Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.
Federal and state efforts to limit the public’s exposure to “forever chemicals” through drinking water sources seemed to be gaining traction just a year ago.
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In a historic move in April 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency set limits on six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, including PFOA, PFOS and HFPO-DA, most commonly referred to as GenX.
About three months after the federal drinking water rules were adopted, North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Resources introduced proposed groundwater and surface water standards on eight PFAS.
Related: Zeldin says PFAS limits may get tougher, downplays layoffs
But, as of this week, the Trump administration says it intends to rescind and reexamine rules on four PFAS, including GenX, and extend the deadline for public water utilities to comply with rules on PFOA and PFOS by two years. PFAS are a class of chemical compounds used in the production of a host of consumer goods from food containers to water resistant clothing.
PFAS are a group of more than 14,000 chemicals used in everyday consumer products including food containers, stain-resistant carpet and water-repellant gear. These man-made chemical compounds are often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they are persistent in the environment and have been found to accumulate in people and animals. Exposure to these substances has been linked to weakened immune function, reproductive and developmental issues and increased risk of some cancers.
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The EPA’s announcement Wednesday of its plans to scale back PFAS limits comes on the heels of a recent decision by members of the state-appointed commission responsible for adopting rules that protect, preserve and enhance air and water resources to again defer moving forward monitoring and minimization discharge plans for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane into the state’s surface waters.
Critics of those proposed plans argue the rules, as written, lack any real subsistence in reducing the releases of chemical compounds into the state’s waterways.
And in a new year with a new administration at the helm of the federal government, the impetus for regulation may turn up the pressure on state governments to limit discharges of “forever chemicals” into drinking water sources.
State Division of Water Resources officials were heading in that direction in July 2024 when they presented water quality standards for eight PFAS to committees of the N.C. Environmental Management Commission.
The standards would be used to limit permitted releases of PFAS into groundwater and surface waters, set health thresholds for providing alternative water supplies to residents on private wells whose drinking water exceeds contamination limits, and establish goals for cleaning contamination.
The commission’s groundwater and waste management committee agreed to recommend groundwater health standards for only three PFAS, including PFOA, PFOS and GenX. That proposal went to public comment later in the year.
The commission’s water quality committee deferred a motion to send the surface water rule package on all eight PFAS to the full commission, which has yet to receive a rule for consideration.
Based on that committee’s vote earlier this month, the commission isn’t expected to see a proposed draft rule on PFAS or 1,4-dioxane earlier than its July meeting.
Draft rule ‘doesn’t have sufficient teeth’
The current proposed rules for surface water bear little semblance to those the Division of Water Resources presented last July.
The set of rule drafts presented to the water quality committee in March were largely written from input provided by the North Carolina Water Quality Association, a statewide organization that represents public water, sewer, and stormwater utilities.
The water quality standards included in the initial draft rules the division created last year have since been deleted. Without those standards, the state lacks ability to enforce limits on dischargers of PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, critics say.
One of those critics of the current proposed draft rules is Environmental Management Commissioner Robin Smith.
“I think that consistently there has been a concern that, in the absence of a water quality standard, even a minimization plan isn’t enforceable,” Smith told Coastal Review in a telephone interview earlier this week.
Following last week’s commission meeting, Smith raised several concerns in an email that she sent to fellow commissioners.
“My concern is that (the current draft rule) doesn’t have sufficient teeth,” she said. “If you read through the full draft, there’s just nothing there other than the minimization contents, like a table of contents for what the minimization plan would have to be. There are no standards for determining whether what a system submits in their plan is adequate or not.”
And the draft rules do not enforce consequences for industries if they increase their pollution, said Southern Environmental Law Center Attorney Hannah Nelson.
“DEQ worked really hard to put together a comprehensive set of water quality standards that would have required polluters to reduce their pollution at the source and they spent a lot of time putting those rules together,” she said. “We don’t see that same thing happening with this set of rules. Instead, the analysis supporting this rule making completely ignored impact to downstream drinking water utilities. They don’t address that because, if they did, we would see that this rule is all about protecting industry and it’s not about protecting the people of North Carolina.”
In an April 17 letter to state environmental officials, Cape Fear Public Utility Authority’s executive director admonished the revised draft rule for 1,4-dioxane.
“After months of research, our consultants determined, as a matter of law, that there is no legal basis by which to create mandatory, legally enforceable 1,4-dioxane minimization requirements without supporting water quality standards for surface waters,” wrote the utility’s Kenneth Waldroup in the letter addressed to Environmental Management Commission Chair JD Solomon and Division of Water Resources Director Richard Rogers.
“Given that the EMC determined many years ago that 1,4-dixoane adversely impacts the protected use of groundwater, we respectfully point out that the EMC neglects its statutory duty to protect surface waters from the same pollutant. Pollution mitigation plans that have no required or enforceable reduction targets will not garner any tangible results but instead be no more than an action in name only providing empty promises to the people of North Carolina,” the letter states.
There are six known 1,4-dioxane polluters upstream of the drinking water supply for Sanford, Fayetteville, Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties, and municipalities that buy drinking water from Sanford.
Waldroup has said that the utility will have to invest millions of dollars to remove 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen, from its raw drinking water source: the Cape Fear River.
Cape Fear Public Utility Authority has already spent millions in upgrades and ongoing treatment of PFAS discharged into the Cape Fear River from, among other upstream polluters, Chemours’ Fayetteville Works plant.
GenX is specific to the Bladen County facility, which is roughly 74 miles upstream of Wilmington.
Since news broke nearly eight years ago that Chemours had knowingly discharged PFAS directly into the river, air and groundwater for decades, the company has spent millions to reduce its PFAS emissions to comply with a 2019 consent order between the company, DEQ and Cape Fear River Watch.
The Cape Fear utility and other public water utilities in the region are calling for regulations that would ultimately shift the cost of reducing PFAS and 1,4-dioxane discharges to the industries that produce those chemical compounds.
“We seek meaningful regulation that acknowledges and rewards the reductions made to date, prevents backsliding, and requires uncooperative industrial dischargers to mirror the work of dutiful municipal partners,” Waldroup wrote.
The Clean Water Act includes “anti-backsliding” provisions advocates say prohibits repealing or weakening the drinking water standard.
“Unfairly” blamed
Water quality committee members pointed the finger at Division of Water Resources staff as the reason for the latest delay in getting proposed rules out for public comment.
Smith, who is not a member of the water quality committee, took issue with that assertion, saying in her email that committee members were “unfairly blaming” division staff.
“DWR was not responsible for the fact that the Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) did not approve the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIAs) for these two sets of rules before the May EMC meeting,” she wrote.
Instead, “significant changes” to the rule drafts and the draft regulatory analyses that were presented to the committee in March “led directly to OSBM questions that delayed approval of the RIAs and remain unresolved.”
An RIA is an evaluation of the potential costs and benefits associated with a proposed regulation.
Changes to the draft rules were made at the direction of a group of commissioners, including the chair and vice chair of the water quality committee, chair of the groundwater and waste management committee, and Solomon. Solomon did not respond to an email request for comment.
During the water quality committee’s May 7 meeting, Rogers said staff had “been engaged in taking direction from a subcommittee of this committee” over the last month.
“We have taken that direction and applied it directly to the draft rules that y’all have before you today,” Rogers said.
Exactly which commissioners had been meeting with staff had not been made clear until the May 7 meeting, Smith told Coastal Review.
“It’s not necessarily inappropriate to have a subcommittee or a working group, a small group of EMC members who work on something between committee meetings, but one of my concerns about this process has been there’s never been any transparency about the fact that was going on and who was involved,” she said. “I do think we need to reach some common understanding of how we’re working on these rules, but that also clearly affects the public, and I’m also not sure we’re on a path toward making great progress in July, depending on how willing some of these water quality committee members are to making changes to satisfy OSBM.”
