MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The General Assembly, GenX and the Future of NC Drinking Water

May 16 marked the first day of the 2018 legislative session, and it took less than one day for lawmakers to begin making headlines about what is likely to be the biggest environmental issue of the session – the General Assembly’s response to the 2016 discovery of GenX, an “emerging contaminant” in the water supply of tens of thousand of people in the Cape Fear region and perhaps thousands more across the state.

(Click here for previous MT Raleigh updates about the GenX issue and its implications for WNC water supplies.)

Lawmakers in both parties, as well as Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, have been sparring over who is responsible for the GenX contamination and what to do about it for more than a year. The debate has raged in the media as well as in two special legislative sessions held earlier this year. In both sessions, GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate largely ignored Cooper’s demands but could not agree on competing GOP proposals.

The stalemate among Senate and House Republicans may have broken. On May 17, key GOP members from the Cape Fear region announced their agreement on what they call a “comprehensive plan to help ensure their constituents have access to clean, safe drinking water and to extend efforts to remove GenX pollution from public water supplies.”

Their proposal, which was introduced in both the House and Senate, provides $2 million to help extend municipal water lines to homes with GenX-contaminated wells. It also provides $8 million for university researchers to conduct statewide sampling and analysis of GenX and other emerging contaminants in public water supplies. And it earmarks $1.8 million to the NC Department of Environmental Quality to purchase a mass spectrometer and hire additional staff for water quality sampling and analysis and to address its permitting backlog.

The bill also makes changes to DEQ’s authority to regulate GenX. Some environmental attorneys say the changes may actually delay the Department’s ability to regulate GenX and similar compounds.

This is the third GenX proposal in recent weeks. Earlier this spring, Gov. Cooper proposed a $14 million GenX response plan, which includes large funding increases in the NC Department of Environmental Quality. The Governor, and all of the state’s environmental organizations, say new funding is needed after years of steep budget cuts made by the legislature. A third plan, offered by House Democrats, would make similar investments in DEQ while also expanding the Department’s regulatory authority.

So where is all this going? Right now it’s hard to tell. With the GOP in charge of the legislative and budget process, the GOP compromise bill is clearly the one to watch. Whether and how the legislature will debate the bill openly is still unclear. There is some indication that it may be placed in the budget lawmakers are working on and fast-tracked along without much, if any, public debate or even amendment.

For MountainTrue, we have two top priorities for legislative response on this important issue.

The first is adequate funding for state regulators to do the work of protecting our air, water and public health.

Clearly, the Governor’s proposal and the Democratic bill meet this important mark, including funding for DEQ, the NC Department of Health and Human Services’ GenX response as well as statewide testing of all drinking water supplies for emerging contaminants.

While the GOP compromise bill also includes funds for statewide testing as well as new funding for the NC DHHS, it does not fund DEQ sufficiently to meet the challenge GenX and other pollutants pose to our state. We are also worried about reports concerning the unintended consequences of the bill’s changes to DEQ’s regulatory authority.

Our second priority for legislative response to GenX is a simple one: we want a full and healthy debate of all of these proposals, with plenty of opportunity for the public to hear the debate and participate in it, and for the media to cover it for those who can’t come to the capital to hear it for themselves. We also want all legislators – no matter their political affiliation – to have the opportunity to comment on and offer amendments to these proposals. And we want the votes on these amendments recorded so the public knows where our representatives stand on this important issue.

In short, we want the legislature to do what it is supposed to do – take up difficult, important, complicated issues, debate them in public and then make and refine proposals and pass legislation that will make all of us safer and healthier.

If you agree, call your legislator today and demand that the General Assembly protect our water by investing in DEQ and by hearing all the GenX bills in a public process with amendments and recorded votes.

MT Raleigh Report: GOTV, DEQ Focuses on Enviro Justice, the Session is Coming

Get Out and Vote

Primary elections are being held across North Carolina today. Regardless of party, we encourage you to learn about the candidates and the issues and head to the polls. You can get customized voter information at https://www.vote411.org/.

DEQ Focuses on Environmental Justice

Last week, the North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) announced the 16 members of its new Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board. The Board is charged with assisting DEQ in achieving and maintaining fair and equal treatment and meaningful involvement of North Carolinians regardless of where they live, their race, religion or income.

“These Board members have been tasked with working directly with me and DEQ staff to help us elevate the voices of the underserved and underrepresented as we work to protect the public’s health and natural resources,” DEQ Secretary Michael Regan said at the announcement.

Most consider North Carolina to be the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, born in Warren County in 1982 during a long fight against a state landfill. Community members protested against the landfill for releasing cancer-causing PCBs in their predominantly black community. Although they were unsuccessful, their efforts launched a national movement highlighting the fact that communities of color bear an unequal – and unfair – impact of industrial pollution.

To read more about the Board and the full list of members, visit DEQ’s website.

Session is Coming, Session is Coming

As the May 16 opening of the 2016 legislature’s short session approaches, the pace at the General Assembly is quickly accelerating. Senate and House budget writers have been meeting in hopes of approving a budget on a very expedited schedule once the legislature officially returns. If they stay on schedule, most of their work may be complete before Gov. Cooper releases his budget proposal – now scheduled for May 10.

Despite legislative leaders’ hopes for a fast and painless session, there are a number of environmental issues to keep our eyes on:

GenX: Will the General Assembly finally agree on funding to begin to address GenX and other emerging contaminants threatening our waters? Last month, Governor Cooper announced that his budget will recommend $14.5 million for DEQ and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to address the safety and quality of North Carolina’s water and environment.
Land conservation: Will the General Assembly set aside more money to preserve open space? While the General Assembly made much-needed investments in the Clean Water Management Trust Fund and the Parks and Recreation Trust Fund last year, overall, these investments are down from the previous year – and have not reached funding levels achieved before the 2008 recession.
Energy: The clean energy sector continues to grow in North Carolina, but legislators have pumped the brakes on several policies to encourage new technology and even put a hold on wind technology. Will legislators reconsider incentives or the pause on wind?

In other news…

MT Raleigh Report: NC DEQ Sec. Regan meets with NC Environmental Groups

Michael Regan, Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, hosted a meeting of the state’s environmental organizations last week to review the department’s first year and look forward to the year ahead, including the 2018 legislative session.

Regan, who was flanked by his entire management team, listed key hirings in several agencies, as well as responding to the unexpected discovery of the GenX pollutant in the Cape Fear River, as key milestones in his first year under Gov. Roy Cooper.

Environmental groups, which welcomed Regan’s leadership after a rocky relationship with the department under former Sec. Donald van der Vaardt,thanked Regan for his leadership on several issues, including opposing federal efforts to open the state’s coast to offshore oil drilling and implementing an open-door policy.

Looking forward, Regan said the Department would soon begin a new effort focusing on environmental justice. He declined to talk about the details of the Department’s budget priorities for the 2018 session, explaining that its budget requests had not yet been approved by Gov. Cooper. Regan did say, however, that DEQ would request full funding to address the GenX issue in the Cape Fear region.

While the environmental groups did not make a unified request at the meeting, several groups encouraged the Department to detail how the Cooper Administration plans to implement the goals of the state Climate Alliance, which Cooper endorsed last year. The alliance is a group of states that banded together with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement after President Trump pulled the United States out of that agreement. Other environmental groups asked Regan to provide more guidance about the Cooper administration’s priorities to newly-appointed members of key environmental review boards and commissions.

Speaking of the State Budget

Look for Gov. Cooper to deliver his revised fiscal-year-2019 state budget to the legislature in early May, before the General Assembly convenes for its short session on May 16.

North Carolina operates on a two-year (or “biennial”) budget, which is approved in the legislature’s long session in odd-numbered years. The second year of the biennial budget is revised during the legislature’s short session in even-numbered years. In preparation for this revision, the executive branch submits a revised version of the second year budget to the General Assembly. Approval of the second year budget is the legislature’s biggest job during the short session.

Right now, the Cooper Administration is in the process of finalizing its spending plan for FY2018-2109 before it goes public in May. While we won’t know for certain until tax returns are in at the end of April, state revenues appear to be holding steady, with very modest increases in both recurring revenue and nonrecurring revenue available to Cooper and the legislature in crafting the state budget for next year.

That’s the outlook for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. But don’t expect things to be so rosy next spring, when many of the tax cuts approved by the GOP-controlled legislature in recent years are in full effect. Unless the economy grows at a very fast clip, lawmakers and Gov. Cooper will likely face a daunting gap between recurring revenues and recurring expenses like teacher pay and public school enrollment growth – as well as increased investments at DEQ and in land conservation and state parks that many environmentalists support.

With the legislative session around the corner, you can keep track of MountainTrue’s efforts in Raleigh by subscribing to our legislative update list here. Ands make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for news about state and national policy issues that impact WNC.

If you value the MTRaleigh Report, our work in the state capitol and our efforts to protect our region’s environment, please vote for MountainTrue in the categories of “Environmental Or Conservation Nonprofit” and “Activist Group For Civic/Political Action” in Mountain Xpress’ Best of WNC reader poll. Thanks!

MT Raleigh Report: Outdoor Recreation Gets a Champion in the Dept. of Commerce

In a happy turn of events, we have some good news to share from Raleigh.

It actually happened last summer, when the General Assembly created a new position at the N.C. Department of Commerce to promote North Carolina’s outdoor recreation economy and bring new outdoor industry businesses to the state. Government hiring always takes a long time, so we were pleased to learn that the position was filled in February and the Department is starting to think about how to grow our state’s outdoor recreation sector.

That’s especially good news for Western North Carolina, of course, where so many jobs are connected to our mountains, rivers, streams and parks.

Trout fishing is a good example. Nearly 149,000 trout anglers fished approximately 1.6 million days in 2014 – with a total economic benefit of $383 million to the state, according to a study commissioned by the NC Wildlife Resources Commission. The study also found that money spent on trout fishing in 2014 supported approximately 3,593 jobs. And since trout live only in mountain streams, this is largely to the benefit of WNC.

Statewide, outdoor recreation supports 260,000 jobs and accounts for $8.3 billion in wages and salaries.

Creating this position is a small reminder of the basic truth those of us at MountainTrue – as well as many forward-thinking business people – have understood for years: a strong economy depends on a clean environment, including efficient, fair and commonsense rules to protect our water and our air.

Special thanks to the leadership of the North Carolina Senate – particularly Alamance County Republican Rick Gunn, who led the way on creating this position, and Department of Commerce Secretary Tony Copeland, who filled it. Henderson County’s Senator Chuck Edwards and Rep. Chuck McGrady as well as Buncombe County’s Representative Brian Turner also lent a hand.

At a time when North Carolina’s government can seem at war with itself, the bipartisan effort to champion outdoor recreation and economic development is a welcome step in the right direction.

General Assembly to Reconvene in May

The General Assembly is set to return to session on May 16th. A court decision or a veto from Governor Cooper could bring them back into session earlier, but for now, the legislature is closed with no plans to reconvene until the spring.

MT Raleigh Report – Feb. 19: GenX Gridlock in the General Assembly

Over the last month, the North Carolina General Assembly has met twice in “special session” to consider legislation to address one of the most high-profile threats to our state’s water quality – and public health – in recent years. Of course, we’re referring to the discovery of GenX, an “emerging contaminant” in the Cape Fear River as well as other public drinking water supplies in North Carolina.

GenX is the commonly used term for a chemical compound produced to make Teflon, which is used to make nonstick coating surfaces for cookware.

GenX and its chemical cousins – other perfluorinated and polyfluorinated compounds – are poorly studied, generally do not break down in the environment, cannot be removed by most water treatment techniques, can behave strangely in the human body and have largely unknown health risks.

Unfortunately, despite statewide media attention and widespread public concern, the General Assembly has been unable to approve legislation to address this pressing problem. You may recall that MountainTrue first reported on the GenX issue in a Special Report in November 2017.

The General Assembly’s recent inaction reflects a growing split between the GOP-controlled House, which is increasingly more interested in responding to the GenX issue, and the GOP-controlled Senate, which continues to balk at the demands of Gov. Roy Cooper – and the House – for increased investment in the state agencies charged with responding to the GenX issue.

This split came into high profile in the legislature’s special session in early January, when House Republicans offered to provide the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) with $2.3 million for staff and equipment to address GenX. When the Senate refused to consider the idea, House Republicans ran the bill anyway, got a unanimous, bipartisan vote in support of the proposal and sent it over to the Senate, which refused to even take the legislation up for debate.

Fast-forward almost a month later, to Feb. 7, when legislators arrived in Raleigh for another special session. This time it was the Senate’s turn to take up the GenX issue. Like the House a month before, the Senate offered DEQ more than $2 million in one-time funding. But, in an awkwardly worded bill, the Senate restricted the money’s use to a limited scope of work that did not include permanent funding for the new staff and equipment Cooper and Department officials say they need to respond to GenX.

The Senate approved the bill along partisan lines, but this time it was the House that refused to consider the bill. The result was another stalemate that no one in Raleigh expects will end any time soon.

What’s behind the Senate’s reluctance to invest in the state’s response to GenX? Many Senate GOP members are unwilling to spend taxpayer dollars on GenX as a result of their belief that the Cooper administration and DEQ were slow to respond to the issue and won’t put the funding to good use.

The House bill, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said in a statement, “does nothing to prevent GenX from going into the water supply. It leaves North Carolina taxpayers holding the bag for expenditures that should be paid for by the company responsible for the pollution, fails to give DEQ authority to do anything they can’t already do, and authorizes the purchase of expensive equipment that the state can already access for free.”

What Berger and his Senate colleagues fail to acknowledge however is the strain responding to the GenX issue is putting on the Department and its backlog of water quality permits awaiting processing because of staff shortages. It is a sad irony that just as DEQ was looking into the GenX issue last year, the legislature was cutting its budget.

Now we have a stalemate over a growing pollution problem that may affect hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians, is straining the already too-meager resources of state regulatory agencies and which the legislature either can’t or won’t address.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of people living near the Chemours plant are drinking bottled water after their wells have tested positive for GenX. There are also growing concerns – still being explored by DEQ – about food supplies in the region after GenX was discovered in honey harvested near the Chemours site. And state officials acknowledge that for those living near Chemours, airborne GenX may be a bigger threat than the waterborne version of the compound, so they have expanded their testing to include both.

Oh, and don’t forget that GenX has also been detected in treated water in Cary and Chatham County.

For MountainTrue, our priorities for this issue are the same ones we listed for you several months ago. We believe it is well past time for the legislature (and DEQ for that matter) to respond to the GenX situation, both in the Cape Fear region and statewide. This response should include:

A full audit of all industrial discharges into North Carolina rivers and streams so that we understand what chemicals are being discharged into our water;
Expanded state investment in water quality monitoring to detect emerging contaminants in all public drinking water supplies;
Full enforcement of the state’s authority under the Clean Water Act to detect emerging contaminants and to ensure they do not pose a risk to human health or the environment until proven otherwise;
Full public disclosure of the results of water monitoring and discharge audits so that everyone — including the public — understands what is in our water; and
A transparent, open decision-making process to determine the best way to eliminate, reduce and prevent emerging contaminants in public drinking water.

Special Raleigh Report: GenX and the Safety of NC’s Public Drinking Water

The GenX issue has focused on the Cape Fear area, but emerging contaminants raise serious questions about the safety of drinking water across North Carolina.

Nov. 9 2017

Revelations that a potentially dangerous chemical called GenX has been found in the Cape Fear River – as well as the treated water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people in the Cape Fear region – for decades have been roiling in the press, in Wilmington politics and at the General Assembly since the news hit earlier this year.

But while the GenX issue has largely focused on the Cape Fear region, recent developments reveal that chemicals like GenX raise a host of questions about the safety of North Carolina’s drinking water more broadly, including in Western North Carolina.

GenX – An “Emerging Contaminant”

GenX is a often referred to as an “emerging contaminant” – a substance or chemical that has been discovered in our air and water but whose environmental and public health risks have been scarcely-researched. Because so little is known about these substances, federal standards for environmental or human exposures to them are rarely enacted. Nor do regulatory agencies regularly monitor for these substances. Instead, states have a lot of leeway under the federal Clean Water Act to regulate them – or not.

Keep in mind that there are between 80 and 130 million known chemicals, and new ones are developed regularly. About 85,000 of these are used in commerce, and perhaps 10,000 of these have been tested for toxicity. Under the Clean Water Act, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has listed 126 of these chemicals as “priority pollutants” and flagged 65 as “toxic pollutants.” The EPA has banned just nine pollutants outright (PCBs, dioxins, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, hexavalent chromium and four carcinogenic mixed nitrates used in metalworking).

GenX – Not New to NC

GenX is used to manufacture Teflon. Its presence in the water of the Cape Fear has been known since at least 2015, and recent research by Harvard scientists disclosed that EPA-mandated sampling detected GenX in public drinking water supplies for 6 million people nationally between 2012 and 2015. North Carolina ranked third nationwide for the number of GenX detections.

The GenX issue finally got the attention it deserved in June of this year when the Wilmington Star-News reported that people in the Cape Fear region had been drinking GenX-contaminated water for years and that the local water utility and the state did not publicize the findings after they were alerted to the problem by Detlef Knappe, a water chemist at NC State University, in 2016.

The GenX Fallout

Since that revelation, DEQ has ordered the source of GenX, the Chemours Company, to stop all GenX discharges from its Cumberland County plant. DEQ has also ordered the company to stop discharging two other chemicals. A number of families living near the Chemours plant are now being supplied with bottled water after GenX contamination was discovered in their personal wells.

The EPA has begun investigating Chemours and its parent company, DuPont, and the NC Attorney General’s office has started a civil investigation. The local water authority in the Cape Fear region is also suing Chemours and DuPont, and the NC Department of Health and Human Services has reduced its “provisional health goal limit” for GenX from 70,000 parts per trillion (ppt) to 140 ppt in drinking water.

On the political front, Republicans in the General Assembly and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper have traded charges about who is responsible for DEQ budget cuts and GenX going undetected for so long.

The Bigger Picture

While GenX has received a great deal of attention, it also raises much larger issues about North Carolina’s drinking water supplies. For example, Dr. Knappe, the NC State professor, recently told a legislative study committee that another emerging contaminant — 1,4-dioxane — is also present in Cape Fear drinking water at levels that exceed NC standards. Like GenX, 1,4-dioxane is not removed by traditional water treatment methods. Dr. Knappe estimated that more than one million North Carolinians, mostly in the Cape Fear river basin, are now drinking water that exceeds the state standard for 1,4-dioxane toxin.

Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette told the same committee that industries should be required to prove that the chemicals they want to discharge into drinking supplies are safe before they are permitted to do so. Right now, Kemp told the committee, polluters are only required to stop putting emerging contaminants into rivers and streams when there is scientific evidence that they are harmful — a process that can take years and cost a great deal of money to complete.

Another environmental group, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, has urged lawmakers to invest several million dollars in a new generation of water monitoring technology that can detect emerging contaminants and ensure that everyone — scientists, regulatory agencies and the public — know what is in our drinking water.

At MountainTrue, our Riverkeepers for the French Broad, Green and Watauga rivers and our Broad River Waterkeeper Affiliate are working with Riverkeepers from across the state to explore the extent of the presence of emerging contaminants in watersheds statewide.

We will also be joining the alliance of environmentalists, local governments, public health advocates and concerned citizens who are pushing policymakers to invest the time, money and regulatory muscle needed to keep our water clean and healthy.

More specifically, MountainTrue’s priorities for the state’s response to GenX include:

A full audit of all industrial dischargers into North Carolina rivers and streams so that we understand what chemicals are being discharged into our water;
Expanded state investment in water quality monitoring to detect emerging contaminants in all public drinking water supplies;
Full enforcement of the state’s authority under the Clean Water Act to detect emerging contaminants and to ensure they do not pose a risk to human health or the environment;
Full public disclosure of the results of water monitoring and discharge audits so that everyone — including the public — understands what is in our water; and
A transparent, open decision-making process to determine the best way to eliminate, reduce and prevent emerging contaminants in public drinking water.

MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The General Assembly, GenX and the Future of NC Drinking Water

MountainTrue Raleigh Report: The General Assembly, GenX and the Future of NC Drinking Water

MT Raleigh Report: GOTV, DEQ Focuses on Enviro Justice, the Session is Coming

MT Raleigh Report: GOTV, DEQ Focuses on Enviro Justice, the Session is Coming

Get Out and Vote

DEQ Focuses on Environmental Justice

Session is Coming, Session is Coming

MT Raleigh Report: NC DEQ Sec. Regan meets with NC Environmental Groups

MT Raleigh Report: NC DEQ Sec. Regan meets with NC Environmental Groups

Speaking of the State Budget

MT Raleigh Report: Outdoor Recreation Gets a Champion in the Dept. of Commerce

MT Raleigh Report: Outdoor Recreation Gets a Champion in the Dept. of Commerce

General Assembly to Reconvene in May

MT Raleigh Report – Feb. 19: GenX Gridlock in the General Assembly

MT Raleigh Report – Feb. 19: GenX Gridlock in the General Assembly

More GenX Reading

Special Raleigh Report: GenX and the Safety of NC’s Public Drinking Water

Special Raleigh Report: GenX and the Safety of NC’s Public Drinking Water

The GenX issue has focused on the Cape Fear area, but emerging contaminants raise serious questions about the safety of drinking water across North Carolina.

GenX – An “Emerging Contaminant”

GenX – Not New to NC

The GenX Fallout

The Bigger Picture

More GenX Reading