Roundup: Next week's elections, year-round daylight saving time and "nurdles."

It’s Saturday, Nov. 4, and we’d like to welcome you to the weekly State and Local Roundup. There’s plenty to keep tabs on, with two state courts weighing former President Donald Trump’s eligibility for the ballot, the lax patchwork of state and local rules governing America’s groundwater and cleaning up “nurdles.”

But first, we’ll turn to a number of high-stakes elections taking place throughout the country next week.

Two incumbent governors are trying to hold on to their seats, abortion rights are on the ballot in Ohio, and the results of legislative races in Virginia could propel a presidential campaign for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin or relegate him to lame duck status for the final two years of his gubernatorial term.

Abortion rights loom large over many of the contests Tuesday, as voters continue to wrestle with the fallout from the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case that ended half a century of federal protections for women seeking abortions.

The landscape of abortion rights has changed drastically in states since the high court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Abortion is now banned in a large swath of the U.S., from the Rio Grande in Texas to the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia.?

Voters in Ohio will decide Tuesday whether their state will join that group, which would expand that territory to Lake Erie. Or they could go the opposite way, and put protections for access to abortion and other reproductive rights (like contraception and fertility treatments) in the state constitution.

Ohio abortion rights groups are behind the proposed constitutional amendment that directly challenges Republican state officials, including Gov. Mike DeWine, who want to end a woman’s right to the procedure. GOP lawmakers passed a law in 2019 that would ban abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they are pregnant, all but outlawing the procedure. The law, which includes no exceptions for rape or incest, was in effect for nearly three months before a court temporarily blocked it. But the ban is expected to go into effect again if the ballot measure fails.

The fight in Ohio has drawn outsized attention, with more than $33 million being spent on TV advertising so far, much of that paid for by national groups. Ohio is the seventh state where voters have weighed in on abortion policy since Dobbs, and abortion rights groups have won the other six, including in traditionally conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky.?

Continue reading here.

News to Use

Trends, Common Challenges, Cool Ideas, FYIs and Notable Events

• ELECTIONS: Should states decide Trump’s eligibility for the ballot? Minnesota Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical Thursday that states have the authority to block former President Donald Trump from the ballot, with some suggesting that Congress is best positioned to decide whether his role in the 2021 U.S. Capitol attack should prevent him from running. Justices sharply questioned an attorney representing Minnesota voters who had sued to keep Trump, the early front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, off the state ballot under the rarely used “insurrection” clause of the U.S. Constitution. Courts in two states were debating questions that even the nation’s highest court has never settled—the meaning of the insurrection clause in the Civil War-era 14th Amendment and whether states are even allowed to decide the matter. The Minnesota lawsuit and another in Colorado are among several filed around the country to bar Trump from state ballots in 2024.
• WATER: A tangle of rules to protect America’s water is falling short. In the latest article in a series on the state of America’s groundwater, The New York Times asked all 50 states how they manage their aquifers and found that they rely on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but nonexistent. The majority of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells, including some that pump large volumes of water, and many states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot the country. Even states that do try to count wells or regulate groundwater use often have other problems: Some carve out exemptions for powerful industries like agriculture, one of the nation’s biggest users of groundwater. And every state relies to some extent on well owners self-reporting their water use, the Times analysis found. That policy raises the risk of under-reporting or deception by users big and small.
• DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME: Where all 50 states stand on making it permanent. Daylight saving time ends tomorrow, and only two U.S. states, Arizona and Hawaii, don't observe it at all, refusing to roll their clocks forward and backward every year. But they are outliers, relying on a loophole in a 57-year-old federal law that requires states to stay on daylight saving time. Many states have passed measures to stay on daylight saving time permanently—a move that some have called "lock the clock." In the last five years, 19 states have passed legislation or resolutions supporting year-round daylight saving time, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2023, at least 29 states considered or are considering legislation related to it, but none of those bills or laws can take effect until there is a federal appeal of the congressional law.

Find more News to Use here.

Picture of the Week

A train that derailed in Maryland in September introduced local officials to a source of pollution no one was quite prepared to handle: nurdles. These tiny plastic pellets, each about the size of a lentil, are transported around the world as the raw materials of plastic production. They were responsible, in part, for closing down a busy thoroughfare to traffic for two weeks. Most state and local governments do not yet have rules in place for monitoring, preventing or cleaning up nurdle spills, according to The Great Nurdle Hunt, a project of the Finland-based nonprofit Fidra. California is the only state in the U.S. with a strong law regulating nurdles and marine plastics as a specific source of pollution. The law was passed because nurdles were increasingly being found on the state’s beaches and along railways in the industrial town of Vernon (see picture). Other states have varied approaches to handling this emerging source of pollution, many of which are developed on the fly after a spill occurs. Federal legislation that would require the Environmental Protection Agency to prohibit the discharge of plastic pellets into waterways or during transport was introduced in July but has not yet passed.

ICYMI

Access to public records is 'deteriorating terribly'

In a time when trust in state and local government is under siege, public access to information is particularly vital.

BY KATHERINE BARRETT & RICHARD GREENE

LA explores new options as copper thieves target streetlight wiring

Transportation departments are scrambling to cope with a spike in copper wire thefts that leave their roads darker and more dangerous.

BY DANIEL C. VOCK

Who should have land-use authority in green energy projects?

Michigan lawmakers are considering legislation that would shift some land-use authorities to the state to streamline renewable energy developments. But local governments and residents fear their voices will get left behind in the race to build green infrastructure.

BY MOLLY BOLAN

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with us. We’re off next week for Veterans Day, so we’ll see you back here Nov. 18. This is an abbreviated version of our Roundup, but you can read the full newsletter here. While you're at it, sign up to get this and/or other Route Fifty newsletters delivered right to your inbox here.