The Valorizing of Paul Newton

 

"Dreamy" Paul Newton, looking all
visionary and non-ideological.
Photo Cornell Watson, for The Assembly

I just got a dose of learning from Tim Funk, who has published a lengthy profile of Paul Newton, Majority Leader of the NC Senate, and the man who has his hand in a lot of bad legislation, though (duly noted) Tim Funk really wants to believe that Newton is basically a good guy trapped in a morality play that emphasizes punishment more than charity. According to Funk, Newton "can seem uncomfortable" with hardball partisanship. In other words, he's a conflicted basic good guy -- competent, talented at leadership, and sincerely religious while not partisan about it, a sometime closet moderate in a Party that doesn't tolerate moderation. 

It's all interesting, and I'm pleased to know something about an important NC politician, though I'm not buying. I'm not buying that goodguyism compensates anywhere near enough for the accompanying oppression.

I didn't know a thing about Paul Newton, had never written about him or bothered to look into his career (which, according to Funk) has been an ascendant rocket, especially since 2016.

The Paul Newton Story

He had a privileged childhood in Eden, N.C. (significantly, the home also of President Pro Tem Phil Berger). Paul was the son of a Fieldcrest fabric company executive and an artist mother ... who divorced when Paul was 10. Paul stayed with his mother and sisters in Greensboro, but Newton told Funk that in the eighth grade, he announced to his mother: “I love you, Mom. [But] I’m a boy. I feel like I should grow up with my dad.” 

"So he returned to Eden," Tim Funk writes, and that's the last we learn about Newton's growing up. Funk leaves questions hanging, like bait in the forest. What was life with Dad like? Funk won't say or doesn't know. Where did Newton's antipathy toward public schools come from? He and his wife homeschooled all four of their children. Was Newton himself ever homeschooled?

Paul Newton is a lawyer, trained at UNC-Chapel Hill. Hired by Duke Energy in 1990 to manage the company’s largest lawsuit up to that time, against Westinghouse Electric for the cracking of steam-generator tubing in its nuclear plants. Westinghouse agreed to a big settlement with Duke, but Paul Newton's skill as a lawyer went unknown except among insiders.

By early 2014, when Duke spilled about a billion tons of coal ash into the Dan River, Newton had risen at Duke to president of North Carolina operations, and he took charge of managing the Dan River crisis -- and largely defused it -- and earned the respect and admiration of Phil Berger, who eventually urged Newton to run for the NC Senate (in Dist. 36, Cabarrus County), for the seat being vacated by the disgraced Fletcher Hartsell. That was 2016. Newton won the seat easily (propelled generously by Duke Energy money) and has won reelection three times more, never with less than 56% of the vote, and he steadily rose in party leadership to his current job as majority leader.

Paul Newton as majority leader

He rose in GOP leadership despite what Funk paints as a lack of strong ideology. Here's a memory told about Newton while he was in law school:

Newton would buy a copy of the Raleigh News & Observer every day from a rack near the law school, pull out the sports section, and toss the rest in the trash. [Newton's friend who retold this anecdote], now a retired attorney in Spartanburg, South Carolina, would retrieve the other sections and say, “Paul, would you at least read the headlines?”

Jim Blaine, Phil Berger's chief of staff and a smart political cookie, told Funk that Newton "is not a political operator. Arguably, if he has a weakness, it’s his political instincts.” An example of those poor instincts: Blaine says that Newton hatched a nutty plan to run against Mark Robinson in the 2024 primary for governor -- not to beat him but to "steel him," give Robinson real campaign experience before the big contest against Josh Stein in the fall. So Newton wanted to throw himself on a sword in order to prepare a man who's clearly unqualified. Interesting. But duly noted: Newton really does have his eye on the governorship.

In addition to his majority leader role, Newton also chairs the Senate's Redistricting and Elections Committee, which means his fingerprints are all over the current pending legislation to suppress and disallow certain voters. Newton has the gall to say he only wants to strengthen "election integrity without constraining the freedom to vote."

For a Republican who's supposedly non-ideological, that dunderheadedness certainly serves the ideology of his pals.

Here's a Headline

After studying Sutton Lake, Duke University scientists say, “Impact of coal ash in environment far larger than previously thought”

--story by Lisa Sorg

Sutton Lake is on the coast, at Wilmington.

Don't Drink the Water

AP Newsbreak

AP headline, 11:35, Friday morning, September 21:

Coal ash may be flowing into Cape Fear River

Substitute "definitely is" for "may be" flowing, and this is the world we've got now, the landscape shaped by, permeated with the leavings of unregulated special interests. 

Add pigshit from overtopped shit lagoons infecting all the surface water, coating the kitchen walls of submerged houses, soaking into the dry wall. Tell me that some powerful interests aren't ruling the roost! And woe to everything that's downhill from them!

Duke Energy is trying to get out of paying damages for the Dan River spill. Duke owes, or could owe, even before Florence, $1 billion+ as a result of spills and other environmental problems at its coal-ash ponds. Duke is suing its insurance providers to pick up that bill, or some of it. Customers will probably pay for the rest. Headline from June 1: "Your utility bill could go up: Duke Energy Progress seeking 16.7% rate increase."

Duh.

You watch: Those well dressed guys in Raleigh, the Phil Berger/Tim Moore troops, will never make Duke or the pigshit industry own up to its abuses. They're the guys who don't do enforcement. Don't believe in it. Against their religion.

Rep. Jonathan Jordan and Sen. Deanna Ballard bunk with those boys. All of them need to go somewhere else.

The Debate for the Future of North Carolina

Tonight, Gov. Pat McCrory will defend his record in his first televised debate with Attorney General Roy Cooper. The debate will be moderated by Chuck Todd of NBC and will air live between 7 and 8 p.m. on UNC-TV.

This morning, residents whose water has been contaminated by coal ash chemicals will join local environmental groups outside UNC-TV studios to urge moderator Todd to ask McCrory about his administration’s ongoing cleanup coverup of coal ash pollution across the state, and his relationship with his former employer, Duke Energy.

Via ProgressNC, the five questions that citizens want Gov. McCrory to answer:

1. Secret Dinner: At the height of the coal ash cleanup debate in 2015, McCrory held a secret dinner meeting at his mansion with Duke Energy executives and state environmental regulators. Shortly afterward, the McCrory administration reduced Duke Energy’s coal ash fine from $25 million to $6 million. What agreements were made during your secret dinner meeting?
    
2. Rudo Meeting: McCrory's chief of staff held a last-minute press conference in the dead of night to accuse state toxicologist Dr. Ken Rudo of lying under oath after he testified that McCrory participated in a meeting between Dr. Rudo and McCrory's communications director to discuss water safety standards. Now McCrory's chief of staff admits that the governor did in fact call into the meeting. What did you discuss? Why did you allow your chief of staff to falsely accuse a 30-year state scientist of lying under oath?
    
3. Water Standards: McCrory characterized his attempts to pressure state scientists to weaken water safety standards and cancel hundreds of Do Not Drink orders as a "disagreement among scientists." But not a single state scientist has gone on record agreeing with that position, and state epidemiologist Dr. Megan Davies even resigned over the administration's attempts to mislead the public. So which "scientists" are you talking about? Do they perhaps work for Duke Energy?
    
4. Coal Ash Families: Why did McCrory have dinner with a big corporate polluter which has donated thousands of dollars to his campaign but won't take time to visit any of the hundreds of families who have struggled for over 18 months with contaminated water? Why are you more interested in protecting the corporate interests of Duke Energy than the health and safety of North Carolina families?
    
5. Cleanup Costs: Why did McCrory sign a law allowing Duke Energy to pass the costs of coal ash cleanup on to rate-payers? Why should North Carolina families be forced to pay to clean up Duke Energy's mess?

Coal Ass

Hexavalent chromium. It's what caused cancer in all those people around Hinkley, Calif., that was the subject matter of the movie Erin Brocovich.

The indisputable presence of hexavalent chromium in well water around Duke Energy's coal ash pits is now causing The Guv's Chief of Staff to cry "LIAR" about the state of North Carolina's Chief Toxicologist, who has testified under oath in a deposition that The Guv and his boys leaned on him to soften the warning about hexavalent chromium. The toxicologist wanted to warn people: "Your water is not safe to drink." The Guv and his guys wanted more of a "Go ahead and drink your water because North Carolina Comeback!"

Duke Energy, which has been McCrory's hot lunch for decades, must not be fingered as the source of cancer. That's the gospel in the McCrory administration.

And according to the Chief Toxicologist's testimony, McCrory was leaning on him not to alarm the folks in the manner that McCrory likes to use to lean on public servants: sort of indirect, sort of vague, sort of intended to give McCrory plausible deniability. The Chief Toxicologist was ordered to a "meeting with the governor," he was told, but when he got there he was confronted only by subordinates of the governor, particularly the ones who handle public relations. Only then did the governor call in -- on the toxicologist's cell phone, no less -- and express misgivings about how a warning to the citizens might be worded, because, after all, science is wholly subject to work choice, isn't it?

How similar that scene was to the famous "I was in a side conversation" dodge adopted by McCrory after it came to light that he had participated in a meeting to pressure the Department of Public Safety into giving his pal Graeme Keith a lucrative prison maintenance contract.

McCrory knows better than to cost Duke Energy money, but he's now clearly concerned that Duke Energy is going to cost him his job as governor. They've been playing with people's lives at the governor's office, and their coverup is crumbling.

Additional reading:

Very thorough unpacking of the history behind this scandal by Bert Gutierrez in the Winston-Salem Journal.

WRAL story by Mark Binker posted late last night following an unusual press conference by the governor's Chief of Staff to cry "liar!"

More background by Mark Binker of WRAL.

Pat McCrory Is the Poster Child for Conflicts of Interest

The meeting stands out as unique among nearly a year of entries on van der Vaart's calendar, and a spokesman for McCrory could not furnish examples of similar mealtime sit-downs with other large companies.

--"Governor, Top Duke Energy Officials Met Privately, Won't Say Why," WRAL news

So last June 1, Governor Squishy invited the top brass of Duke Energy to his house, to sit down and sup at his table with his top environmental regulators, all the while publicly he was growling menacingly about making Duke Energy clean up its messes (plural) across the state, not least of which was the monstrous coal ash spill into the Dan River.

What he was really doing at that secret dinner was promising Duke Energy a sweetheart deal, which he and his administration proceeded to deliver, like a fruity cocktail on a silver platter:

State regulators reduced Duke Energy’s fine from $25 million to $7 million:

“There seems little doubt that the country’s largest electric utility certainly bested the state in this case. Going from $25 million to $7 million doesn’t seem the shrewdest negotiating on the state’s part. And the coal ash problem is an ongoing threat.” (News & Observer editorial, 10/4/15

Duke Energy didn’t even admit the final settlement was a fine:

“Duke called it a payment and didn’t even seem to concede it was a fine.” (News & Observer editorial, 10/4/15)

Duke Energy declared cleanup efforts on Dan River over after cleaning up only 3,000 of approximately 39,000 tons of coal ash:

“Last February, around 39,000 tons of toxic coal slurry gushed into a major North Carolina river. Now, having cleaned up around 3,000 tons worth, the company behind the spill and state regulators say their work is done. With 92 percent of the original heavy metal-laden and possibly radioactive coal ash still coating 70 miles of river bottom, river advocates are frustrated.” (Newsweek, 7/21/14)

McCrory was elected the Governor of North Carolina, but he has continued to behave like the Prize Sow of Duke Energy. It ain't funny.

The McCrory Administration: The Man in Charge of Protecting NC's Environment

Donald van der Vaart is straight out of an Art Pope/Civitas/John Locke Foundation briefing book. He took over the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) last January from big business toady John Skvarla, who had bungled the response to the Duke Energy Dan River coal ash spill. Van der Vaart is twice as dangerous as Skvarla ever was because he's four times smarter and infinitely better educated.

He holds multiple degrees in chemical engineering including a Ph.D. from Cambridge, plus a law degree. He has a wide mean streak. He's confrontational and is not afraid to use his educational attainments to intimidate lesser human beings. In other words, he's the type of take-no-prisoners, "you're fired!" Republican administrator currently in vogue among conservatives. A Donald Trump kind of guy.

The Raleigh News & Observer delves deeply into his one-year tenure at DEQ in today's edition:

1. He's a free market fundamentalist -- let the corporations rule! In other words, he's "economic" in his perspective in that he knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

2. He's following the Art Pope/Civitas playbook in sneering at "renewable" energy -- solar and wind power principally. He would enthusiastically applaud the elimination of North Carolina’s "renewables mandate" that was enacted in 2007 and which the Art Pope Machine has been trying to eliminate.

3. He loves loves LOVES fracking and is a big promoter of off-shore oil/gas drilling.

4. He has proposed a major policy change to the Environmental Management Commission to eliminate the air pollution permit process for rock quarries, concrete plants, and some 1,400 other small businesses in the state that account for 3.4 percent of air emissions. Terry Lansdell of Clean Air Carolina says the proposal will let "businesses police themselves rather than relying on state oversight."

5. In March, two months into his tenure at DEQ, he signed off on a settlement with Duke Energy over coal ash violations. The fine that Duke deigned to accept was $25 million, the largest in DEQ's history but still considered a mere mosquito bite for the multi-billion-dollar corp with a "bad neighbor" history.

6. He submitted a compliance plan for the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power plan that was "designed to be rejected," because he has a bigger fish to fry: he's part of a law suit against the EPA challenging the entire mandate for clean power. Being a prick to the Obama administration's EPA only wins him more hugs and kisses from fighting mad conservatives.

7. "Van der Vaart has said the only way to make drastic reductions in carbon emissions is by aggressive development of nuclear power."

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article42125817.html#storylink=cpy

Our Governor, The Suck-Up

So here's Donald Trump's Twitter comment about the groveling of Republican candidates, including our dear dim Governor Pat McCrory, at a California resort this past weekend, begging the Koch Bros. and their rich friends for money--

"Puppets?" tweeted Trump.

That's the thing, especially so far as Pat McCrory is concerned. He's a man without a "values" rudder, always at the beck and call of the rich and powerful who do have core values and who are looking for willing tools to tote their water and fetch their slippers. Pat McCrory is their guy. Always has been.

McCrory was first induced to run for the Charlotte City Council by William S. Lee, CEO of Duke Energy back in the 1980s, and once in office, McCrory became Duke Energy's guy, running to their whistle, always willing to put his thumb on the scales for The Big Boys. He would obligingly testify in Congress, after he became mayor of Charlotte and was still working for Duke, against stricter air pollution standards without bothering to mention that he also worked for a major fossil fuel polluter.

In a famous NC Supreme Court dissent in Cook v. Charlotte, Justice I. Beverly Lake explicitly mentioned McCrory's toadying for Duke. Lake wrote that McCrory's conflict of interest had been shocking, that he had in effect colluded with Duke Energy and voted to condemn a piece of property that Duke wanted for itself. Puppet? You bet.

McCrory obviously relishes the lifestyles of the rich and famous, especially when The Big Boys are paying. Then he neglects to report on his financial disclosure forms that he's yucked it up in luxury with the high-rollers, as though it were a shameful thing. Which it is, if you don't know who you are and are totally fixated on who they are, and what they want.

The rudderlessness is what has made McCrory a disaster as governor of the state. The Berger-Tillis junta took over the General Assembly two years in advance of McCrory's own election as governor, and McCrory spent those two years slavering Berger-Tillis with sycophantic praise, currying their favor so they'd support him in the 2012 Republican primary.

Berger, certainly, saw McCrory for what he was, a willing tool to the powerful who had no core principles himself. Tillis was maybe kinder in his assessment and tried to prop up the governor occasionally, but the Berger abuse of McCrory showed the world how hollow the governor was, and other members of the General Assembly have piled on.

They bought him. They own him. They'll treat him like the lap dog he is.

Now someone else may have bought him, and North Carolina will veer again in new, dangerous directions.

Jabba the Putz

Dwane Powell, N&O, 22 May 2015

To appreciate fully this Dwane Powell cartoon, you must understand that Sen. Bob Rucho chairs the NC Senate Finance Committee and

...that last Wednesday Sen. Rucho abruptly cut off debate on whether North Carolina should continue encouraging solar energy projects through a provision in law that makes large energy corporations (Duke Energy, we're looking at you) buy a certain (tiny) percentage of their electricity from renewable sources and

...that the bill under debate in Rucho's Finance Committee would freeze North Carolina’s “Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standard” (or “REPS”) – a law that requires a growing percentage of the state’s electricity load to be provided by renewable sources. Current law places the REPS requirement at 6%, but it is scheduled to grow to 10% in 2018 and 12.5% in 2021. And

...that the Republican senators on Rucho's committee are far from unified in wanting to scuttle renewable energy initiatives. In fact, observers say the majority in that committee last Wednesday wanted to vote negatively on that particular bill. And

...that Rucho, after cutting off debate, called for a voice vote on the bill and then declared it had passed even though it sounded like it had failed loudly, and

...that Sen. Josh Stein, a Democrat from Raleigh who is on the Finance Committee, told Under the Dome on Thursday he doesn’t mind losing, but if he wins and still loses, that’s not fair.

Duke Energy Admits Guilt, And the World Didn't End

The three U.S. attorneys for the Eastern, Middle, and Western districts of NC filed criminal charges against Duke Energy yesterday for illegally dumping coal ash at coal-fired power plants in Eden, Moncure, Asheville, Goldsboro, and Mt. Holly.

Simultaneously, Duke Energy said that it has already negotiated a plea agreement under which it will admit guilt, pay diddly squat $102 million in fines, restitution, and community service, and make their shareholders bear the costs of the settlement rather than pass on the costs to its electricity customers.

"We are accountable for what happened at Dan River and have learned from this event," said Lynn Good, Duke's president and CEO.

Pigs just took flight. "We are accountable," said Duke Energy, the same company that has spent years stoutly denying any fault on their part.

"It's not just a slap on the wrist," said Kemp Burdette, of Cape Fear River Watch. "A $100 million fine is a significant one." "Anybody who agrees to pay $100 million is confirming that they did something wrong," said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. "Duke Energy cannot buy its way out of its coal ash scandal. It has to clean its way out."

Okay, okay. Guess we'll have to take your word for it, Mr. Burdette and Mr. Holleman. But for the largest energy producer in the nation, and for such a flagrant scofflaw, seems like a puny fine to us. But we'll let that go.

LEST WE FORGET, there is still this other small piece of history: 

After numerous environmental groups sued to force Duke to clean up its act -- because North Carolina's regulators weren't doing their job -- the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources blocked the citizen lawsuits, intervening at the last minute to assert its own authority under the federal Clean Water Act to take "enforcement action" in state court.

The administration of Gov. Pat McCrory, who worked at Duke for 29 years, then proposed a sweetheart deal under which Duke Energy would have paid fines of just $99,111 to settle violations over toxic groundwater leeching from two of its plants. That agreement, which included no requirement that Duke immediately stop or clean up the pollution, was pulled amid intense criticism after the Dan River spill.

Surprise, Lee County! You Get Millions of Tons of Coal Ash for Christmas!

Lee County, NC, is high on the target list for immediate fracking for natural gas. Now it's also about to receive a snoot full of Duke Energy's coal ash. Are the citizens happy?

Duke Energy wants to put millions of tons of its precious coal ash into open-pit clay mines in both Lee and Chatham counties. Duke Energy has put in its applications for permits to its wholly owned subsidiary, the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), which is sure to approve them.

Some slick Duke Energy boys in expensive suits showed up earlier this month at a Lee County Commissioners meeting in Sanford and reassured the folks that everything was copacetic, that there was no danger, that ... blah blah blah. According to WRAL, the crowd of citizens who showed up to hear Their Slicknesses weren't buying what Duke Energy was selling. Every single speaker in the public hearing spoke against putting coal ash into Lee County, and they chanted "shame on you" at the end of the public hearing.

One resident spoke directly to the Duke representatives, “I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re all very nice people, but you are not here for the betterment of my community.”

Incidentally, Republican Rep. Mike Stone, a great champion for fracking who represented Lee County, lost his seat to Democrat Brad Salmon in the elections just passed. So there's that.

You Can't Eat It Or Drink It, But You Sure as Hell Can Pay for It!

The hand-picked ... is stooges too strong a word? ... the hand-picked appointees to North Carolina's new Coal Ash Commission have generously decided that you and I and every other rate-payer in North Carolina will have to bear the cost of the coal ash cleanup that billion-dollar corporation Duke Energy should pay for but doesn't want to.

Here Sit the Stooges

Perfect example of the privatization of profit and the socialization of costs, the only brand of socialism that conservatives seem to love.

Oh, you chose those Coal Ash Commissioners by choosing their puppet-masters in the North Carolina General Assembly. You did it. Now choke on it.

Governor Bimbo

Gov. McCrory's long history of covering up business connections that benefitted said businesses through the mechanism of his "public" service, all successfully performed because of a total lack of governmental transparency.

Somehow the word whore springs to mind.

He works for those who are best positioned to feather his nest. Always has. Always will.

McCrory and the Smell Test. Hint: He Doesn't Pass It

On April 15 of this year, Governor Pat McCrory filed a financial disclosure statement with the NC Ethics Commission, as required by law. In it, he claimed to own no -- zero -- Duke Energy stock as of December 31, 2013.

In May, Gov. McCrory filed a supplemental financial disclosure statement in which he continued to maintain that he had owned no Duke stock in 2013.

It comes to light this morning that indeed he didn't own any Duke stock by April, or by May of 2014, because he had sold it all shortly after the big Duke ash spill on the Dan River, which happened on February 9. His lawyer is now saying he sold his Duke holdings some time between February 14 and April 15. The lawyer is also not saying how much that stock was worth, but it has to have been worth at least $10,000 to fall under disclosure rules, and clearly the holdings did fall under disclosure rules.

The governor has found a patsy to take the fall for this cover-up: Bob Stephens, McCrory’s general counsel. He's taking the blame. He was "confused," he says in a prepared statement.

McCrory twice signed statements that claimed he owned no Duke Energy stock as of December 31, 2013, immediately following his quick divestment of that stock on the heels of one of the worst ash spills in the country. No, he wouldn't have known a thing about that! Because Mr. McCrory generally doesn't know anything about anything.

Thank Gawd we have a governor who is so totally out to lunch.

Yes! Just Go Home, You Extremist Ideologues and Sorry Nincompoops

The extinct Dodo bird

The NC Senate adjourned and left for their home districts in the wee hours last night, and the NC House will be following them today or tomorrow. As Molly Ivins once said, "Every village reclaims its idiot."

They did nothing about the coal ash spill and Duke Energy's plan to charge all of us electricity consumers for the costs of cleaning up their shit.

Shifting teachers’ longevity pay into their salary schedules to fake a bigger pay raise is a gyp that a first-grader could see through.

A recent report from the General Assembly’s fiscal staff that taxes cut last year will amount to a shortfall of about $700 million this year, and a total of $5.3 billion over five years – $880 million more than projected -- is the baseline revenue problem that The Honorables do not acknowledge and can not overcome. So their budget claims that it will balance itself with the Education Lottery and by raiding the "rainy day fund." Smart?

Alexandra Sirota of the N.C. Budget and Tax Center said, “The knowledge that there is a higher cost to the tax plan passed last year is not reflected in this budget, which calls into question whether this budget is really sustainable, not in the long term but even over this fiscal year.”

Perhaps the General Assembly could open a revenue-generating concession called "Smoke 'n' Mirrors R Us."

North Carolina is spiraling down just like Kansas, and you know what's happening right now in Kansas, right?

We're Duke Energy: We Own This State

Frank Eaton strikes again!

The Good Hands People

Governor McCrory's former boss and current Sugar Daddy, Duke Energy, deliberately pumped, over several months, 61 million gallons of coal ash water into a tributary of the Cape Fear River, an intentional "spill" which is more than twice the size of the Feb. 2 Dan River accidental spill.

McCrory's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), which absolutely no one with at least two working brain cells trusts any more, notified Duke yesterday -- several days after DENR became aware of the pumping -- that putting 61 million gallons of coal ash toxins into the Cape Fear River, uh, violates the law (cough).

DENR also thoughtfully notified officials down-river of the pumping, in Sanford, Dunn, and Fayetteville, to be on alert for carcinogens in their drinking water. Gee, thanks!

With Duke Energy and DENR in charge of our future, what possibly could ever go wrong?

Soucek & Jordan Voted for This Travesty

Champions of the public good,
Sen. Dan Soucek and
Rep. Jonathan Jordan

"Regulatory Reform" -- ha!

Duke Energy led the new Republican majority in the North Carolina General Assembly by their noses to insert 330 little words into a bill regulating water quality (among other things), altering "a provision that had been on the books for decades, requiring Duke to halt the source of contamination if its subterranean plumes of pollution crept more than 500 feet from its ash dumps."

But even before Duke's lobbyists began whispering in legislators' ears, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had not been enforcing the law (under either Democratic or Republican administrations)

A "compliance boundary" is like an early warning system. If groundwater contamination inside the line exceeds state environmental standards, a company is supposed to take corrective action. The goal is to stop the spread of pollution to neighboring properties, as well as rivers and streams.

But that wasn’t happening. Instead of enforcing the limit, state officials were letting Duke continue to pollute groundwater inside its compliance boundaries around old ash pits without taking any action to stop the contamination. At some plants, regulators even let Duke redraw its compliance boundaries when it looked like contamination might cross the line — a stalling tactic to avoid the cost of cleanup.

After environmental groups began attempting to sue DENR and Duke Energy to enforce water pollution laws, Duke's lobbyists and their blank checks went into action in 2013:

Working closely with lawmakers, the lobbyists helped craft a provision to conform to the way state regulators had been interpreting the law. The change would allow Duke to contaminate groundwater until it crossed onto a neighbor’s property.

The fact that the general public is just now learning how corrupted state government has become via the largest and most powerful corporate bully in the state does not lessen the outrage. Don't forget either that Gov. Squishy, a 29-year employee of Duke Energy, signed that abomination into law.

Kevin Siers, Charlotte Observer, 12 March 2014.

NC DENR Disappears Climate Change Science

Mr. John Skvarla (bless his heart!) can't seem to scrub anything clean except the website of his Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), which has recently been washed of any scientific evidence of climate change.

Maybe Gov. Squishy told him to do it. McCrory too has become a national laughingstock on whether the science of climate change has anything to do with anything other than God's will.

Was it perhaps also God's will for Duke Energy to defy environmental laws and pollute our state's water supply at every last one of their dozen + coal ash dumps?