Category: News

Dear Friends –

Last week I shared descriptions of the bills I am going to work hard to pass. This week, I’ll share the “messaging” bills I’ve introduced that have no chance of moving forward. As I said last week, we introduce these because we feel strongly about an issue, it’s an important issue for our districts, or we want to send a message about the policies we would adopt and the state we would build if we were in charge.

But first, I have a new legislative website that is in addition to my NCGA webpage. This has additional information you might find helpful, plus all of these newsletters, so please check it out and share it around.

Also, we are coming up on some Helene-related deadlines you need to know.

·       April 7 – Deadline to apply for FEMA Individual Assistance, which can be used to pay for housing, repairs, and other needs caused by Helene.

·       April 7 – Deadline to apply for FEMA Public Assistance, which can help local, tribal, state government agencies, and certain nonprofit organizations offset costs associated with response and recovery.

·       April 27 – Deadline to apply for SBA Physical Property Disaster Loans, which can help WNC renters, homeowners, and business owners whose property was impacted by Hurricane Helene.

·       June 30 – Deadline to apply for SBA Economic Injury Disaster Loans, which are available to small businesses, small agricultural cooperatives, and most private nonprofit organizations.

There is also lots of data about how far WNC has come in the recovery. I’ve pasted some below, and here is a dashboard where you can check the continued progress.

·       More than 4,500 families received temporary housing support.

·       More than 1,300 roads repaired and reopened by the crews and contractors of NC Dept. of Transportation, including I-40.

·       More than 5.3 million cubic yards of debris cleared from right of ways helping first responders save lives and allowing people safe travel within their communities.

·       More than 97% of water and wastewater systems have been restored.

·       $150 million in loans to NC home and business owners through the Small Business Administration.

·       $20 million in state-funded grants and $15 million in philanthropic grant funding through the WNC Small Business Initiative.

Not Likely to Pass Legislation

S94 – Repeal the Death Penalty.  This is a personal passion – my first job after college was working against the death penalty for Amnesty International USA, and I have been committed to the fight ever since.

S166 – This bill should be titled, “A Ban on the Ban Banning Bans.”  This is in response to the enactment two years ago of a ban on local governments adopting ordinances to regulate food packaging like styrofoam and plastic bags. Asheville and Buncombe were poised to do just that, so this is an important statement for our community.

S199 – Housing Support for Hurricane Impacted Areas. This allocates $150,000,000 to the NC Housing Trust Fund for use in rebuilding homes in WNC. If any of this is actually allocated, it will be through the budget, so that’s where I’ll look for this in a couple of weeks.

S326 – Economic Security Act.  This does a number of things to support working people and families, including raising the minimum wage to $22/hour, requiring paid sick leave and family leave, mandating equal pay for equal work, and reinstating the child tax credit and earned income tax credit.

S381 – Equality for All.  This ensures equality for members of the LGBTQ community in all areas – housing, employment, public accommodations, education, banking, etc.

S398 – Prohibit Weapons at Polling Places. Enough said.

S406 – Allow ERPOs (Extreme Risk Protective Order). This is a red flag law that would allow a court to temporarily remove weapons from someone who is determined to be a danger to themselves or others. It would also allow law enforcement to remove weapons from a person who is the subject of a domestic violence protective order.

S407 – Prohibit Defense Based on Sex or Gender. This would prevent defendants in homicide or assault cases from claiming as a defense that they acted out of a belief or perception of the victim’s sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

S438 – NC Adopt ERA.  Again, enough said.

S518 – Mobile Home Park Act. This gives residents of mobile home parks additional rights, including the right to form homeowner cooperatives.

S553 – Save More Tatas Act. This would create parity in insurance coverage for advanced breast cancer diagnostic imaging, like ultrasounds and MRIs, that are recommended for women with an elevated risk of breast cancer and/or dense breasts. This bill is personal for me since I have an elevated risk and get MRIs every year rather than simple mammograms. I pay for those MRIs whereas I wouldn’t pay for regular mammograms, and this bill would fix that.

I am a primary sponsor on several other bills, but in a supporting role, and I’ve cosponsored many, many more bills. You can see all the bills I’m supporting here.  I’ll keep you updated as any of my bills move forward on the long journey of becoming law. And here’s a fun flashback on how we learned how a bill becomes a law!

Julie

Dear Friends,

Sorry for the long absence – things have been flying fast and furious here in the last month. But the bill filing deadline was Tuesday, so things will settle down some as we now begin the heavy lift of moving our bills through the legislative process. Today, I’ll give a brief update on several things and then talk about some of the bills I’ve sponsored this year.

Updates

This is old news now, but we should still celebrate that we passed and Gov. Stein signed into law H47, which is the first Helene Relief bill of 2025 and the fourth overall. With this bill, we’ve appropriated over $1.5 billion for relief efforts. This bill is perhaps the most important since it provides funding to get started the process of rebuilding homes and repairing private roads and bridges. With this funding, Gov. Stein’s administration can begin hiring contractors and creating the program to accept and process applications for this funding. These efforts will get $1.4 billion from the federal government in the form of CDBG-DR funding later this year, but H47 gets the ball rolling.

As with the other relief bills, this one did not contain grants for businesses, revenue replacement for local governments, or additional rental assistance. I will continue to fight for these in future bills.

Also last week, Gov. Stein introduced his budget for the next two years. It makes strong investments in state personnel, education, and working families. For more detail, see here. Now, this budget is far from the final budget, and legislative leaders will not use this even as their starting place because their budget will include pending tax cuts. You should know that the state Office of Management and Budget predicts the tax cuts will put the state in a budget deficit starting in 2026 that will only grow worse each year after that. Unless that revenue is replaced somehow, we will have to start cutting programs and staff. Republican leaders say this won’t happen, so we will soon see how they plan to deal with the revenue reduction.

Legislatively, we have passed several controversial bills in the last month, including the following:

• S50 eliminates the need for a concealed carry permit and lowered the age for concealed carry to 18. This means people will no longer have to apply for the permit, go through an eight-hour course on laws governing guns, gun safety, and how to load/unload and shoot the gun, and then pass a test. There is a similar bill in the House, so chances are good that something will pass this year. In the Rules Committee, I got a little feisty when responding to another senator who suggested that we don’t require anyone in any other context to go through any education before exercising a constitutional right. Well, he’s not quite right about that.
• S261 eliminates the interim goal of reducing carbon pollution from utilities by 70% by 2030. Functionally, that deadline had already slipped to 2035, but the Senate voted to do away with it altogether, though leaving in place the 2050, 100% carbon neutrality goal. I was one of three senators who helped negotiate H951 in 2021 that established those goals, and I led our advocacy against S261, but to no avail. Hopefully, it will get stuck in the House.
• S58 restricts the ability of the NC Attorney General, currently Jeff Jackson, from challenging presidential executive orders. Ridiculous, as AG Jackson’s work so far may ensure billions of federal dollars continue to flow to NC, saving jobs and helping North Carolinians.
• S227 eliminates diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools. There is another bill that does the same in higher education, but we have not heard that yet.

Finally, we’ve had several advocacy days here this year – doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, etc. This past Tuesday was Rainbow Repro Day that celebrated both women’s reproductive freedom and LGBTQ equality. I am the lead sponsor on several of these bills and you can see my comments at the press conference here. I also appear in this piece speaking against a new and worse version of HB2.

Legislation

Every session, legislators introduce two different kinds of bills: those they really think could and should be adopted, and those they know won’t be adopted but are important statements (otherwise known as “messaging” bills). I have a number of both kinds, and this week I will share the bills I am going to spend the rest of session really trying to get passed.

Housing: Republican Sen. Tim Moffitt and I have introduced four bills that will make it easier to build housing, thus helping address our perpetual housing shortage.

• S492 would allow for construction of multifamily buildings up to 32 units with only a single staircase rather than the normally required two. Two is the standard for fire safety, and I’ve already heard opposition from our firefighters, but several cities in the US and Europe have adopted these building code changes with no ill effect on resident or firefighter safety.
• S495 would require most local governments to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in all residential districts.
• S497 would allow more middle housing through the construction of a multifamily building of up to six units in all residential districts.
• S499 would allow residential construction in any commercial/office/retail zoning districts, thus allowing more housing near jobs.

Healthcare: I am a primary sponsor on three bills, two of them with Republicans, all of which stem from our collective experience as a community during and after the sale of Mission Hospital.

• S532 – For the second time, Sens. Burgin, Corbin, and I introduced this bill to govern the process by which hospitals and healthcare systems merge, creating the kind of transparency and opportunities for public input that we never had in the Mission deal. It also gives the Attorney General, the State Treasurer, and the State Auditor each a role in reviewing the proposed deals and imposing conditions to ensure the cost, quality, availability, and accessibility of healthcare do not diminish in the wake of the sale.
• S673 creates whistleblower protections for healthcare professionals and makes clear that non-disclosure agreements cannot prevent these professionals from disclosing information related to patient safety, ethical violations, or illegal activity. The bill also prohibits noncompete clauses for healthcare professionals who work for hospitals and hospital systems.
• S570 clearly prohibits the Corporate Practice of Medicine in NC by restating the type of business entities medical practices must be and by banning the “strawman” or “friendly physician” structure that big healthcare companies and private equity have used to get around state prohibitions on the corporate practice of medicine. This bill will be challenging to move forward, but the two physicians in the House, both Republicans, are supportive and plan to introduce it there as well.

Second Chance: These bills are intended to reduce the barriers for people coming out of prison who are trying hard to rebuild their lives. Honestly, only the first of these has a chance of passing, but I’m listing the others here because they also need to happen someday.

• S564, the Public Safety Through Food Access Act, would lift the ban on SNAP/TANF benefits going to people convicted of drug related felonies. Currently, NC law doesn’t allow most of these people to access to these food programs, which only increases the risk of recidivism.
• S334 would repeal the antiquated, harmful drug tax law that keeps people in debt for failure to pay taxes on illegal drugs. You read that right – NC requires people in possession of illegal drugs to obtain a stamp from the Dept. of Revenue, which of course no one does. Then they get hit with the tax liability for failure to acquire the stamp. The NC Justice Center has more information if you’re curious.
• S529, the Second Chances Success Act, would eliminate just a couple of the dozens of fines and fees people involved in the criminal justice system have to pay, again, making it hard for them to get ahead. It also prohibits extending someone’s probation solely for failure to pay the $40/month probation supervision fee.

I am also working with Sens. Moffitt and Daniel to pass S131, which would change some tax rules to give Buncombe County about $12 million more revenue than they would otherwise have this year. Note that this bill will need to be amended to clarify that the school capital funds can only be used for school operating or capital, not just anything.

That’s it for now. More next week!
Julie

Dear Friends,

As you likely know, North Carolina was recently awarded $1.4 billion from Congress that will flow through the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development. This pot of money is called Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery or CDBG-DR, for short. It can be used for many purposes. You may also remember that the City of Asheville will receive a direct allocation of $225 million in CDBG-DR funding that is separate from the State’s pot.

Both the State and the City have to develop Action Plans that describe how they will spend the money they receive. The City is hosting public meetings, and you can find out more information about those here. The State is just starting its public input process, and below are the meetings scheduled for around the region. You can also find more information here on the Dept. of Commerce’s website.

I hope you can get to one of these meetings. The focus of the spending will be housing, infrastructure, and rebuilding the economy of the region, but there is more in the details.

Tuesday, Feb 18
2:00pm – 4:00pm
Isothermal Community College, Business Sciences Building, Room 15
286 ICC Loop, Spindale

Friday, Feb 21
10:00am – 12:00pm
Haywood County Historic Courthouse, 2nd floor, Waynesville

Monday, Feb 24
11:30am – 2:30pm
Office of Land of Sky Regional Council, 339 New
Leicester Highway, Suite 140, Asheville

Tuesday, Feb 25
10:00am – 12:00pm
High Country Regional Council Office, 468 New Market Blvd., Boone

Thursday, Feb 27
1:30pm – 3:30pm
Western Piedmont Council Office, 1880 2nd Avenue NW, Hickory

Friday, Feb 28
10:00am – 12:00pm
Centralina Regional Council Office, 10735 David T
Taylor Drive, Suite 250, Charlotte

All the best,
Julie

Hello Friends and welcome to the new, 2025-26 legislative session!

On Wednesday, my Senate colleagues and I were sworn in for a new two-year term. We also elected the Senate leadership, adopted our rules for the session, and then adjourned until January 29 when we return to get down to business. I continue to proudly represent the people of District 49 and am grateful to be serving my third term.

While the Republican leadership of the Senate is largely the same, Democrats elected a new Minority Leader in Senator Sydney Batch. Our Whip, Senator Jay Chaudhuri, remains in his position, and I round out the leadership as our caucus Secretary. We’ve already had our first retreat, and I’m excited about the year ahead of us.

My committee assignments for this term are largely the same as last year, with two important changes. Repeat assignments are Healthcare, Transportation, Elections, and Rules. My new assignments are ones I’ve been asking for since I first got here – the Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee and the associated appropriations committee. At last I can put my environmental expertise to work on a committee!

Since we’re starting off new, I thought I would provide some information about how things work down here. I’ll be in touch soon to discuss my legislative priorities, but I hope you enjoy this review of the legislature, the process, and how you can stay engaged.

The North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA)

The General Assembly is a bicameral body consisting of the 50-member Senate and the 120-member House of Representatives. It convenes anew every two years after elections. In 2025, the “long session” typically runs from January through July, with lawmakers working to pass the biennium budget and a myriad of other legislative matters. The “short session” will be next year, in 2026, when we convene usually in April and work through June. The Speaker of the House presides over the House, while Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt serves as President of the Senate. Senate leadership, however, is largely driven by the President Pro-Tem, Senator Phil Berger, who is the key figure in shaping legislative priorities in the chamber.

How to Stay Engaged During the Legislative Session 

It is important for you to remain informed and engaged in the work we do here as we work on policies that impact your family and community. Here are some ways you can stay informed and involved throughout the session.

1. Attend Meetings and Sessions. You can attend committee meetings and legislative sessions in person to hear discussions and debates, and most committee meetings also offer an opportunity for public comment. Most committee rooms and both chambers also provide live audio recordings for those who prefer to listen remotely. The live streams are available on the NCGA’s website. If you come to Raleigh and plan to attend a committee meeting or session, please let me know.
2. Track Legislation Online. The General Assembly’s website offers tools to track bills, read summaries, and follow the legislative schedule. By staying updated on key proposals, you can understand how they may affect you and take action when necessary.
3. Contact or meet with Me. You can schedule a meeting with me either in Raleigh or when I’m back in Asheville by contacting my Legislative Aide, Irma Avent Hurst. Once session gets going later this month, I am generally in Raleigh from Monday evening until Thursday evening. That means I’m available to meet in Asheville on Mondays before leaving town and Fridays.
4. Have an Idea for a Law? You can play a role in shaping policy by proposing a bill. While only legislators can sponsor and introduce bills, anyone can suggest a new idea or request a change to current law. You can bring your idea to me for starters and I can let you know if it makes sense to pursue it. There are no silly ideas!

In additional to setting up a meeting, Irma can also help you with a range of constituent services if you’re having trouble with a state agency, your local government, or a federal issue. If we can’t help you, we can at least get you to the person who can.

You can reach Irma at irma.aventhurst@ncleg.gov or by calling my office phone, 919-715-3001. If you find yourself in Raleigh and just want to stop by to say hello, our office is #1025 in the Legislative Building at 16 West Jones St. Raleigh, NC 27601. We always love to see constituents!

That’s it for now. I’ll be in touch again soon when there is more to report!

Julie