FRANK HOLLEMAN

Guest Columnist

In a recent opinion piece, the Columbia trade associations representing the state’s largest polluters – through their paid staff – recently tried to justify their efforts to lobby the Legislature to take away the citizens’ right to protect our communities and clean water from illegal toxic pollution. These polluter associations and their well-paid lobbyists are trying to push through the Polluter Amnesty Bill, a bill that would wipe out the ability of local communities to stop illegal pollution from destroying their water supplies and economies. These associations want us to leave the fates of our communities solely in the hands of state bureaucrats.

Take, for example, Duke Energy. Duke Energy’s operating companies in the Carolinas, by their own confessions, have repeatedly committed environmental crimes. Last year, they pleaded guilty 18 times to nine coal ash pollution crimes in North Carolina – including crimes that led to the catastrophic Dan River spill. Duke Energy’s companies are currently on criminal probation, with their activities overseen by a court-appointed monitor. Duke Energy also had been violating South Carolina’s Pollution Control Act for years at its Lee facility on the Saluda River on the Greenville-Anderson county line and at its Robinson facility in Darlington by polluting ground water and rivers because it stored millions of tons of coal ash – containing arsenic – in unlined pits next to our waterways. And just last year, Duke Energy proposed to tear up a broad stretch of South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and rural Piedmont by building an entirely unnecessary – but very profitable – power line and substation.

In all these instances and for years, the state agencies did not protect the public. Duke Energy was forced to excavate coal ash from its Lee and Robinson leaking pits because citizen groups publicized the problem and made clear they would use their rights under the Pollution Control Act to enforce the law. No state agency stepped forward to protect Greenville and Spartanburg counties from Duke Energy’s threat to rip apart the mountains and Piedmont – the citizens backed down Duke Energy.

The pattern has repeated itself across the state. In Conway, Santee Cooper stored hundreds of thousands of tons of coal ash in a swamp in unlined pits right on the Waccamaw River. DHEC had told Santee Cooper in writing that it was violating the law, yet state agencies did nothing to force Santee Cooper to clean up its coal ash. When citizens enforced the Pollution Control Act, Santee Cooper agreed to remove its ash and – to its credit –agreed to remove all coal ash from all its unlined waterfront pits. The same thing happened with SCE&G in Columbia. Only when citizens enforced the Pollution Control Act did SCE&G bind itself to remove its coal ash from arsenic-leaking pits just above Congaree National Park.

Here are the simple facts. The big polluters, including the utilities, are the most powerful political force in Columbia. They spend a fortune on lobbyists, trade associations, political contributions and lawyers to influence the Legislature. The Legislature appropriates the money for the budgets and jobs of the regulators who are supposed to be enforcing the law against these same polluters. The citizens of South Carolina cannot count on state bureaucracies to always stand up to the most powerful forces in state politics. That is why the Pollution Control Act provides that citizens can enforce the law when the bureaucracies will not.

No citizen of South Carolina is asking the legislature to take away the rights of communities to protect themselves. The Polluter Amnesty Act is purely a creation of the lobbyists for the big polluters. Make no mistake – the big polluters and their paid spokesmen are the special interests, and they want to take away your rights so that they do not have to clean up their toxic illegal pollution. Our state, our communities, and our clean water deserve better.

Frank Holleman and his family live in Greenville. He is a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center and has worked with citizen groups enforcing the Pollution Control Act against toxic pollution.