Avi Bajpai, NC Insider, 6/19/26
Gov. Josh Stein signed a bill into law Friday that will block a handful of counties that had conducted reappraisals this year from assessing property taxes under the new valuations.
The temporary measure, which when combined with another bill currently making its way through the General Assembly, will only apply to eight of the state’s 100 counties. It was put forward by Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger at the beginning of the short session as a way to delay expected tax hikes this year, giving lawmakers time to study and determine more comprehensive solutions to give homeowners relief.
In a statement, Stein said he signed Senate Bill 889 because the cost of living “is too high” and the one-year moratorium on reappraised valuations from going into effect would provide “tax relief for North Carolinians who are feeling pain in their pocketbooks.”
The bill was criticized by Democrats as an inadequate response by the General Assembly, and even as he signed it into law, Stein said the bill “is not our most effective method of lowering costs.”
“We must make life more affordable, which is why I'm pushing to cut taxes for working and middle class families and lower housing, electricity, child care, and health care costs,” Stein said.
Property tax burdens have been a key issue of discussion on Jones Street this year, and apart from SB 889, Republicans approved a ballot measure in May that will ask voters if the General Assembly should limit the amount by which property tax levies can be increased by local governments.
Stein has strongly criticized overall Republican tax policy, specifically the efforts by GOP lawmakers to gradually draw down the state’s corporate income tax rate until it is eliminated by 2030, and ask voters to approve another constitutional amendment that would lower an existing cap on the income tax rate from 7% to 3.5%.
Republicans speaking in favor of SB 889 argued that certain municipalities and counties were irresponsibly raising property tax rates, and that a one-year freeze on new valuations being used to assess taxes would provide homeowners with financial relief.
The bill, as originally written, would have affected 20 counties. It was subsequently revised to carve out several western counties that were hit by Hurricane Helen and continue to struggle with economic recovery.
Last-minute adjustments to the criteria, contained in a separate measure, Senate Bill 474, added two counties and removed two others from the list, resulting in a final tally of eight counties that the moratorium would apply to: Anson, Pamlico, Chowan, Pender, Bladen, Davidson, Onslow and Guilford.
That adjustment bill received near-unanimous approval in the House this week and has been sent to the Senate.
Stein, in his statement Friday, urged the Senate to pass the measure, specifically because it would exempt Buncombe County and other jurisdictions that are still recovering from Helene.
Asked if the Senate would agree with the House’s changes to the final list of counties as laid out in SB 474, Berger told NC Insider/State Affairs on June 10 that he had not seen the new language but expected the bill to advance as long as it “does not adversely impact any of the Senate members that want the bill, as it was originally put forward, or that members are not upset with some provision that affects their district.”
“I don’t anticipate a problem with technical modifications to the bill,” Berger said.
Coastline Protection
As state lawmakers consider repealing the longstanding ban on seawalls and jetties on North Carolina’s coastline, some of the state’s top scientists are recommending “a cautious approach” to allowing any new hardened structures. The N.C. Coastal Resources Commission Science Panel released a highly-anticipated report Thursday examining various approaches to stabilizing the shoreline against coastal erosion.
Dr. Laura Moore, chair of the CRC Science Panel and a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, said while the recent storms and the dramatic loss of homes in Dare County have brought the issue to the forefront, North Carolina’s beaches suffer from long-term chronic erosion.
“When construction is based on a 30-year setback and buildings last longer than 30 years, the shoreline will eventually intersect or come close to intersecting the development line,” said Moore. “This is what we’re seeing, and we’ll see more of it in the future.”
The CRC panel was tasked with identifying the best way to protect coastal property — terminal groins, seawalls, retaining walls or other erosion-control measures. Moore told the commission that each approach has tradeoffs. Groins can slow erosion and widen a beach in some areas where the sand naturally accumulates, but they can also increase the erosion in areas where sand is already being lost naturally, Moore said.
Shoreline hardening with seawalls and sandbags can be used to absorb energy and reduce wave impacts. But this approach takes up space on the beach. And Moore said maintaining the beach in front of a seawall or hardened structure will actually require greater amounts of sand over time.
“You lose some of the beach and dune profile depending on where the structure is placed,” Moore explained. “Seawalls also reduce sand supply for adjacent beaches because the area that’s armored is no longer available as a sand source.”
The panel examined the use of existing groins, jetties and other sand-trapping methods at Fort Fisher, Fort Macon, Buxton, and Bald Head Island. In each case, maintaining the shoreline required regular beach nourishment and repair once the hardened structures deteriorated. “All approaches to protecting infrastructure that involve hardening the shoreline tend to produce the same adverse physical effects,” according to the draft report.
Moore added that not all tradeoffs can be easily monetized or analyzed. The addition of hardened structures could harm nesting sea turtles, shorebirds, and fish habitats. The ecological impact could impact regional tourism.
State lawmakers, however, appear to have made up their minds before the report was even released. Senate President Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, told reporters Wednesday he would support the Senate bill to lift the ban. “I think we need to do that. We’ve just seen too many examples of the ocean taking fairly large structures. And there’s a solution to that,” said Berger. Berger said any bill moving forward could be amended based on the report’s recommendations.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger said Thursday he and House Speaker Destin Hall had “extremely productive conversations” on the state budget this week and made good progress, but “still have a ways to go.”
Negotiations between both chambers, which kicked off in mid-May after Berger and Hall reached an agreement on a framework for taxes and raises, have reached the final stage. The two GOP leaders are now sitting down for one-on-one meetings in the Legislative Office Building with lists of spending items and policy questions that require resolution.
Berger and Hall met for hours on Wednesday in between House and Senate voting sessions, wrapping up for the day at 7 p.m.
The two leaders settled “a number of things on the list,” Berger said, declining to talk about specifics.
The list in question is the product of weeks of talks between appropriations committee chairs in both chambers, who completed their work earlier this week. Items that remained unresolved at the end of that process were turned over to Berger and Hall for final review and negotiation.
Rep. Donny Lambeth, a senior budget chair in the House, told reporters on Wednesday that House budget writers had submitted about five pages worth of bulleted items that needed to be resolved. In the past, those lists have been up to 30 and 40 pages long, Lambeth said.
Berger, asked about the list on Wednesday, said there are multiple versions of items that need his and Hall’s approval.
“What happens is, you get a packet, it’s got some things on it, and somebody in the room has six more packets,” Berger said.
“At the beginning, it seems to be never ending, but it’s a lot and we’ve made good progress,” Berger told NC Insider/State Affairs Wednesday afternoon, before his second meeting of the day with Hall.
Speaking with reporters after Thursday’s voting session, Berger explained that the list of items requires extensive discussions with Hall because of both the volume of remaining issues, and the complexity of some of them.
Illustrating his point, Berger said there was one issue in particular that had been vetted by chairs of the area-specific appropriations committees and the full budget committees. By the time it reached Hall and him, however, “there was some disagreement.”
“It was a very complicated situation, so we asked the staff to go back and rewrite the provision, and I think in doing that, we’re likely to get the issue resolved,” Berger said.
“Those things do take time, which is why it’s not something you get done in one day,” he said.
Republican leaders continue to say they hope to have a budget finalized by the end of June, but with just two weeks left in the month and plenty of remaining negotiation for Berger and Hall to complete, they’ve been hesitant to lay out an exact timeline.
Berger told reporters on Thursday that he is “concerned that we need to work more than one day a week in order to get things done.”
Berger and Hall only met one day this week, since the House adjourned for the week on Wednesday. The Senate held a voting session Thursday afternoon.
Berger said Thursday he believes the end-of-month goal is still achievable, but will require as many as four to five days with additional scheduled negotiating sessions with Hall next week.
“I’d like to see enough, and if we can get it done in one session, that’d be great, but I’d like to see enough where we can start seeing the finish line as opposed to feeling like we’re still on the first line,” Berger told NC Insider.
Lambeth and another top House budget writer, Rep. Dean Arp, said Wednesday that part of the reason the process has taken longer than Republicans initially anticipated, is because of the complexity of the final budget document, which usually spans several hundreds of pages.
An example of that, Arp said, was that budget chairs reviewed the salary package four times before completing their work and turning the negotiation over to Berger and Hall.
“You want to make sure there’s no errors and everything’s been covered,” Lambeth said, “and the more eyes you can put on it, so it’s constant, kind of reviewing and updates.”
Animal Crossings
If you’re a red wolf or a black bear, the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern North Carolina can be a pretty sweet place to live, with plenty of food and lots of open spaces, largely free of humans. That is except for the two-lane highway, U.S. 64, that cuts through the refuge in Dare County, carrying people to and from the Outer Banks at 55 mph or more. The highway is a killing field for bears, wolves and all manner of small mammals, snakes, reptiles and amphibians that try to cross it.
Now the N.C. Department of Transportation is moving ahead with plans to make the highway safer for wildlife. Endowed with a $25 million federal grant, NCDOT plans to build fences and several passages under a section of U.S. 64 in the wildlife refuge. NCDOT will present its plans and seek feedback at a public meeting from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 23, in the Manns Harbor Community Building.
NCDOT hasn’t determined how many passages it will build but says they will likely vary in size, with some large enough for bears, deer and wolves. Each passage would come with new fencing to guide animals to the openings under the highway. The state won federal funding for the project in large part because of the red wolves. The only wild population of red wolves in the world live in and around the wildlife refuge, and the highway is a big threat to their survival.
The passages will be built under a 2.5-mile section of U.S. 64 from the eastern edge of the East Lake community to just west of Robertson Landing Road, a known hotspot for wolf crossings, said Ron Sutherland, chief scientist for Wildlands Network, a national conservation group with offices in North Carolina.
“It is definitely the right place to start,” Sutherland said. “The wolves tend to walk right up Buffalo City Road, one of the gravel roads in the refuge, to the highway and get run over.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says at least 19 wolves have been struck and killed on U.S. 64 in the wildlife refuge over the years. One of the wolves killed last year was a male helping to raise a litter of five pups which later died.
The target area is also a popular crossing for black bears, and collisions with those can have consequences for humans. Law enforcement agencies responded to 40 crashes in that 2.5-mile section from 2021 to March of this year, 19 of them involving bears, according to NCDOT.
Wolves and bears are not the only animals being hit on U.S. 64. Wildlands Network has conducted daily roadkill surveys on U.S. 64 and U.S. 264 in Tyrrell and Dare counties since August 2024. In the first year, it found 5,044 vertebrates killed by cars and trucks, including 1,050 snakes, 1,186 turtles and 1,529 frogs. Altogether, the surveys found 144 species of dead vertebrates, which will all benefit from the wildlife passages, Sutherland said.
NCDOT estimates that its wildlife passages will cost $31.25 million to design and build. In addition to the $25 million federal grant, NCDOT received nearly $4 million from the Center for Biological Diversity and Wildlands Network, raised from more than 5,800 individual donors. NCDOT expects to finish designing the wildlife passages in 2027 and begin construction in 2028.
A proposed Senate bill aims to establish a commission to develop a 20-year strategic framework for state investment in infrastructure across transportation, water and resiliency needs.
Senate Bill 1010, the Framework for Upgrading Technology, Utilities, Resiliency and Economies NC Infrastructure Act, is necessary due to immense growth over the last 15 years, bill sponsor Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, told the Senate Transportation Committee on Wednesday.
By 2030, North Carolina is projected to surpass Ohio and Georgia to become the seventh-largest state in the country. Over 400 people move to the Tar Heel State each day. Brunswick County is the seventh fastest-growing county in the nation.
“We’re growing at almost (a city the size of) Wilmington every single year,” Lee said. “Bringing this bill forward really relates to a plan for not just transportation or water and sewer or healthcare, it’s really an infrastructure planning bill to make sure that we are looking at all aspects of growth.”
Approaches to long-term investment such as the State Capital and Infrastructure Fund and the state’s wastewater infrastructure master plan have yielded major benefits, Lee said, but often are developed in isolation.
The commission, housed within the Department of the State Treasurer, would be tasked with uniting those disparate efforts into a single report. It would consist of three appointees from the treasurer, two from the governor and two from each legislative chamber.
Lee credited Republican control of the General Assembly over the last 15 years for putting the state in a position to develop and fund such a commission.
“It will set us a really strong path moving forward to help us get a strong infrastructure plan in all areas of healthcare, transportation and safety,” Lee said. “All of this culminates in coming back to us. Nothing is going to happen without the Legislature really moving forward with a plan with the governor as well. That’s why we have it set up this way.”
An interim report would be due to the governor and various legislative committees within the first year of the commission. A final plan has a deadline of March 31, 2028. SB 1010 — also known as FUTURE — appropriates $300,000 to set up the commission.
Amy Auth, deputy treasurer for external affairs at the treasurer’s office, said increased demands on the state’s infrastructure are the impetus for the bill. “In many areas, those demands are outpacing the states’ ability to plan and invest strategically,” she said. “This legislation takes a thoughtful approach … to evaluate a process for long-term infrastructure needs across the state and develop recommendations for future investment.”
Transportation Package
A massive slate of changes to North Carolina’s transportation laws advanced in the state Senate Wednesday, touching on everything from e-bikes to delivery drones, toll roads, left-lane drivers, speed-limit rules, driver’s licenses and more.
Among other changes, the newly rewritten text of House Bill 1094 would:
- Let people renew their driver’s licenses early, before they expire.
- Allow the DMV to give people involved in car wrecks the unredacted copy of their accident report.
- Privatize the signs on highway exits that point people to local gas stations, restaurants and hotels.
- Explicitly authorize local governments to regulate battery-powered e-bicycles.
- Require children and teens to wear helmets on faster e-bikes.
- Loosen the rules for drones or self-driving vehicles, intended for delivery companies, to allow them to be larger and move faster.
Members of the Senate Transportation Committee had almost nothing to say about the bill as it was rushed through committee Wednesday, indicating that it’s likely heading to fast passage in the chamber before heading back to the state House for final approval.
Committee leaders said all the changes have been pre-approved by House leaders in closed-door discussions, so the bill could quickly arrive to Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s desk.
The committee room was packed with lobbyists for affected industries and groups, but none of them or any other members of the public commented on any piece of the bill.
Toll Lanes
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein warned against the use of “threats” when asked about the ongoing fight over adding toll lanes to Interstate 77 South during an appearance in Charlotte on Wednesday. The Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization voted in May to rescind support for adding toll lanes to an 11-mile stretch of I-77 from uptown to the South Carolina state line. That vote followed after months of anger in the community over the impact of the new lanes on neighborhoods and the environment.
But a proposal in the state legislature to make local governments who voted in favor of rescinding support pay back about $60 million already spent on the project began to circulate late last week. The proposal from Republican state Sen. Vickie Sawyer also says the state wouldn’t start new transportation projects and would withhold money for road maintenance until the $60 million is paid back.
Stein, speaking to reporters Wednesday at Bank of America Stadium after an awards ceremony, called I-77 “one of the most crowded urban highways” and said “the need is clearly there for some fix.” “I trust the people of Charlotte to come up with a fix that makes sense for them,” the Democratic governor said. Stein said he’d like to see the parties involved “talk together around a table.”
“Threats are very rarely an effective way to get to a desired outcome,” he said. “And so I just hope that we can work together constructively to address this issue in a way that makes sense, that makes sure that travel is safe and at the same time that the neighborhoods are protected.”
Asked about Mecklenburg County Commission Vice Chair Leigh Altman’s recent comment that Stein should “make clear” transportation money won’t be withheld for other projects, the governor said “there are a lot of technicalities in the way the transportation dollars are issued.”
Sawyer’s amendment wasn’t added to a transportation bill moving through the legislature during a Wednesday Senate Transportation Committee meeting. But her proposal could still be added to the state budget. The CRTPO is scheduled to talk about the I-77 toll lanes again Wednesday night, hours after the town of Monroe decided to reverse its vote on revoking the funding agreement for the toll lanes.