Senate rolls out GenX bill

DEQ has said repeatedly that it does not believe this tactic will give it enough unimpeded time on highly specific equipment, and there has been confusion over just how many of the devices that fall within the department's specifications the university system actually owns.

In addition to $2.4 million in new, one-time money taken from state reserves, the Senate bill would target $1 million a year in already-budgeted money at the North Carolina Policy Collaboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the group's work on GenX and related chemicals. Jeffrey Warren, a former science adviser to Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, is the group's research director, and the collaboratory would work with the state Department of Health and Human Services and others to develop thresholds on how much GenX and similar chemicals in the state's waterways can be considered safe.

This family of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances has been found in drinking water supplies in Wilmington and elsewhere along the Cape Fear River, as well as in private drinking wells. It's manufactured at the Chemours facility in Bladen County. A number of lawsuits and investigations are pending over the releases, and the state has been working with Chemours, which has said it no longer dumps GenX and a number of other compounds into the water.

The state has set a health goal for the substance at 140 parts per trillion, a miniscule amount considered to be safe for a baby to ingest. But the substance has not been fully studied, and its precursor chemicals are considered carcinogens, which triggered a multi-hundred-million-dollar payout in a lawsuit out of West Virginia.

Municipal water supplies have been declared safe by both state and local officials, but Chemours has been ordered to purchase bottled water for dozens of well users.

The Senate's bill would also tell DEQ to cooperate with an audit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, something four state senators recently wrote to the EPA to request. The bill also calls for a multi-level study of DEQ's permitting system, with particular attention to how the state handles, and should handle, emerging contaminants, a class of chemicals not fully understood and often unregulated and unidentified in industrial waste streams.

"Water quality is not a political issue – it is a public health issue and a deeply personal issue to me," Sen. Mike Lee, R-New Hanover, said in a statement. "The health of my constituents in southeast North Carolina, neighbors and family depend on what we do, and I am pleased this bill will leverage the expertise of our university system’s world-renowned scientists and utilize state-of-the-art equipment that already belongs to our taxpayers to research ways to improve and protect our drinking water.

"This legislation provides another incremental step forward as we continue to search for answers as to how GenX has been in our water supply for over 35 years and why we continue to hear there are further discharges of GenX and other compounds with no enforcement action on the part of DEQ," Lee added.