State lawmakers are back in Raleigh, after taking most of the last month off for vacation, and with a busy schedule ahead of them.
The state House and Senate plan to spend Tuesday attempting to override some if not all of the 14 vetoes that Gov. Josh Stein vetoed earlier this year on issues ranging from utility costs to guns, gender, immigration and deregulation. Stein is a Democrat and both legislative chambers are controlled by sizeable Republican majorities.
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But first, on Monday, a state House committee took up several bills setting up major actions in the coming days and months.
One newly re-written bill announced the legislature's intent to create a state commission to handle hurricane preparedness and disaster response, including flood mitigation, early warning systems for floods and landslides, choosing how to spend federal grant money, and where to try buying out homeowners living in flood-prone areas. House Bill 907 would also give Republican legislative leaders more say over those decisions, which historically have been left up to the executive branch.
High-ranking GOP lawmaker Rep. John Bell, R-Wayne, said in an interview Wednesday that the exact details are still likely to change and that the proposal made public Monday was just a starting point. Lawmakers plan to spend the rest of the year soliciting input and fine-tuning the proposal, he said.
"We're open to conversation," Bell said. "We know how important this is, not just for my folks in eastern North Carolina. For western North Carolina. And now my friends in Alamance County, and central North Carolina, have experienced storms. So we just want to make sure we get it right."
Also on Monday, the House committee advanced a new version of an anti-squatters bill that Stein vetoed, doing exactly what Stein asked them to do in order to get his support.
It’s perhaps an indication that a veto override would be unlikely to find success — or that lawmakers were uneasy about going on the record for a second time about their support for one controversial piece of the bill.
The anti-squatters bill passed the House nearly unanimously earlier this year, but it was then held up by the Senate for months — until the final, whirlwind day of votes in late June when the Senate added in an unrelated provision to protect pet stores, including those that work with puppy mills, as a condition for its approval.
The bill passed but was promptly vetoed by Stein, who said he would've supported the bill if it only had the squatter crackdowns without the puppy mill protections. On Monday Rep. Julia Howard, R-Davie, said the House is hoping to get that version of the bill back to Stein, as long as the Senate doesn't meddle again with unrelated additions.
“They decided to add something that didn’t belong,” Howard said. She added that in the new version of the bill moving forward now, “that ‘something’ has been removed.”
Stein has vetoed 14 bills so far this year, including the squatters-and-puppy-mills legislation.
Other vetoes aim to stop bills with stricter immigration rules, looser gun rules, a bill backed by large corporate interests that’s aimed at stopping state agencies from issuing new rules or regulations, and also a bill that would exempt Duke Energy from climate change goals and allow it to charge customers for power plants that don’t yet exist.
Supporters of Senate Bill 266, including Duke Energy, say it’ll save the utility giant money in the long-run. Opponents, including Stein, say it will raise the average family’s electrical bills by changing a formula that would shift electrical costs away from Duke’s business customers and onto residential customers instead.