The Cottages of Boone has discharged tens of thousands of gallons of sewage and untreated wastewater into Laurel Creek, which flows into the Watauga River. Call on the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to make The Cottages clean up their act and stop polluting our rivers.

MountainTrue has been closely monitoring this facility’s illegal discharges, including large overflow events in April and September that dumped 70,000 gallons and 5,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into Laurel Creek, which flows into the Watauga River. In August, DEQ levied a $38,000 civic penalty against The Cottages’s treatment plant, and now DEQ is currently considering whether to renew its discharge permit. We need you to speak up and help us hold this egregious polluter accountable and prevent future wastewater spills.

While we are not asking DEQ to deny the permit outright (displacing 900 households), we are requesting that DEQ make monitoring data publicly available online, and the permit stricter and conditional upon The Cottages cleaning up their operations.

Fill out the form below and sign on to our letter to DEQ asking that they:

1. Reduce the term of the permit from five years to a term of two years to make it easier to hold The Cottages accountable if they don’t clean up their act.
2. Increase monitoring of The Cottages of Boone and make monitoring data from all Sewage System Overflows — including those from The Cottages of Boone — publicly available in a timely manner and easy to find online.
3. Make any approval of the permit conditioned on The Cottages cleaning up their act. DEQ should promise to change or revoke the permit if The Cottages illegally discharge more than 2,500 gallons within any 3-month period of time.

UPDATE: Thank you to all who have responded to our action alert and signed our letter to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) demanding better monitoring and a stricter wastewater discharge permit for The Cottages of Boone. We surpassed our goal of 1,000 signatures, and we emailed a copy of the letter to DEQ on the afternoon of Monday, December 13.