— Gov. Roy Cooper said this morning he will veto a hodgepodge environmental bill that tacked six figures worth of funding to study potentially toxic pollution in the Cape Fear River with the repeal of North Carolina's coastal ban on grocery store plastic bags and a number of other regulatory changes.

Cooper ticked off a string of complaints about the bill, noting that it doesn't include near the $2.6 million he requested to study GenX in the Cape Fear River and that none of the $435,000 legislators did approve would have gone to state agencies. The bill also contains buffer and landfill provisions that Cooper said would weaken protections.

The bill also takes down a long-standing target for many in the General Assembly's GOP majority: A 2009 law forbidding retailers in three coastal counties from giving customers single-use plastic bags, except to contain fresh fish, meat, poultry or produce.

Senate Republicans said Cooper was placing politics ahead of public safety with the veto, and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said he would push for an override.

“He is now on record for rejecting the only proposal that will actually help clean our drinking water in the lower Cape Fear region," said state Sen. Michael Lee, R-New Hanover, who represents areas that draw their water from the Cape Fear River.

The bill passed without veto-proof margins in the House and the Senate, but a number of Republicans were absent that day. A trio of GOP House members voted against the bill.

Cooper blasted the bill, saying in a release that, "when it comes to drinking water, there is no room for political posturing or hollow solutions." He noted legislative cuts to the state Department of Environmental Quality in recent years, saying the agency has lost 70 positions from its water quality department.

North Carolina has nine permit writers now for 220 facilities that discharge into state waters, the administration said, adding that South Carolina and Kentucky have nearly twice as many for far fewer facilities. Much of the funding Cooper requested would have gone to DEQ to allow normal regulatory work to continue apace while resources were tasked to the GenX study.

Speaker of the House Tim Moore said in a statement that it "defies belief that Gov. Cooper is still making the false claim that GenX contamination is related to recent state budgets, and more shocking that he would reject emergency funds intended to protect the citizens of the Cape Fear region to continue this irrelevant assertion."

GOP leaders have generally been critical of the administration's response to this issue, which didn't kick into gear until the Wilmington StarNews reported on pollution in the Cape Fear River coming from the Chemours plant in Bladen County. Legislators wanted to send money to the local water authority in Wilmington, as well as to scientists at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington studying GenX.

They said repeatedly that more funding would come later.

"Shame on Gov. Cooper for vetoing a local solution," Berger, R-Rockingham, said in a news release. He accused Cooper of vetoing the bill "because it did not achieve his preferred objective of growing a bureaucracy that has thus far failed to resolve this crisis."

"It defies belief that Gov. Cooper is still making the false claim that GenX contamination is related to recent state budgets and more shocking that he would reject emergency funds intended to protect the citizens of the Cape Fear region to continue this irrelevant assertion," House Speaker Tim Moore said in a statement.

Little is known about the health effects of GenX and other modern fluorinated chemicals due to a lack of study. GenX was developed, though, to replace a chemical in the same family, which has been tied to cancer. Chemours and DuPont, its predecessor, agreed to pay $335.4 million each to settle almost 4,000 lawsuits in Ohio and West Virginia involving the predecessor chemical.