Issue Position: Clean Water

Issue Position

Access to clean water is a basic human right. While in office, I introduced the Water Safety Act to establish a statewide monitoring network, provide additional funding to DEQ for enforcement of bad actors and to clear up a backlog of permitting. The Water Safety Act also gave the Governor the power to shut down polluters, requires all industry that discharges into our waters to identify and report every compound they intend to discharge into surface waters, provided funding for cities and towns to begin the process of municipal connections for those on contaminated wells (with a provision of reimbursement from the polluter), funding for additional pilot tests to clean PFAS (and GenX in particular) out of the water, funding to UNCW to look into bioaccumulation of GenX in sediments and shellfish, and required polluters to pay for connections to municipal water supplies or whole house filtration in the event of contamination. In the Senate, I will continue to work on innovative water safety and quality initiatives.

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