Resources Commission agreed last month were too important to be pulled from the state Administrative Code. The commission was created to adopt rules for the state’s Coastal Area Management Act, or CAMA, and the Dredge and Fill Act, and establishes policies for the North Carolina Coastal Management Program.
The commission voted at a specially called meeting in mid-December to classify the rules as “emergency” and adopted them as a way to fast-track getting them back into the Administrative Code.
The commission’s vote overrode the decision of state Codifier of Rules Ashley Berger Snyder to remove 30 of the coastal commission’s longstanding rules after those rules were objected to by the Rules Review Commission last October.
Snyder, who was appointed in 2021, returned a telephone call to Coastal Review Thursday but declined to answer questions.
“We do not comment on any pending litigation,” Snyder said, referring to an ongoing lawsuit the coastal commission and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality filed in November against her and the Rules Review Commission.
The Division of Coastal Management is accepting written comments on the 16 emergency rules through Feb. 1.
All comments are to be shared with the Coastal Resources Commission during its first meeting of the year, Feb. 22, in Wilmington. The commission is expected to decide whether to adopt the 16 rules as temporary in order to keep them in the Administrative Code where the rules would remain through to about April.
If adopted, the temporary rules would then be kicked back to the Rules Review Commission for reconsideration.
Division of Coastal Management Deputy Director Mike Lopazanski said Wednesday during the last of the three public hearings the division held this week that staff had been working with the rules commission to tweak wording in the 14 rules that were not adopted as emergency rules.
Those rules are important, he said, but the 16 emergency rules “were the ones we thought were critical.”
Among those rules is one that designates Jockey’s Ridge State Park as an area of environmental concern, or AEC, and dictates that sand blown from Jockey’s Ridge onto neighboring properties must be returned to the park. AECs are areas of natural importance that the division designates to protect from uncontrolled development.
Nags Head Mayor Ben Cahoon, one of the few people who commented during the series of hearings, emphasized the importance of the rule to preserving the park.
“Coastal North Carolina has largely avoided corresponding coastal environment-changing disasters due to CAMA and its establishment and regulation of AECs,” he read from a prepared statement at the hearing held in Dare County on Tuesday. “The establishment of an AEC requires a closer examination of proposed activities and interventions, and gives everyone time to fully consider the consequences of particular actions.”
He noted that Jockey’s Ridge is the only state park that lies fully within a town’s boundaries.
“It is very special to us. Please help us protect it,” he said.
Until recently, when the Rules Review Commission objected to a rule, the agency that submitted the rule had to request the rule be returned to make changes. If an agency did not make that request, then the objection would be merely noted in the rule and that rule would remain in the Administrative Code.
But the state budget adopted Oct. 3 of last year includes language that gives the rules commission authority to send rules it objects to back to agencies. The budget also appears to give the state codifier of rules, in this case, Snyder, new authority. It remains unclear, however, whether that new authority includes stripping longstanding rules from the books.
Two days after the budget went into effect, the Rules Review Commission voted in a special meeting to return the 30 of 132 rules the Coastal Resources Commission submitted for review.
The coastal commission and Department of Environmental Quality sued, asking a Wake County Superior Court judge to resolve the deadlock over legal interpretations between the two commissions and restore the rules.
According to the complaint, on Oct. 26, 2023, Snyder explained via email to DEQ’s rulemaking coordinator that, “because readoption of rules in the periodic review process requires that all rules be readopted as if they are new rules, the RRC had to approve preexisting rules for those rules’ ‘entry’ into the Code. As described further in the attached email correspondence, the Codifier asserted that the thirty rules at issue were removed from the Code because the rules had not been approved by the RRC and were subsequently returned to the agency.”
