Opinion

KIRK ROSS: Flo shows weirdness in scheme to void coastal planning rules

Monday, Sept. 17, 2018 -- As the legislature fought behind the scenes to do something to roll back coastal planning rules, the story started to take off. By the time a new watered down version of the bill surfaced, it was getting worldwide attention. Some was funny but kind of off base. But hey, it got the laughs.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Kirk Ross is the state government reporter for the Coastal Review and writes for Carolina Public Press and the Washington Post.
After a long day of hurricane reporting I was looking at Twitter and seeing the story of North Carolina’s notorious 2012 Sea Level Rise bill coming up in the context of #HurricaneFlorence. Since I broke the story, I feel like I ought to say something

Like a lot of policy weirdness there’s backstory for days. But long story short, climate change deniers, real estate interests and private property zealots didn’t like that state and local governments might use the latest climate change science in planning and policy.

Coastal land use planning is already complicated. I’ve covered the two “planningest” towns in the state, Carrboro and Chapel Hill and coastal land use rules are 11 Dimensional Chess by comparison.

Erosion rates, overlapping jurisdictions and the Atlantic Ocean complicate things. So when a state science panel came up with a new suggested rate based on the model of accelerated sea level rise, some people freaked out.

Eventually, a state senator quietly drafted a bill that would essentially ban the use of the accelerated model across all kinds of areas the state controls including local and state agencies and the University of North Carolina system.

This naturally alarmed the world renown researchers on the science panel since many of them worked at a UNC system campus, had federal grants and did science that was based on science.

In May 2012, my editor at Coastal Review got a copy of a draft of the bill and forwarded it to me (I was on vacation) along with a list of scientists to call. We scrambled to get a story out ahead of the meeting where it was to be introduced.

We did and the meeting mysteriously got cancelled. The bill would have limited rates of sea level rise that could be used for standards and rule making — and possibly even research — to the historical rate since 1900. That meant no accelerated rates.

It said the rates “shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900” and that “(R)ates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise.” I told you coastal land use policy was fun.

We were a new news operation at the time, started by a nonpartisan coastal advocacy group. We wrote it up real straight. Just the facts.

As the legislature fought behind the scenes to do something, anything, the story started to take off. By the time a new watered down version of the bill surfaced, it was getting worldwide attention, some of which was funny but kind of off base. But hey, it got the laughs.

As happens a lot when legislatures get this deep in the weeds, various interests, mainly the universities and local governments, pushed back and got their respective areas written out of the legislation.

Then, in a very typical move when legislation is unraveling it got converted to a study bill. It was a punt. But hey, it got the votes. Then Gov. Bev Perdue let bill become law without her signature.

The new study was assigned to the state’s Coastal Resources Commission and required the coast be divided into regions, with new rates of sea level rise for each region. In another bill that year, the legislature abruptly ended the terms of nearly every member of the CRC, appointing new members along with new Gov. Pat McCrory.

The new CRC decided to narrow the prediction of sea level rise to 30 years instead of 100 years used in the original study. Those projections might be right, but remember, they only go out 30. In the meantime a lot more science has been done and there’s been a lot more mapping using new/better technologies. That’s had more impact. That and a couple of hurricanes.

In reality, probably none of what happened in that sad chapter affected coastal planning in North Carolina. No one builds a road, a school, a hospital or a sewage treatment plant for just 30 years out.

And as the persistence of so-called sunny-day flooding inundates more communities throughout the coast the unbelievers with their heads in the sand are dwindling.

The state senator who introduced the much lampooned sea level rise language has moved on as well. David Rouzer is now in the U.S. House, representing North Carolina’s 7th Congressional District, now reeling from another possibly catastrophic hurricane -- Florence.

Whether anyone wants to admit or not, the sea level rise fight here is over and the concept of resiliency has a firm hold on coastal planning. That doesn’t mean that the rush to develop our coast is going to stop or that somewhere phony science won’t be used to justify it.

But most of the people making decisions and planning for a future here are taking the rising seas into account. Not because they were shamed into it, but because you can’t be here for very long without knowing what rules this coast.

Friday morning, yet another reminder made landfall.

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