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The PFAS morass
This week, we published an article examining claims about regulating PFAS and Duke Energy in the State Senate District 7 race, which meant covering some backstory, particularly on PFAS. The piece was both very long – about 4,000 words – but also, somehow, not long enough.
We knew the story couldn’t be exhaustive, and tried to focus on some of the most prominent claims we’d seen (and been asked about) in this election cycle. We didn’t get into the full history of PFAS, a family of thousands of chemicals, their origins in earlier generations of chemicals that led to major lawsuits, or why exactly PFAS are believed to be dangerous – even at levels measured in parts per trillion in drinking water. In the sprawling, constantly evolving story of PFAS, toxicity is a long and complicated chapter. The short version is there’s compelling evidence that some specific PFAS cause disease and adverse health conditions in humans. Many experts I’ve spoken with believe they’ll be able to prove that PFAS are dangerous – and should thus be highly regulated or banned – as a class, meaning testing each of thousands of congeners, one variety at a time, won’t be necessary.
We also didn’t get into a more granular political history of PFAS regulation, including how the changing makeup and attitudes of the state’s air and water quality rulemaking body, the Environmental Management Commission. We dug into that last year onThe Newsroom, with Adam Wagner, who covers Raleigh for public media stations around the state (including WHQR), and Lisa Sorg from Inside Climate News – but there’s certainly been developments since then.
And we didn’t touch on PFAS news from beyond North Carolina, though there’s a lot going on in other states and other countries (and the U.N.) that show a broader range of approaches to the issue.
As you might imagine, fitting all that in one frame would require a wide-angle shot of bewildering proportions – and more time than any one journalist would have in a year, let alone during campaign season.
For many longtime residents, you can pick up the PFAS story in medias res, without going back to episode one: the June 8, 2017 StarNews article (or the prequel, about ‘who knew what when,’ before that bombshell report). And, almost a decade later, far more people are conversant about PFAS – not just about GenX in the Cape Fear, but about the broader family of ‘forever chemicals’ that are, frighteningly, damn near everywhere. Call it the extended fluorochemical universe.
But I still meet new arrivals all the time who aren’t familiar with PFAS or our own local lore. And I know plenty of people who have grown exhausted trying to keep up – with the scientific and regulatory developments, the legislative and litigation battles – year after year. I confess, I’ve felt that way myself. The story is unfolding all the time, and yet, paradoxically, it sometimes feels like little progress has been made. Sometimes, people throw up their hands.
All of this to say, it feels like time to revisit the broader story. We still probably won’t be able to capture the entire thing in one go, but we’ll be putting in some time to bring folks up to date, whether they’re hearing it for the first time or just the first time in a while.
Letters and lobbyists
This week we reported that, after New Hanover County commissioners unanimously signed a bipartisan letter to our federal delegation, asking for assistance on the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge replacement project, they sent a lobbyist to follow up.
Drew Heath, a federal lobbyist for the county who works with the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP firm, met with staffers for Republican Senators Ted Budd and Thom Tillis and Republican Congressman David Rouzer.
The short version is, while there are a lot of moving pieces, it does seem possible to have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reassess the navigation channel needs of the Cape Fear River around the bridge. That process would take time, about two to three years if the federal government leads and funds the process, but faster if a non-federal local or regional ‘sponsor’ (e.g., in theory, the City of Wilmington, New Hanover County, or NCDOT) leads the project and foots the initial bill. A reassessment of the channel could – and I stress, could – mean a new set of requirements for the bridge, allowing a lower clearance and/or narrower span that would translate into a less expensive bridge. And that could mean a project NCDOT and the federal government could fund without tolls.
It’s unlikely even an expedited reassessment could finish before the deadline on the current deadline for the $242 million Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) grant to be obligated. The county, eager not to see that money evaporate, has asked to extend that deadline. They’ve also asked that, if the required height and span – and thus, the cost – of the bridge replacement can’t be reduced, then the feds pony up more of the total cost. Based on Heath’s report, there’s more support for the former than the latter.
Heath noted that Rouzer’s office seemed to be the most engaged and open to working on the issue, and Rouzer himself toldPort City Daily this week that extending the deadline would not be easy but also that it was “not unprecedented.” (Port City Daily spoke to Rouzer at a transportation expo in Brunswick County, where he defended his accessibility, saying “I talk to anybody and everybody that wants to talk.”)
Now, it’s a long walk from possibility to reality. Heath told the county that staffers think the Army Corps may want to maintain a navigable waterway all the way north to Fayetteville. Heath also noted that staffers felt there would be pushback from riverfront property owners north of the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, writing, they expected "stiff opposition from commercial landowners whose property borders the river, up to and including litigation.” When we asked USACE, a spokesperson said they could only speak to the Wilmington Division; we asked if they could put us in touch with someone who could speak to the upriver area, and haven’t heard back yet.
Speaking of not hearing back: the City of Wilmington also reportedly sent a letter to Budd, Tillis, and Rouzer a month ago. According to a spokesperson, as of this week, no one had responded. (You could take this as an endorsement or indictment of our intra-governmental lobbying system, depending on how you look at it.)
The city, and many opponents of the current NCDOT replacement designs for the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge and the proposed tolls on it, are also waiting to hear back from NCDOT. Consultants working for the city helped draft several new replacement designs (alternate alternatives, you could call them). Now that the public comment period for NCDOT’s two official alternatives is over, the state will be considering the input it received – including the city’s suggested new designs, officials say – and is expected to make a decision by the end of the year.
Building a bridge is a massive and massively bureaucratic process, and disrupting the entrenched way of doing things is a tough row to hoe. But if the city is successful in shifting the conversation, other regions will be paying attention, because with NCDOT’s funding issues, I suspect many more new projects around the state may get tolled – and if there’s one thing nearly all North Carolinians can agree on, it’s that we hate tolls.
Body-cam footage petitions
This week, District Attorney Jason Smith announced there would be no charges against two New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office deputies and three Wilmington Police Department officers who shot a man during an incident over the summer.
According to police, officers responded to a call about a suspect acting aggressively and pointing a gun at someone. WPD said that when they arrived at North 7th and Red Cross streets, 35-year-old Rodney Wilson shot at them. Officers returned fire – reportedly 60 rounds or more – striking Wilson over a dozen times. Remarkably, Wilson survived, though family and friends say he has a “long road to recovery” due to life-altering injuries.
Criticism of the shooting has centered around both race – Wilson is Black – and mental health – those close to Wilson said he was experiencing a mental health crisis. The family is pushing for the release of bodycam footage to bring transparency to the incident.
Under North Carolina law, that footage can only be released to the press or general public through a petition process and a Superior Court order. Immediate family members have different rights, and reportedly a judge has already ordered footage turned over to them.
A different type of petition, online, is encouraging WPD and NHCSO to release the footage.
In an unrelated case, WHQR just received law enforcement footage from WPD and NHCSO, several weeks after a Superior Court judge ruled in our favor. We’re currently reviewing the tape, and we’ll have some reporting on it after the election.
While I have successfully petitioned for footage without legal aid in the past (once flying solo, once working with Ashlea Kosikowsski, a host and journalist for WECT at the time), it’s not easy. I credit our success this time entirely to the hard work of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the Duke Law School First Amendment Clinic, who represented us pro bono. We’ve worked with them before – and we hope to work with them again, perhaps on the Wilson case, if it comes to that.
I’ll note that, in many cases of alleged police brutality and excessive force, there are videos from cellphones and personal surveillance devices like dashboard recorders and Ring-style cameras.
It’s becoming the standard response of law enforcement agencies that these videos “do not portray the entirety of a situation and only show a small portion of everything that occurred.” That was WPD’s response to a violent altercation between an officer and a resident this week.
To be fair – bystander video doesn't always offer a completely clear view of an event. We’ve covered several cases where crucial parts of an incident took place before someone started filming, or outside the frame of a stationary camera. At the same time, given how hard North Carolina law makes it for the public to get law enforcement video, it’s understandably frustrating when officials dismiss the evidence we do have.
One potential solution: while releasing footage is up to a Superior Court judge, the agencies involved are allowed to make their case and can support or oppose petitions for release. In 2020, WPD actually petitioned the court directly to release audio recordings of three officers fired after being accidentally recorded making violent racist comments. A judge eventually ruled against the release, but – at least in my opinion – it established a precedent: if law enforcement agencies want to dispute the version of events captured on bystanders’ videos, they have tools at their disposal to do so.
