Advocacy groups are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke the state’s authority to regulate water pollution because of legislature interference.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed Wednesday a 65-page petition requesting the federal agency withdraw North Carolina’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, authority because lawmakers have been “unlawfully stripping” North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality of its ability “to protect its waterways, drinking water sources, and communities from harmful pollution.”
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The federal Clean Water Act implemented the NPDES permit program in 1972 to address water pollution by regulating point sources that discharge pollutants to waters of the United States.
“DEQ operates the NPDES program in compliance with the Clean Water Act as delegated to the State by EPA. Our staff is dedicated to carrying out our delegated authority in a manner that protects the resources and residents of North Carolina,” DEQ officials said Wednesday in response to a request for comment.
The petition, filed on behalf of Cape Fear River Watch, the Environmental Justice Community Action Network, MountainTrue, and the Haw River Assembly, “documents how the North Carolina General Assembly has systematically undermined the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Management Commission to the point that the state can no longer effectively protect its waters, including through the following actions.”
The petition also argues that the General Assembly has caused North Carolina to violate the Clean Water Act requirements and the memorandum of agreement between the state and EPA that governs how the state administers its NPDES program.
“The people of North Carolina deserve clean water, yet the state legislature is preventing the state from limiting toxic pollution of our waterways and drinking water,” Mary Maclean Asbill, Southern Environmental Law Center North Carolina offices director, said in a statement. “Legislative-induced failure is not an option when it comes to protecting North Carolina’s water and communities, so we are asking the Environmental Protection Agency to step in.”
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The petition asserts that the legislature has systematically acted to block NCDEQ from effectively implementing its NPDES permit program and from protecting residents from water pollution, including chemicals like per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and 1,4-dioxane.
“For instance, the legislature has amended the state laws governing the appointment and composition of the State’s Environmental Management Commission (“EMC”) and Rules Review Commission (“RRC”) such that these commissions have been effectively captured by a supermajority in the legislature that is hostile to environmentally protective regulation. Together these commissions are blocking the agency’s development and use of numeric water quality standards for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, impeding its implementation of the narrative standards,1 and threatening to take permitting authority away from agency experts,” the petition states.
The petition continues that the legislature has enacted legislation that gives the Office of Administrative Hearings final decision-making authority over NPDES permits, “thereby stripping DEQ and the EMC of the roles assigned them by the Memorandum of Agreement and threatening DEQ’s ability to issue protective permits.”
The legislature has enacted laws prescribing specific permitting conditions for discharges from fish farms and wastewater discharges into small creeks and streams. “These laws unlawfully usurp the State’s environmental agencies’ authority to evaluate permit applications and issue permits tailored to the discharger and receiving waterbody. These laws also prevent the public from participating in the permitting process, and they violate the backsliding provisions of the Clean Water Act,” according to the petition.
And, the legislature-enacted state budget “has perpetually and systematically underfunded DEQ for over a decade, resulting in a backlog of expired NPDES permits and a lack of agency capacity to adequately develop and enforce protective NPDES permits.”
The law center agues that the “legislature has gone too far. To protect North Carolinians, EPA should withdraw North Carolina’s NPDES permitting program unless these issues are resolved and the State is returned to compliance.”
