North Carolina Legislative Staffer Creates "605" Process to Build Consensus on Environmental Legislation
Givens observed that in the traditional legislative process—in which bills are heard and committee amendments offered—amendments are presented at the behest of some specific interest group. "The net result does not necessarily produce a coherent bill that will hang together, from anyone's point of view," Givens said.
He also began to see that "people actually do talk to one another and are not always trying to posture," he said. "When you get folks in a room together, where they're not trying to persuade someone with ultimate decision making authority, there's a lot more common ground than initially appears to be the case."
While the 605 process operates on behalf of the legislature, working group participants are not themselves legislators, Givens said. "Normally they are representatives of the regulated community, environmental advocacy groups, state agencies, and local governments," he said. "605 wouldn't really work if legislators attended, primarily because the non-legislator participants (who are, after all, advocates for a particular viewpoint) would tend to talk 'at' whichever legislators were present. They would do so in an effort to, in effect, lobby the legislators rather than to talk and listen to one another in order to resolve differences."
Givens says 605 works best "when nobody has a lock on the outcome; no one has the political oomph to make it come out the way they want. So most interests have something to gain, and probably something to lose."
One of the strengths of his role as legislative staff, he says, is his position as committee counsel. Givens is tasked with the writing and re-writing of many of the bills that lawmakers ultimately debate. "In doing this," he says, "I've discovered that a bad idea that's well written will often defeat a good idea that's only verbalized. But a good idea that's well written is very difficult to stop."
In the course of his career with the North Carolina Legislature, Givens says he was spending a lot of time carrying messages around, talking to people one-on-one. But it became clear that inviting them all into the same room at the same time offered a more efficient way to communicate messages.
"605 started as a time saving device," he said. "But I realized that the interactive process of people discussing the issues, finding areas of agreement, and getting it all down into a bill or committee substitute, was very useful in getting the issues resolved."
A bill that has been through the 605 process must still go through the formal, constitutional, legislative process in order to become law. Givens said.
Yet despite its intended purpose, the core outcome of a 605 process is no longer always a bill, Givens says. "It's true, the bill is the primary business of legislation, and the end product is a legal document. But sometimes it's about just getting local and state agency folks in the same room to see if we can't come to agreement on what to do about something."
Recently, a matter involving ground water contamination had state and county people at loggerheads for weeks, Givens said. "But in one afternoon in 605, they figured out a way to resolve this thing. It was the first time these folks had ever been in the same room together to listen to one another."
605 has received a lot of attention, not just within the regulatory community but also among legislators, Givens said. On underground storage tanks, air and water quality, and a host of other environmental regulatory issues, "605 is managing to help people reach consensus, and to make it through the legislature with few or no amendments."