2016 Public Health Legislation Highlights

The SOG will host its 2016 legislative update webinar next Monday, August 1 at 10:00 a.m. This annual tradition is your opportunity to learn about significant legislation affecting North Carolina local governments. The webinar will cover current hot topics such as law enforcement body cameras and House Bill 2, as well as providing a timely update in areas ranging from criminal law to the environment. You can register for the webinar here.

Unfortunately, I will be out of town and unable to participate in the webinar. Fortunately, my colleague Aimee Wall has offered to summarize this year’s public health legislation highlights, so if you tune in you will get the critical updates. This post provides some background and more details about some of the 2016 legislation affecting public health and local health departments. Read more »

Interpreting the Zoning Ordinance

Interpreting the zoning ordinance—like interpreting any legislation—can be tricky business. Ordinances may be imprecise, development continually evolves, and terms are not always clear.  Reasonable minds may disagree over the correct interpretation and application of a particular provision of the ordinance.  Still, the zoning official must make hard determinations about the meaning of the ordinance.  A recent decision from the North Carolina Court of Appeals, Long v. Currituck County, offered reminders about the rules of thumb for interpreting the ordinance.  This blog discusses the case and highlights those rules of thumb. Read more »

Rabies Prevention and Control: Integrating Recent Research into North Carolina’s Legal Framework

UPDATE:  The rabies law was amended in 2017.  A revised version of this post is available here.

Your dog, Duke, is outside in the yard and has an unexpected encounter with a raccoon. The raccoon bit Duke and there is a small break in the skin on his leg. At this point, the public health system’s rabies prevention and control laws and programs are set in motion. This post briefly walks through the legal framework for responding to suspected rabies exposures, including issues such as booster shots, euthanasia, and confinement. It also addresses a recent development in the public health veterinary research community that may result in local health directors authorizing shorter confinement observation and quarantine periods in certain circumstances. Read on to find out what will happen to Duke.

Read more »

Counting the Mayor in Quorum Calculations

Scenario 1: A city council has six members and no vacant seats.  Three of the members fail to show up for this month’s regular meeting, leaving only the mayor and the other three members in attendance.

Scenario 2: The same council, but four of the six members attend the meeting, and the mayor is absent.

Is a quorum present in either scenario? Read more »

Answers to Questions About North Carolina’s Body-Worn Camera Law

On July 11, 2016, Governor McCrory approved new legislation that creates rules for access to law enforcement recordings, including body-worn camera and dashboard camera records. Following a national trend, North Carolina’s law enforcement agencies have adopted these technologies, and the status of the recordings they create under the state’s public records law has been unclear. Legislators considered several approaches over the course of the 2015-16 session, ultimately arriving at an approach that allows a limited right of access only to individuals who are depicted in the recordings (and representatives of those individuals), and places with the courts the primary responsibility for allowing disclosure to the public. This blog post provides an overview of the new law, S.L. 2016-88 (HB 972), and some answers to questions about it. Read more »

Confidentiality of Taxpayer Income Information

The General Assembly avoided messing with the Machinery Act during their session that just ended, which means that you don’t need to worry about any big property tax law changes this year.  The only ratified bill relating to local property taxes worth mentioning is one that affects the confidentiality of taxpayer income information contained in local tax records.  The new law presents a nice opportunity to review the rules concerning this important category of non-public information. Read more »

HB 2 and Bathrooms: What Must North Carolina Units of Government Do Now?

Updated September 1, 2016:  Three federal court rulings in separate cases, all in August 2016, make the job of the school attorney described near the end of this blog post much more difficult.  In G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board, cited in the blog post as controlling the school board attorney’s advice, the U.S. Supreme Court on August 3 issued a stay, making it appear that the school board attorney should not rely upon the G.G. decision.  But then, on August 26, a federal district court judge in North Carolina, ruling in an unrelated lawsuit concerning HB 2, held that the G.G. decision, despite the stay, remains controlling law.  That ruling is in Carcano v. McCrory.  The school board attorney will be put to a hard task to decide how to advise the school board.  Must it abide by G.G. or not?  The third court ruling was issued on August 21 by a federal district court in Texas, in litigation not involving North Carolina.  State of Texas v. United States of America.  That court issued a nationwide injunction barring federal agencies from enforcing guidelines that the G.G. court had relied on in its ruling.  This ruling gives weight to the position that a federal government challenge to compliance with HB 2’s bathroom use requirements is unlikely.  The law of bathroom usage in public schools, in light of these three court rulings, remains very much in a state of confusion and change.  Additional rulings will be necessary to discern a clear direction

Here is the basic requirement with respect to bathrooms that HB 2 imposes on cities and counties and other units of government in North Carolina:  “Public agencies shall require every multiple occupancy bathroom or changing facility to be designated for and only used by persons based on their biological sex.”  GS 143-760(b).  That requirement has two parts.  First, it requires that multiple occupancy bathrooms be “designated” for use by persons based on their biological sex.  Second, it requires that those bathrooms be “only used” by persons based on their biological sex. Read more »