McCrory signs 'job-promoting' enviro bill

Gov. Pat McCrory signed a bill Friday to cut "burdensome regulation" that dissolves the state's water-quality division, relaxes groundwater standards and places a moratorium on local environmental rules.

McCrory had hinted he might veto the Regulatory Reform Act. Instead he signed it nearly a month after the bill landed on his desk and two days before a veto deadline.

Environmental pieces of the bill:

-- Require state agencies to review rules every 10 years to judge whether they're still in the public interest. Rules that are not reviewed will expire.

-- Let billboard operators take down trees outside defined cut zones on freeway ramps in order to make their signs more visible.

-- Ban until October 2014 new, local environmental ordinances on issues that state or federal laws also address -- unless the ordinances are adopted unanimously.

-- Extend the "compliance boundary" for groundwater contamination violations, previously 500 feet from the source, to the owner's property line. Existing compliance boundaries won't change. Duke Energy, which has been sued by the state over coal-ash pollution, and its critics disagree on whether the change will benefit the company.

-- Combines the N.C. Division of Water Quality, which policed water pollution, with the N.C. Division of Water Resources. Their combined staffs are expected to be about 15 percent smaller as the streamlined division adopts a customer-friendly approach to regulation.