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.

MT Raleigh Report | August 9, 2017

A quick report from Raleigh, with updates about last week’s special session and next steps on redistricting.

A So-So Special Session

Lawmakers gathered last week for a one-day special session scheduled when they adjourned their regular 2017 session in July. Originally, last week’s session was focused on complying with court orders to revise many of their voting districts. But days before the session, the court overseeing the redistricting case ordered a different calendar for revising the maps.

So, while lawmakers did not actually take up redistricting last week, they did approve a new calendar for approving new maps.

After approving the new schedule for redistricting, both the Senate and the House tried to work out deals on bills leftover from the regular session. They succeeded on one, Senate Bill 16, the “Business Regulatory Reform Act of 2016” – a hodgepodge of various provisions on a wide variety of topics. For MountainTrue, our concern with this bill focused on a provision that limits the ability of local governments to do more than the minimum to control stormwater runoff and reduce water pollution and flooding.

Unfortunately, the Senate and the House approved Senate Bill 16 with little discussion of these concerns. The bill now goes to the Governor, who has 30 days to sign it, veto it or allow it to become law without his signature.

The General Assembly also took up two other regulatory bills. House Bill 56, “Amend Environmental Laws,” is another collection of changes in a variety of policy areas. These changes included a host of last-minute revisions to the state’s solid waste laws, many of which had not been discussed. The other was the House Bill 162, which started out as a largely technical bill but was transformed into what one analyst called a “quarterback sneak attack against the state’s ability to strengthen environmental rules.” The bill seemed headed for a vote of the full House when Greensboro Rep. Pricey Harrison shamed the House leadership for taking up such an important bill with little notice or debate. Called out — and facing a likely extension of the session over the bill — the House leadership pulled House Bill 162 off the chamber’s calendar. Approval of House Bill 56 also stalled when Senate and House negotiators could not reach a compromise on the bill.

Up Next: Another Special Session

Under the plan approved last week, the legislature will return to Raleigh later this month to approve revised legislative districts that must be accepted by the court in September.

Here’s how the process is planned, at least right now:

Aug. 18: The legislature comes into session, with organizational, non-voting sessions of both House and Senate.

Aug. 22: A public hearing will be held on proposed legislative maps.

Aug. 24-25 – Both the House and Senate vote on revised redistricting plans.

In addition to taking up redistricting, the legislature can also override vetoes and take up unfinished business, including House Bills 56 and 162.

That’s the legislative news for now. Check back here for more MTRaleigh updates as the legislature goes in and out of session in the next few weeks.

MountainTrue Raleigh Report | August 1, 2017

The latest from Raleigh, where lawmakers come back to town, briefly, this week and Gov. Cooper signs an important energy bill.

Legislature Back for a Not-So-Special Session

The Senate and House reconvene Thursday for a special session they scheduled before adjourning last month. While lawmakers have the flexibility to do just about anything they choose during this week’s session, they are widely expected to limit their work to a handful of unfinished bills left over from the regular session.

That means MountainTrue is on watch for the collection of “regulatory reform” bills that Senate and House negotiators are trying to settle. Of top concern: a provision to limit the ability of regular people, like adjacent property owners, to effectively challenge environmental permits relating to air pollution, mining and other issues. We’ll also be keeping an eye out for a proposal to strip local governments’ ability to regulate asphalt plants — an idea that has local governments in Ashe and Watauga counties particularly concerned. Both communities are currently wrestling with proposals for new or expanded plants in their areas.

This week’s special session is one of several we can expect in the coming weeks and months as legislators comply with court orders to redraw many House and Senate districts. You can read more about the ins and outs of this long-running — and enormously important — saga here. The courts ruled just this week that legislators must complete new maps by September 1 (or September 15 if they demonstrate suitable progress) and that no special election will be held before next year’s short session in May.

Governor Cooper Signs Energy Bill

The legislature approved one of the most contentious — and important — environmental bills of the year in the last hours of the 2017 regular session. HB 589, Competitive Energy Solutions for NC, included positive changes that will improve access to solar energy for many North Carolinians and continue to require large utilities to obtain significant portions of their power from sustainable sources. The bill is far from perfect, however, as it also includes what we judge to be an unnecessary and damaging 18-month moratorium on wind energy development in North Carolina. You can read our previous updates about this legislation here and here.

Because HB 589 included the wind moratorium, it was not clear whether Gov. Cooper would sign or veto the bill — or simply let it become law without his signature. After meeting with a variety of stakeholders, Cooper signed the legislation last week, while also approving an executive order directing state agencies to continue processing wind energy permit applications during the moratorium. Because wind permits can take months or even years to approve, the Governor clearly hopes that new projects will be ready for construction when the moratorium ends. The order also directs state agencies to do everything possible to support the wind energy industry in North Carolina. You can read the Governor’s announcement about HB 589 and the executive order here.

MountainTrue supports the Governor’s decision to sign the bill into law. While the bill is far from perfect, it will help stabilize the market for clean energy in North Carolina and give thousands of individuals and many communities expanded access to sustainable energy. It will also support countless jobs associated with this important new industry.

Help Us Clean Up Our Rivers

MountainTrue is partnering with a number of community organizations to support the annual Big Sweep cleanup of the French Broad, Watauga, Broad and Green rivers on September 9 — and we have invited legislators to join us. MountainTrue member and Senator Chuck Edwards from Henderson County was the first to accept the invite and we hope others will follow his lead. We need your help too, so sign up now and you may find yourself working alongside your representative or senator!

MountainTrue Raleigh Report | July 7, 2017

Greetings! We hope you enjoyed a fun and safe Fourth of July weekend. ICYMI, the legislature recessed late last week; so here’s a quick rundown of what happened and what’s next at the General Assembly.

Legislature Serializes Its 2017 Session

Last week the legislature wrapped up its 2017 session — sort of.

Typically, lawmakers approve the state budget some time in late June or July and sometimes even later. Then it takes a week or two (or more) of long days and nights of committee meetings and debates in the full Senate and House to approve a flurry of bills before they recess for the year.

This year, all of that took place, but, instead of ending the session for the year, lawmakers scheduled follow up sessions on August 3 and September 6.

The August session is intended to allow the legislature to override any vetoes by Gov. Cooper and take up any unfinished business from the regular session. The September session is intended to focus on the legislature’s long-delayed redrawing of legislative districts. But under the rules approved for both sessions, the General Assembly has given itself wide latitude to take up just about any issue it chooses. The rules also provide for the possibility of a third special session in November.

Effectively, the General Assembly didn’t end the 2017 session last week so much as it simply took a July recess. For reasons we’ll get to in a moment, that’s especially frustrating for environmentalists.

Last Minute, Not So Good Deal on Clean Energy

Before suspending the session, lawmakers approved HB 589, “Competitive Energy Solutions for NC” — a rewrite of state laws guiding the development and use of clean energy in North Carolina for millions of customers, businesses and clean energy companies. You can find previous updates about this important bill here.

The Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly approved the compromise bill several weeks ago with the backing of both Duke Energy and clean energy advocates, including MountainTrue. The GOP-controlled Senate, unfortunately, loaded it with a number of anti-clean energy amendments, the worst of which was a four-year moratorium on new wind energy projects. Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown of Jones and Onslow counties pushed the moratorium. Brown is a long-time critic of wind energy on the coast. He fears that it will limit aviation at important coastal military bases and undermine the state’s efforts to protect the bases from future federal base closures, despite repeated statements from military leaders as well as studies that conclude otherwise.

After a good deal of behind the scenes negotiation in the last hours of the session, GOP leaders agreed, over the objections of the clean energy industry, to an 18-month moratorium on wind projects. Both chambers quickly approved the legislation just past 1:00 a.m. on Friday and shut down the session a few minutes later.

It was a startlingly fast resolution to a complicated bill that left clean energy supporters grim-faced and angry after months of good-faith negotiations with both lawmakers as well as Duke Energy. The final bill puts two large wind energy projects in two poor rural counties at risk and sends a terrible message to the industry about the state’s long-term interest in wind and other sources of sustainable energy. You can read more about the final bill here.

As of now, it is unclear if Gov. Cooper will sign or veto HB589, or simply allow it to become law without his signature. Many of the clean energy stakeholders on the bill have been careful to outline their concerns with the legislation but have stopped short of calling for a veto. In part that may be because they know the GOP legislature has the votes to override any veto. It also reflects the fact that the legislation includes important policy changes that the solar industry needs to keep solar viable in North Carolina. For its part, Duke Energy says it opposed the moratorium but continues to support the bill.

What’s Next?

The legislature’s rolling, on-again, off-again session is particularly maddening for environmentalists. That’s because much of the most important legislation that was left in limbo when the legislature left Raleigh last week are the so-called “regulatory reform” bills. These are bills that are chock full of various changes to environmental rules and standards, a few of which are of great concern to environmentalists. With so much unresolved about these bills and lawmakers at home for the next few weeks, we fear that the already imperfect process for finalizing these bills will be even less accessible to the public, the press and environmental groups during the recess. One provision MountainTrue is particularly concerned about would greatly limit local governments’ authority over asphalt plants, including plants in Ashe and Watauga counties. We’ll be meeting with legislators from those areas as well as local government leaders before the August session on this proposal.

Finally, Some (Really) Good News

The “end” of the 2017 session was bleak for the environment in many ways, but there were some victories. Perhaps the most surprising was the defeat of a House bill that would have greatly expanded the power of the billboard industry at the great expense of local governments and the public’s ability to regulate them. The bill was sponsored by House Rules chairman David Lewis of Harnett County, who faced off with WNC Representative Chuck McGrady on the House floor in what was a polite, but long and no-holds barred debate on the bill. Most political watchers thought the best McGrady could hope for was to take enough votes away from the Lewis bill to allow it to survive a veto in the future. To everyone’s surprise, the debate convinced a good number of House Republicans to vote against the bill. The GOP votes combined with overwhelming opposition from House Democrats to defeat the bill outright. Thanks to McGrady for his leadership on the bill and to all of the MountainTrue supporters who called our legislators encouraging them to oppose this bill.

Another piece of good news: many of you also responded to our requests for calls and letters about a provision in one of the Senate regulatory reform bills that would have greatly limited the ability of citizens to appeal permits for big polluters like cement plants and quarries. We are happy to report that senators heard you on this issue, revised the provision and eliminated much of the language we objected to. We still hope the entire provision is struck before the overall bill is adopted, but we thank you for doing your part in helping with this interim victory.

Thank you so much for your support! Stay tuned as we will keep you posted on the final sessions of 2017 in the coming months!

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