PFAS Response
North Carolina has played an outsized role in the United States' forever chemical water contamination crisis, with much of that attention focused on chemical company Chemours' Fayetteville Works plant. Company officials have admitted that the plant discharged forever chemicals into the Cape Fear River for decades, largely under DuPont before it spun Chemours off amid mounting legal liabilities. Those discharges polluted the primary drinking water source for Wilmington and its surrounding area, while air emissions carrying PFAS polluted groundwater around the plant.
Now, Chemours is weighing in on North Carolina's closely watched U.S. Senate race, with its corporate political action committee contributing $5,000 to GOP candidate Michael Whatley's campaign. The Delaware-based company has also donated $6,500 to five GOP state legislators over the course of this biennium, according to federal campaign finance data.
DJ Griffin, a Whatley campaign spokesman, did not reply to either an email or a text message asking about the GOP candidate's stance on Chemours.
Erin Carey, the director of the Sierra Club's North Carolina chapter, said it is disappointing that Whatley has not discussed PFAS contamination and more so that he is accepting campaign contributions from the company that is linked with that contamination. "It's as baffling as it is disgraceful," said Carey, who lives in Wilmington and drank contaminated water for two decades.
The donations come as Chemours is poised to see the Trump Environmental Protection Agency roll back some Biden-era PFAS rules to which the company had long been opposed. The company has long maintained that maximum contaminant levels for GenX and three other chemicals are not backed by science and that the former EPA did not go through the appropriate regulatory process before enacting them.
And last month, the company and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a settlement that would see Chemours pay a $22.5 million civil penalty for PFAS contamination in New Jersey, North Carolina and West Virginia. As part of the settlement, Chemours agreed to spend at least $90 million over the next 15 years preventing contamination from three plants, including Fayetteville Works.
Democratic leaders in North Carolina such as Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson have blasted the settlement.
Jackson said that North Carolina officials had no role in crafting the agreement and called it "insulting" to about half a million people whose drinking water has been contaminated by Chemours.
Former governor and current Democratic Senate candidate Roy Cooper dealt with Chemours' contamination throughout his time in office, starting when it became public in 2017.
Cooper posted a message to social media platform X about the settlement that said, "This backroom deal is another example of Washington bailing out billionaires and corporations instead of standing up for hardworking people. I fought to hold corporations accountable for pollution, and I'll do the same as Senator."
Chemours formed its corporate PAC in 2018, a year after the Wilmington-area contamination became public knowledge. The PAC is funded by donations, typically monthly, from Chemours employees.
In North Carolina, the company has largely supported Republican members of the state legislature so far, focusing its donations on powerful anti-regulatory Republicans such as Rep. Jimmy Dixon, R-Duplin, and Sen. Brent Jackson, R-Sampson.
The only federal candidate to which the Chemours PAC has contributed was $1,000 to former Congressman Wiley Nickel in 2023. The Wake County Democrat left Congress after legislative Republicans redrew the district he was representing to make it more favorable to GOP candidates and is poised to become the next Wake County District Attorney.
Chemours did not respond to a series of questions about why its PAC is supporting Whatley's campaign; what specific legislation or rules it is concerned about; or why Whatley's is the first North Carolina U.S. Senate campaign in which it is spending.
Notably, Chemours made the $5,000 contribution to Whatley's campaign on March 3, technically during the primary. That means the PAC could make another contribution of up to $5,000 for the general election. During this election cycle, the Chemours PAC also made a maximum $15,000 contribution to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is Senate Republicans' official campaign arm.
As part of their efforts to end diversity, equity and inclusion efforts throughout state government, GOP lawmakers included a measure in the state budget to abolish a longstanding office that helped minority-owned businesses compete for government contracts.
Both Senate and House Republicans proposed eliminating the Office of Historically Underutilized Businesses, which was established by Gov. Jim Hunt in 1999 through executive order and has been housed under the Department of Administration, in their individual budget proposals last year.
A group of Senate Democrats who broke ranks with their party and voted in favor of the Senate’s spending plan last year, including Sens. Gladys Robinson of Guilford County and Paul Lowe of Forsyth County, identified the preservation of the HUB office as a top priority and said they would raise the issue with Republican budget writers.
That outreach failed to save the office. The provision to do away with the HUB office remained in the final budget both chambers negotiated and passed with bipartisan support last month.
While Democrats continued to object to the closure, they said substantial teacher and state worker raises and funding for health care needs and hurricane recovery made the budget worth voting for.
Sen. Carl Ford, R-Rowan, told NC Insider/State Affairs this week that budget writers “were looking to identify areas where we could cut red tape and unnecessary spending.”
“We realized the HUB office was itself being underutilized and frankly, redundant since there is a similar federal program,” Ford said in a statement. “When a program is no longer working or needed, it’s imperative that legislators shutter it instead of allowing it to siphon taxpayer money from more pressing needs.”
The closure of the office eliminates 12 positions and is expected to save a little over $883,000 in recurring funding.
The budget provision also changes a declaration of state policy from encouraging and promoting the use of “minority contractors, physically handicapped contractors and women business contractors” to promoting the use of small business contractors.
Sen. Ted Alexander, R-Cleveland, said during committee discussion over the office’s closure last year that “nothing prohibits minority or underutilized businesses from continuing to ask for contracts or go after contracts.”
The Department of Administration said last week that it “hopes to continue to work with” minority-owned businesses that it had previously partnered with through the Small Business Enterprise program, which the budget moves to the department’s purchase and contract division.
Under the HUB program, qualifying minority-owned businesses were able to apply for designation as “HUB vendors” that the office encouraged state agencies, departments and universities to contract with.
To qualify, businesses needed to have majority-owners who were Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian, women, socially and economically disadvantaged or disabled.
The department said the HUB office, over the past two decades, had helped thousands of business owners qualify for the program “while also helping improve the number and type of businesses competing for government contracts in North Carolina.”
Department Secretary Gabriel Esparza said last week that the office had “played an instrumental role in opening doors of opportunity for businesses that had not traditionally been at the table to compete for state contracts.”
Esparza said in a statement that the department was “deeply disappointed” by the decision to close the office and is working with 10 employees who lost their jobs as a result of the cut “to help them find other opportunities.”
School Infrastructure
Public schools in North Carolina are facing billions of dollars in unfunded school construction projects, and a lottery-supported grant program is only able to address a fraction of the requests it receives.
As one of the state’s poorest school districts, Halifax County hasn’t had enough funding to make needed repairs and renovations to its oldest schools. Hollister Elementary School was built in 1960 to serve the small rural community that is home to the Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe, and the building looks much as it did when it first opened.
Hollister Elementary Principal Lorane Johnson explains what it’s like to educate young people in a building like this. "Anything can stop working at any minute," she told WUNC News. "Many of our teachers know how to flip a breaker. We have learned how to work through heating and air challenges, we know how to open windows as necessary. Our kids are resilient, and our staff is resilient because of it."
Students won’t be returning to Hollister and nearby Pittman Elementary School this fall. The schools are being replaced by the new pre-K-through-8th grade Eastman Leadership Academy. The new state-of-the-art campus was funded by about $48 million in lottery revenue.
Halifax County Schools Superintendent Eric Cunningham says the new building will solve a lot of problems. "Your roofs aren't going to leak anymore, so kids won't have to move their desk and put a little bucket down to catch the water," he said. "Those days are gone with this new building, and I'm very proud and grateful for it."
Replacing the two aging schools took so long because Halifax doesn’t have the local tax base to build schools on its own. It’s one of many rural counties that rely on the Needs-Based Public School Capital Fund, which typically funds about $400 million in construction projects each year.
Other proceeds from the lottery are divided up between school districts based on population. While that can help fund construction in larger districts, Nathan Maune with the N.C. Department of Public Instruction says it doesn’t add up to much in smaller districts.
"It's about $70 per student in round numbers, so if you've got 500 students, you're not getting very much money each year," said Maune, who serves as the director of the Office of School Facilities.
The Needs-Based Capital Fund was created nearly a decade ago and prioritizes projects in lower-wealth counties. Districts are more likely to win grant funding if they’re building a new school that consolidates several smaller ones, like the project in Halifax.
"The projects that tend to not score as well are going to be typically small renovation work, roof replacement, building systems — partial renovations," Maune said.
School districts applied for nearly $2 billion from the grant program during the latest funding cycle, so about 80% of those requests didn’t get funded.
The grant program’s budget varies from year to year based on lottery revenue, and that revenue has been under scrutiny from State Auditor Dave Boliek. Boliek's review found that while overall lottery revenue is increasing, its contributions to public education have been stagnant.
"North Carolinians have a reasonable expectation that if the Education Lottery’s ticket sales go up, money going toward our public schools would increase as well," Boliek said in a news release in December. "Over the last three years, total revenues have increased by a total of over $3 billion, while contributions to public education have been flat."
In a response to Boliek's report, N.C. Education Lottery officials said that their profit margins decreased in 2025, but they didn't dispute the auditor's findings or explain why education funding didn't increase.
Gov. Josh Stein wants to see other funding sources help support what he estimates is a $10 billion backlog of public school infrastructure needs.
Last year in his State of the State speech, he called on the legislature to borrow money for school construction, arguing that a $4 billion public school construction bond measure is needed because "we need safer, healthier, and more modern schools."
But lawmakers never took action on the proposed bond. Senate leader Phil Berger says he thinks local governments – not the state – should fund school construction.
"I just think that with all of the other things that the state has as its obligations, and the longstanding tradition that we've had, that but for the lottery money, public school construction is a local obligation — that that's something that we need to continue to adhere to," Berger said.
Stein's more recent funding request is more modest than the original bond proposal. His budget proposal this year included $136 million for school construction, much of it coming from the state's primary fund for government construction projects rather than from lottery revenue.
I-77 Tolls
Plans for toll lanes on Interstate 77 South may not be over. Charlotte-area leaders pulled support for the lanes two months ago, effectively ending the project. Leaders now want to have a re-vote, which could bring it back to life. This all comes down to millions of dollars that would have to be paid back. There will be one more vote ahead of the state budget’s imposed deadline. The Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization scheduled that vote for Sept. 23. That’s ahead of the Oct. 5 deadline. Any community opposed to the toll lane project, at that point, will have to team up to pay more than $60 million back to the state because that’s how much has been spent on the controversial project so far. Charlotte City Council voted, 6-5, to pull its support for the project. However, Councilman Ed Driggs, R-District 7, said there are talks behind the scenes about bringing it back. It’s unclear when Charlotte City Council will discuss this. The nonprofit Sustain Charlotte is urging city leaders to stand strong and “not be driven by political threats.”
Plate Readers
After a lengthy statewide pilot program, automatic license plate readers are here to stay in North Carolina. The newly passed state budget allows the North Carolina Department of Transportation to enter into agreements with the State Bureau of Investigation to, on state-owned land, place and use automatic license plate readers. The readers take photos of plates and translate the image to text to then compare with databases. The systems must be above ground, removable, and without combustible fuel, according to the budget. The placement of the license plate reader cannot “unreasonably interfere” with public utility facilities. The state has used license plate readers for the past three years under a pilot program run by the SBI. More than 100 cameras have been set up statewide, The News & Observer previously reported. The N&O asked the SBI if the program is no longer considered a pilot now that the budget bill is law. The agency provided a general statement. “The NC SBI is grateful for the trust the members of the North Carolina General Assembly have placed in this agency,” Chad Flowers, a spokesperson for the agency, said. “We will work diligently to comply with all legislation passed by the General Assembly.”