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NH AG Joins Effort To Rein In ‘Chevron Deference’
ARPA Money Targeted To Dam Safety
Manatee Bay Becomes A Hot Tub
Morgan Stanley has determined that President Joe Biden’s policies are responsible for a boom in large-scale infrastructure and manufacturing, leading the global financial services company to revise its gross domestic product growth projections to 1.9%, almost four times higher than its original projection. Other analysts have doubled their projections for the fourth quarter and raised forecasts for next year.
There has been a surge in manufacturing construction across the country as a result of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.
During the 2010s, companies invested $50 – 80 billion a year in manufacturing construction; now such investment is $189 billion, with private investment following the government investment.
NH AG Joins Effort To Rein In ‘Chevron Deference’
Although the New Hampshire Supreme Court has not adopted the legal principle known as Chevron deference for state agencies, Attorney General John M. Formella has joined a coalition of 27 states in a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule — or at least clarify — the doctrine that allows courts to defer to a federal agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute.
Explaining his stance, Formella said, “For decades now, unelected bureaucrats at federal agencies have been using … Chevron deference to operate like a fourth branch of the government. We now see courts deferring to federal agencies as they bend the law, grow their size, and expand their power over the everyday lives of Americans. As a result, New Hampshire small business owners and taxpayers have been seeing their personal rights directly impacted. While we do not think agencies should be eliminated or their expertise ignored, courts should no longer abdicate their job of interpreting the law. The U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Chevron.”
The case at hand, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce, centers on a regulation by the National Marine Fisheries Service that requires herring fishing boats to have a monitor on board to track compliance with federal regulations. The fishing companies must pay the monitor’s salary, about $700 per day. The fisheries took the government to court, but the lower courts supported the principle, saying that the Magnuson-Stevens Act allowed that requirement, even though the statute did not expressly authorize it. As a result, the fisheries have asked the Supreme Court to take the case — either to overrule Chevron, or at least “to clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute does not constitute an ambiguity requiring deference to the agency.”
Formella maintains that, because agencies have only the powers that Congress gives them by statute, the doctrine effectively allows agencies to expand their authority whenever statutes are even a little unclear. “The doctrine has been abused and manipulated to allow federal agencies to run amok,” the coalition's brief explained.
ARPA Money Targeted To Dam Safety
The state has about 176 dams that, if they fail, could lead to the loss of life and significant property damage. At least a dozen high-hazard dams are in poor condition and are slated for repairs through the American Rescue Plan Act.
The Associated Press reports that the number of high-hazard dams — dams that could cause the loss of human life and community destruction if they fail — that are in poor or unsatisfactory condition in New Hampshire have increased by 51 percent in three years’ time.
The state’s last high-hazard dam failure was in 1996, when the Meadow Pond Dam failed in Alton, causing one death, two injuries, and $5 million in property damages. Forest Lake Dam in Winchester, a low-hazard dam that washed out from flood waters in this year’s heavy rainfall, is privately owned, and its failure did not create significant harm to people or property.
Most of the roughly 2,600 dams in New Hampshire are state-owned, and the majority of high-hazard dams in poor condition are state-owned. The Executive Council has approved the repair or removal of state-owned high-hazard dams using $30 million in ARPA funding, with another $5 million in grants allocated to remove or repair municipally owned dams.
Manatee Bay Becomes A Hot Tub
A buoy near Manatee Bay in Florida recorded a 101.1-degree water temperature on July 24, a temperature common for hot tubs. (The average hot tub temperature is 100 - 102 degrees.) Experts have been tracking exceptionally warm water temperature readings that have ranged from 92 to 97 degrees since early July.
Factors that may have caused the high water temperatures include air temperatures in the mid- to upper-90s; weak (less than 10 mph) winds across the region; strong sunlight hitting shallow water; and silty water that leads to a darker color that absorbs more sunlight for additional heating.
The water temperatures recorded on July 23 and 24 challenge the record for the hottest sea surface temperature in the world. There are no official world water temperature records, but a 99.7-degree temperature recorded in Kuwait Bay has been considered the world record. Due to factors like proximity to land and the silty nature of the water, the temperatures recorded off Florida would have to go through an extensive verification process to be a record-setter.
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