A proposal at the North Carolina General Assembly could reshape how parking lots are built and help reduce pollution from paved surfaces like roads and driveways.

House Bill 369, known as the Parking Lot Reform and Modernization Act, advanced last week in the House. The current version of the bill focuses on two changes: limiting local parking mandates and banning the use of certain toxic pavement sealants.

As rain drenches much of the state this week, the environmental stakes are hard to ignore. Stormwater runoff from paved surfaces is one of the leading sources of water pollution in North Carolina, carrying oil, chemicals and other contaminants into streams and rivers.

In a blog post, Catawba Riverkeeper Ellie Riggs called the proposed bill “a critical step to protect waterways, businesses, and communities from runoff and flooding.”

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, just one inch of rain on an acre of pavement can generate more than 27,000 gallons of runoff. 

“Reducing unnecessary pavement and banning toxic sealants are crucial steps to protect our waterways,” Riggs wrote.

What the bill would do

The current version of HB 369 includes two main provisions:

• Parking reform: Cities and counties would no longer be allowed to require more parking spaces than a developer chooses to build. It also limits local authority to mandate oversized parking spaces, except in cases like handicapped or diagonal parking. Supporters say the change could reduce unnecessary pavement, lower development costs and allow for more flexible land use.
• Pollution prevention: Beginning in 2026, the bill would ban the sale and use of pavement sealants containing high levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. Studies show these chemicals, found in coal tar-based products, can be harmful to human health and aquatic life. Several cities in North Carolina and across the U.S. have already banned these products.

The bill also includes a $5,000 appropriation to the Department of Commerce to help educate property owners about potential savings from reducing the size or number of parking spaces.

What changed from the original draft

Earlier versions of the bill also included language aimed at limiting how local governments regulate stormwater during redevelopment projects. Specifically, it would have prevented cities and counties from requiring new runoff controls on areas that were already paved or developed, particularly for small-scale residential projects.

That draft language allowed local governments to require stormwater capture for up to 50 percent of runoff from an entire redevelopment site and encouraged the use of incentives for capturing more. Supporters argued the section would help promote redevelopment by setting clear limits on what could be required.

However, some environmental advocates and local officials raised concerns that it could weaken efforts to manage flooding and water pollution, especially in areas facing growing stormwater challenges.

In response to those concerns, lawmakers removed the stormwater language from the most recent version of the bill. Stormwater rules would remain unchanged, leaving cities and counties with the authority to require runoff controls as they see fit.

The bill remains under consideration in the House State and Local Government Committee. It must pass both the House and Senate before becoming law.

North Carolina Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin’s lawsuit seeking to throw out thousands of ballots from the 2024 election ended when he conceded defeat Wednesday. But the ramifications of the Republican’s lawsuit will have long-lasting and far-reaching effects for voters around the state.

Griffin, a judge on the state Court of Appeals, didn’t succeed in overturning the result of last year’s election for a seat on the state’s highest court, which he lost to Democratic incumbent Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes. But Griffin did succeed in changing state law along the way, with new rules that will apply in all future elections.

Hundreds of thousands of voters — including 100% of overseas voters as well as many others living inside the state — could be affected.

In large part, the changes are because of court rulings in Griffin’s favor from fellow Republican judges in state courts. Additionally, there’s a new Republican majority on the State Board of Elections, which will have the authority to interpret those court rulings — and to take additional actions based on election integrity claims made by Griffin and other GOP leaders.

The new board is expected to enact sweeping changes based on election integrity claims made by Griffin, Republican President Donald Trump and other party figures.

“Judge Griffin deserves the appreciation of every North Carolinian for highlighting the appalling mismanagement, inaccurate data, and partisan behavior from the prior State Board of Elections,” the North Carolina Republican Party wrote after Griffin conceded defeat.

The narrow race for the high-court seat remained uncertified while Griffin challenged more than 60,000 voters with inconsistent information in voter rolls, such as missing hyphens. He also contested some overseas voters who didn’t show photo identification, even though they weren’t required to at the time. Griffin’s challenges were rejected by state elections officials, so he took them to court.

Griffin won in state court but then lost in federal court. A federal judge said the state court rulings in Griffin’s favor would’ve violated the constitutional rights of the voters being challenged, since Griffin sought to punish those voters for not following voting rules that didn’t exist when the election was held.

Griffin accepted the decision, saying he wouldn’t appeal. Riggs is set to be formally named the winner on Tuesday.

While the federal judge ordered Riggs’ victory to be made official, he didn’t overturn the pro-Griffin rulings from state court. So even though the state Supreme Court’s attempt to apply those new rules retroactively to the 2024 elections was blocked as unconstitutional, those same rules are allowed to go into effect for future elections.

The next elections begin soon: 2025 municipal races kick off in September, and campaigning is already underway for the 2026 midterms.

The new rules

In the Griffin case, the state Supreme Court ruled that overseas voters need to show photo identification to vote. It also ruled that U.S. citizens who have only ever lived overseas, but whose parents are North Carolina voters, should be banned from voting. Riggs recused herself from the case; Griffin did so at the appellate level.

However, the ruling only affected state-level elections, and not federal races. So going forward overseas voters will find themselves in a strange legal situation in which these new rules only apply to certain races on their ballots.

“It really just creates this soup of chaos,” said Joselle Torres of the group Democracy NC, a voting rights group that opposed Griffin’s challenges and is now scrambling to educate voters on the new rules.

The so-called “never-resident” voters, for example, will still be able to vote for North Carolina’s members of the U.S. House and Senate, but not for the state legislature. And if a North Carolina resident who’s voting from overseas doesn’t show ID, their vote for governor would be thrown out but their vote for president would still count.

State elections officials are working to implement the new rules, to create a new online portal for overseas voters to provide proof of ID, to create the new systems that will be needed to make sure no ballots are either wrongfully counted or wrongfully thrown out, and to educate overseas voters on the changes.

“This will require, for the first time, that North Carolina counties maintain two separate voter rolls—one for everyone eligible to vote in all elections, and one for everyone eligible to vote in federal elections only,” elections board spokesman Pat Gannon told WRAL. “The State Board is in the process of updating its website and voting materials to reflect these new instructions from the courts on state law.”

Torres said she’s expecting the new GOP majority on the elections board — which last week switched from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s control to Republican Auditor Dave Boliek following a separate legal battle — won’t just stop at enforcing the rules the state Supreme Court has put in place.

“They might prioritize some quote-unquote ‘election integrity’ initiatives that could make voting with ID, voting overseas, voting by mail, much harder,” Torres said.

The new chairman of the GOP-majority elections board, Francis De Luca, hinted at as much on Wednesday in his introductory speech. He said the board will have “a little bit of a busy time ahead” as he pushes for changes meant to “ensure trust in the election system.”

Republican politicians have long pushed for more restrictive voting rules, whether by passing new laws in the state legislature or by funding lawsuits including Griffin’s. Republicans often say the state’s electoral process needs more safeguarding, despite little evidence of voter fraud.

When the new GOP-majority elections board was sworn in this past week, state GOP chair Jason Simmons wrote that “restoring confidence in the State Board of Elections will take time but we are hopeful in the new direction that began today.”

Purging voters?

One part of Griffin’s post-election challenges — based on people whose identifying information is missing or mismatched in a state database — was also the topic of a separate lawsuit by the state Republican Party thrown out during the election.

State and national Republican leaders sued in August, trying to have more than 225,000 North Carolinians ruled ineligible to vote. That lawsuit was thrown out by the same federal judge who also threw out Griffin’s challenges: Richard Myers, a Trump appointee who serves as the chief judge for the eastern district of North Carolina.

In each case that saw Myers ruling against his fellow Republicans, he wrote that their requests would violate the U.S. Constitution and call into question the legitimacy of elections in North Carolina.

Now that Republicans control the state elections board, though, they could purge voters or enact other similar changes without needing to sue, since the previous Democratic majority on the board no longer exists to block such efforts.

Opponents such as the Democratic Party or private groups and individuals might sue to fight such efforts. One group involved in fighting Griffin’s challenges was the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a Durham-based civil rights group that Riggs led before becoming a judge.

Hilary Harris Klein, the group’s top voting rights lawyer, said in an interview that any effort to purge those potentially hundreds of thousands of voters from the state’s voter rolls — over the missing information both the state GOP and Griffin lawsuits focused on — would be legally suspect, since there’s no evidence any of them are fraudulent voters.

Many of those voters did provide the required information but landed on the list of voters with missing information regardless, due to mistakes by government officials inputting the data.

“A lot of those people on the 225,000 list are lawfully registered, even if you assume [Republicans’] theory of registration is correct,” Klein said. “So the backstop to all of this is that there’s no evidence, not an iota of evidence, that any of those voters on that list are not eligible.”

The previous members of the state elections board also agreed. All of its Democratic and Republican members voted unanimously in early 2024 to reject the same argument that the state Republican Party later based its lawsuit on, as it sought to purge those 225,000 voters. About 60,000 of them voted in 2024, and became the focus of Griffin’s lawsuit.

Griffin never provided any proof in the six months his lawsuit went on, nor did the state Republican Party in its prior lawsuit, that any of those voters were imposters or otherwise committed voter fraud.

“We don’t have any evidence that any of them are fraudulently registered,” Klein said. “And of course, we know that voter fraud in general is just vanishingly rare.”