Legislative Watch: House Recommends Funding Water Cleanup Work; Senate Goes Home
The NC House stepped up last week by voting to add some real funding to its bill to address growing water quality contamination issues. Sadly, the NC Senate decided the issue wasn’t that pressing and went home instead.
Taking a bill recommended by its river quality panel to direct state agencies to further study GenX and other “emerging pollutants” in state waters, the full House on a bipartisan basis gave the bill some genuine teeth for a change. As amended, HB 189 would make a down payment on the equipment and staff training tools needed to take effective action.
The bill allocates $1.3 million in one-time funding for the NC Dept. of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to analyze weaknesses in its permitting system related to controlling these contaminants, evaluate stronger reporting requirements, and share data with other states. (That funding would be drawn from the ill-considered scheme to ‘fix’ water pollution in Jordan Reservoir by dumping more chemicals in the polluted water.) HB 189 also includes another $1 million for purchasing advanced analytical equipment and training DEQ staff in its use. That’s not all that’s needed, and is less than requested by Gov. Roy Cooper, but it would represent a meaningful start.
In response, unfortunately, the Senate recessed while the House was still debating, and sent most members home for two weeks. Instead of taking the House recommendations seriously, Senate leaders trotted out the same empty anti-government rhetoric they seem to use as a substitute for thinking. Sen. Andy Wells (R-Catawba), the co-chair of the Senate Agriculture, Environment, and Natural Resources Committee, asserted that “more government” and more money won’t help. Wells and other Senate leaders like Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger seem intransigently committed to opposing any steps that would enable DEQ to do its job of dealing with pollution of the state’s water.
Also last week, a news event held by families still impacted by coal ash contamination of their drinking water underscored how poorly the legislature’s approach of cutting funding and pretending the problem will go away is working out elsewhere. Nearly 1,000 households with contaminated water wells near coal ash ponds have now gone over 1,000 days confined to using bottled water.
NC State Senator Terry Van Duyn (D-Buncombe) connected the two water quality issues in her comments. “We have cut the funding for the Department of Environmental Quality by over 40 percent over the past five years. They are unable to do their jobs and set safe levels for these chemicals,” Van Duyn said. “The Senate needs to do its job and take up [House Bill 189] and fund DEQ adequately so we can protect the drinking water for everyone in North Carolina.”
Under these standoff circumstances, the anti-environmental Senate leadership have set themselves as the worst roadblocks to fixing a growing clean water and public health crisis. NCLCV urges concerned citizens to let their Senators know that this obstructionism is unacceptable.
