Published: Thursday, January 23, 2014 at 10:42 p.m. Last Modified: Thursday, January 23, 2014 at 10:42 p.m.

About 50 residents attended a forum Thursday to hear a panel of experts discuss what two of three panelists characterized as North Carolinas systematic rollback of environmental protections.

Sponsored by the Environmental and Conservation Organization, the public forum at the City Operations Center featured N.C. Rep. Chuck McGrady, Senior Attorney D.J. Gerken of the Southern Environmental Law Center and Co-Director Julie Mayfield of WNC Alliance.

The speakers focused primarily on the impact of three bills that became state law last year: a 59-page regulatory reform act, a bill to prevent local governments from updating building codes more than every six years, and a bill sponsored by McGrady to regionalize water and sewer service.

Most troubling to the panelists as a whole was House Bill 74, a catch-all that McGrady a past national president and board member of the Sierra Club said started as a two-page bill and quickly morphed in the Senate to include everything from hog lagoons to carbon monoxide detectors.

One provision of the massive bill is that local governments can only adopt environmental ordinances stricter than state law by unanimous vote, Mayfield said.

If you pay attention to local politics, you might know that getting a unanimous vote on anything is difficult, she said. Getting a unanimous vote on an environmental regulation is almost impossible.

The regulatory reform bill also requires that the states Environmental Management Commission review all state environmental regulations and re-adopt them within an aggressive timeframe or the rules will automatically expire, Mayfield said.

We really dont know how this is going to play out, but there is a huge amount at risk here, she said. Allowing rules to expire will be easier, she said, because the legislature passed a bill firing all the EMC members who were appointed by previous governors and allowed new members with greater ties to polluting industries.

Potentially, theres a little bit of the fox guarding the hen house here, Mayfield said.

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ECO forum focuses on state’s environmental ‘rollback’