[Ed. note: The piece was updated to include responses received after press from Sen. Michael Lee.]
SOUTHEASTERN N.C. — The North Carolina General Assembly included several provisions regarding PFAS in its budget, passed earlier this month. Championed by Sen. Michael Lee (R-New Hanover County), it grants funding for PFAS research and mitigation, but this provision, environmentalists argue, continues a cycle of inaction.
The budget provides $22 million to the North Carolina Collaboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study firefighter protections related to PFAS and overall mitigation, detection and research of PFAS. The budget calls for the collaboratory to break down who the main PFAS dischargers are and search for alternatives to PFAS in manufacturing processes.
The Firefighter Protection Act, included in the budget, would test groundwater near fire stations, wells near the homes of firefighters, as well as impacts of PFAS exposure to the firefighters.
READ MORE: ‘EPA has abandoned NC’: Local stakeholders dismayed by Chemours, feds’ settlement
ALSO: AG Jeff Jackson calls on residents for feedback on EPA-Chemours settlement
CATCH UP: ‘No limits, no accountability’: Area residents rebuke state’s proposed PFAS, 1,4 dioxane rules
Sen. Lee said the goal was to fund “answers we can act on,” and said the reason for moving it through the budget was based on precedent, pointing to different iterations of the Water Safety Act and its funding goals dating back to 2018.
“The Testing Network we built in 2018 tells us what is in the water people drink. This study tells us where it is coming from. We have never had that statewide,” he wrote to Port City Daily.
According to language in the state budget, the data and research is mostly for state legislators, so they can make informed decisions about regulating contaminants in drinking water and chemical discharge through scientist recommendation. The state budget has created a fund for alleviating contaminants in drinking water and wastewater facilities; local governments and utilities can apply for grants to “detect, reduce, mitigate, and prevent exposure to emerging contaminants.”
“My commitment is to take those recommendations and write them into law. That is the through line of all the Water Safety Acts I’ve introduced. The 2018 act built the monitoring network, what the network found shaped the acts that followed, and this study will shape the reduction requirements that come next,” Sen. Lee said. “I cannot promise you how 169 other legislators will vote, but I can tell you my goal: enforceable, North Carolina specific limits on what goes into our rivers, aimed squarely at the polluters rather than the public, and backed by a dataset no one can credibly dispute.”
However, it leaves out regulating polluters.
Environmentalists, like deputy director for the North Carolina Sierra Club, Erin Carey, argued further research without action did not benefit North Carolinians, especially nine years into what she called a “contamination crisis.”
“Could we stop dumping it into our drinking water first? Do we have to be an ongoing human experiment?” she asked, adding she was unclear what data the General Assembly needed.
Some of the budget’s provisions appeared in the Water Safety Act earlier this spring; it would have been the first legislation to regulate and enforce PFAS discharge from industries in the state. It was filed in committee by Sen. Lee in April but never gained traction.
“For me and for people that are dealing with PFAS in their drinking water all over the state of North Carolina, the most important part of his original bill was section six,” Cape Fear River Watch Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette said of the initial act’s regulations. “Spoiler alert, it didn’t pass.”
The original bill contained 13 sections. About half focused on funding PFAS research, and those provisions made it into the budget. However, the other half of the Water Safety Act provisions left out of the budget centered on regulating industries that discharge “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to cancer and other adverse health effects. Had the initial bill passed, it would have required regulations be in place by October 2026.
One provision in the bill also included grounds for enforcement, which was the “most important,” according to Burdette. It would have limited how much individual companies discharge and included oversight from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. It also would have established mitigation methods for industries.
“And that would have been a big deal because that would have required industry to treat their waste before they put it into the public’s water,” Burdette said.
Maximum contamination limits didn’t make it into the budget, though appeared in the bill prior. It would have ensured companies and utilities adhere to limits: PFOA at 4.0 parts per trillion, PFOS at 4.0 ppt, PFNA at 10 ppt, GenX at 10 ppt, PFHxS at 10 ppt and mixtures containing two or more of PFHxS, PFNA, GenX and PFBS at 1 (unitless).
The state does not currently have numerical limits on PFAS. The Water Safety Act’s limits would have matched the current Environmental Protection Agency standards, though the federal agency has recently proposed rolling back the standards for all of the above-listed chemical compounds except for PFOA and PFOS.
Sen. Lee said taking the other provisions out before putting the Water Safety Act into the budget was in an effort to enact change in an order that was more durable. In part, he said, the ever-changing standards at the federal level played a role in the decision; it would be better to have a more comprehensive, in-state understanding of what the limits should be versus what was actually present in the water.
“Overnight blanket limits would have treated public utilities like the polluters, handed their ratepayers an unfunded mandate, and still missed the actual sources. This budget does it in the right order,” Sen. Lee wrote.
As for the other provisions regulating discharge limits, he said the framework was “moving forward,” though noted the discharge limits yielded through the research would be implemented. Recommendations for numerical thresholds would come by March 31, 2028 and March 31, 2029, which he said would turn into enforceable regulations.
“The researchers we consulted were blunt on that point: do not lock in numbers before the data exists to defend them,” Sen. Lee said.
Carey, from the Sierra Club, also criticized the budget for not addressing ultrashort-chain PFAS. They are smaller molecular forms of PFAS compounds; because of their size, they are highly water-soluble and move quickly through the environment. They are even more difficult to filter out using traditional treatment methods.
“We haven’t figured out how to stop that yet or even how to properly measure for it at scale,” she said.
Carey also didn’t think finding alternatives to PFAS for manufacturing uses should be the N.C. Collaboratory’s responsibility in the first place.
“I think that should fall to industry,” she said. “And industry would find an alternative if we regulate them.”
While research funding is always a good thing, according to Burdette, he said the state already had enough information about PFAS to know the best path forward was to regulate and eliminate.
“Industry is fine using taxpayer dollars to help remediate their problem because they never have to acknowledge the reason the problem is there in the first place is because they chose to dump waste into public drinking water supplies,” Burdette said. “They don’t have to pay for this because it’s just taxpayer dollars being used to help taxpayers. So we’re all paying out of our own pockets to do more PFAS research and to help out our friends and neighbors who have contaminated water.”
Burdette was also concerned about the public disclosure of the Collaboratory’s research. It will not be subject to public records law, as opposed to studies by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. The budget states phase one of the research will be presented to NCDEQ and the Environmental Management Commission — the 15-member regulatory board responsible for protecting, preserving, and enhancing state air and water resources — but the public will only be privy to an anonymized summary.
“Industry is winning,” Burdette said. “They don’t have any regulations. And people who drink surface water in North Carolina are losing because there’s nothing stopping the industry from continuing to dump PFAS into our rivers.”
Have tips or suggestions for Emily Sawaked? Email [email protected]
At Port City Daily, we aim to keep locals informed on top-of-mind news facing the tri-county region. To support our work and help us reach more people in 2026, please, consider helping one of two ways: Subscribe here or make a one-time contribution here.
We appreciate your ongoing support.
