One of these men took PFAS water contamination seriously. The other didn’t. For over a decade, the entire Cape Fear region has faced the issue of toxic PFAS chemicals in their water supply. Since 2017, when PFAS contamination was first publicly discovered in the drinking water supply for Wilmington and all of the Cape Fear river basin, the community has asked: how can this be stopped? No answer has ever come from the North Carolina state legislature. Over the last decade, our state lawmakers have done virtually nothing to stop PFAS. Our state legislature has never passed any limits whatsoever on what, or how much, toxic PFAS discharges polluters like Chemours can dump into the water supply. It’s not like bills to limit PFAS and crack down on polluters’ liability haven’t been proposed. Many have. In fact, there’s been a bill to do this proposed in almost every legislature for years back. 2019: HB 1109 ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2019/H1… 2021: HB 1095 ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2021/H1… 2023: HB 864 ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2023/H8… This year’s bill was HB 569. It was a bipartisan bill, with both Republican AND Democratic sponsors, to require PFAS polluters to pay for water cleanup, and to refund consumers for their higher costs due to PFAS contamination: ncleg.gov/BillLookUp/2025/H5… But once again, HB 569 was killed - this time in the State Senate. @MichaelLee4NC, the Republican Majority Leader in the State Senate, presides over a Republican supermajority. He’s a very powerful politician in Raleigh, second only to Phil Berger himself. Michael Lee is the kind of politician who can make bills pass - or kill them quietly. But not only has Michael Lee helped to kill any meaningful PFAS legislation, he’s actually worked to do the opposite - to protect polluters, and cripple North Carolina’s state environmental agencies from doing anything about it. After Michael Lee killed HB 569, he voted to pass another bill, HB 402, that specifically blocks the NC Department of Environmental Quality from imposing meaningful restrictions on polluters like Chemours. After Governor Josh Stein vetoed HB 402, Michael Lee then voted to override that veto - and pass it into law. They call holding polluters accountable “burdensome regulation.” You call it “PFAS water contamination.” When Attorney General @jeffjacksonnc forced Chemours into a settlement at court last month, he singlehandedly did more to crack down on PFAS pollution than North Carolina’s state legislature has done in more than a decade. AG Jackson’s settlement forces Chemours to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments throughout southeast North Carolina for PFAS water cleanup. Elections have real world consequences. That settlement wouldn’t have happened if Jeff Jackson hadn’t been elected in 2024. And if North Carolina had different leadership in its state legislature, PFAS water contamination might’ve been addressed years ago.