North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper wants to tackle an emerging problem of water and air pollution from industrial chemicals by beefing up the state’s health and environmental agencies, a move legislators have resisted.
Cooper proposed Tuesday spending $14 million with half of the money to find sources of water contamination or collecting and analyzing data on how to handle perfluorinated compounds like GenX.
Legislators in February failed to agree on an extra $2 million for the Department of Environmental Quality.
State regulators said in new court documents this week that the operators of a chemical plant near Fayetteville have lied for years about discharging compounds that have gotten into water as much as 100 miles away in Wilmington. The Chemours Company did not respond Tuesday to an opportunity for comment.
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