In a recent column, the Observer's Tim White asked, "Will the current North Carolina General Assembly fix our water issues caused by GenX?"
Common sense says the answer is an obvious "yes." However, given the current leadership's past history, legislation recently enacted by the House and stalled in the Senate puts the answer serious doubt.
This raises two fundamental questions:
• Why are we always reacting to problems rather than anticipating them? Any reasonable person could see this crisis coming. If it was not GenX, it would have been something else as bad or worse — hog lagoons, blue algae blooms, fish kills, coal ash and more have plagued our rivers. We have stressed our water resources to their maximum. The Cape Fear and Neuse River basins are as stressed and endangered as any rivers in this country. Throw in the fact that our Cape Fear River Basin has a reduced capacity due to Raleigh and Wake County's consumption of our water, treating it and then transferring it into another basin and a once abundant asset becomes a resource in crisis.
• Just as it is with our schools, infrastructure and higher education, we consistently fail as a General Assembly to prioritize and devote adequate resources to solving our problems. We most certainly fail to use long-range planning to prepare for the demands of a fast-growing state. The GenX crisis is a symptom of a much bigger problem — failure to act and plan for the future. We have come to a place in our governance where extreme partisan philosophies are shaping both parties, but in particular the extreme right who now controls the House and Senate, who are hunkered down and refusing to work with anyone, much less compromise. The extreme right House Caucus dictates to the present leadership and other Republicans who otherwise are willing to work with Democrats in what they can and cannot do. Commonsense solutions and the proper use of government is paralyzed. It results in a state government unable to do what it should do — protect the health and welfare of our people. For example, our House leadership in dealing with GenX is fearful of any change offered with the proposed legislation, therefore any other solution other than that offered by the house leadership is either not considered or voted down. The House's fear of the Senate causes our own members to be so rigid that meaningful dialogue and discourse on a solution is impossible (and rarely even attempted). The Senate, philosophically opposed to any government solution to any problem, refuses to consider any bill that adds funding for the Department of Environmental Quality. Dogma is placed over people's welfare.
Despite our water issues and increasing demand we place on our water, we continue to allow hog waste to freely influence our water. Also, North Carolina is the only state from Maine to Texas that allows unrestricted netting and trawling in our estuary system. These choices fail to protect our water. They have caused our state to lose 90 percent of our oysters in Pamlico Sound, and has caused over 15 species of saltwater fish to become severely distressed. Ask any sport fisherman about fishing on our coast.
We cannot just brag about our tax rate and deregulation and expect industry and business to flourish in our state. We must also govern. Every responsible corporate citizen who researches and considers doing business in North Carolina has asked these questions? "Do you have the trained workforce capable of handling modern jobs?" "Do you have an abundance of usable water?"
Water is essential to growth, yet in requiring DEQ to assume responsibility for fixing the GenX problem our legislature refuses to allocate the additional funds DEQ needs to do the extra testing and develop solutions. They even voted down an amendment I offered to add airborne agents containing GenX as "emissions". How else did GenX get into wells on the other side of the river, upstream or in ponds? So we have no regulation of airborne GenX.
The solutions here are commonsense and must be nonpartisan. They start with equipping our executive branch with the resources it needs to test, identify and solve the problem. We cannot require and expect our overstressed DEQ or our local county governments to fix this problem. Reducing an already reduced budget and playing petty politics won't either — we must act decisively and quickly to handle the pressing issues of providing clean water to all our citizens whose wells have been contaminated. Our utilities must be brought up-to-date as well.
Next we must comprehensively assess just how widespread the contamination is. Delaying this will only worsen the problem. When we fully understand the widespread nature of the issue we can come up with meaningful solutions. We must then partner with industry and clean up this mess. Finally, we must enact commonsense rules that prevent this from happening again. Here is a simple rule that I learned from my parents: "When you borrow something from someone, you return it in the same or better condition that you found it." So why do we not require anyone using our water to do the same? We owe our children and our grandchildren nothing less. We certainly owe our citizens that as well. My prayer for this New Year is that we put aside partisan differences and dogma and begin to work using our common sense and practical effort to solve the pressing problems the affect our health and the safety of our citizens. By doing so we will instill trust back in our government.
Billy Richardson of Fayetteville represents House District 44 in the North Carolina General Assembly.