Today we have some good news to share - your calls and emails have helped secure two significant environmental victories this week!

• The NC House and Senate agreed to a final version of the state budget this week that includes $300,000 for testing of drinking water wells around known groundwater contamination hot spots.  Your emails and visits during Clean Water Lobby Day kept this issue at the forefront of budget discussions.  A related bill, H2873, Protect Drinking Water Wells, was also passed by the NC House this week and will require inspections of new wells.
• This week the legislature passed H1502, Healthy Schoolchildren Act, which will require school systems to adopt policies that protect children from pesticides, mold, diesel exhaust from school buses, and arsenic treated wood.  Your emails were particularly important for this bill as the arsenic wood treatment industry mounted an aggressive effort to derail the bill in the NC Senate.  Kids across the state will benefit from your activism starting later this year, when the first of the bill’s deadlines takes effect.

Of course, we haven’t won everything. Here are some items that need a final push in what is likely to be the last weeks of this legislative cycle. Click on the Take Action link to send a message to your legislators:

• Budget negotiators ultimately dropped a moratorium on new landfills; we’re still hoping it will pass as an independent bill. Take Action
• Several of the ‘slimy’ special interest bills have been slowed, thanks to your emails, but we won’t know for certain that they been stopped until the legislature adjourns and goes home. Take Action
• A few really great bills – such as S.2051, the Energy Independence Act, to promote energy efficiency across the state – are in a race against the clock, to make it through the legislative process before the session ends. Take Action

Any bills that do not pass before session ends will have to start again from scratch in January 2007, so the stakes are high. 

Next week may be the final week of session – a time when proposals start flying so fast, and legislators’ time is at such a premium, that a single phone call from a constituent can change the fate of a bill. 

To give you fair warning:  we won’t send you anything that isn’t urgent, but you may receive several alerts from us next week.  Once the state legislature goes home for the year, we’ll try to give you a break from the steady stream of emails. 

Thank you for making your voice heard, and for working with us for a better, healthier North Carolina!