The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources squandered nearly $700,000 this year buying environmental restoration from a company that had already been paid for the same work by another state agency nine years earlier, according to a state legislative review released today.
The state legislature's Program Evaluation Division also found that the state's losses could continue. The environmental agency has certified that the company can sell more acreage for environmental restoration that also had previously been bought by the N.C. Department of Transportation, Dan Kane reports.
"Decisions related to this controversy resulted in actual and potential future losses to the environmental integrity of the Neuse River basin," said the report.
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The Neuse River flows through Wake County and is a drinking water source for many downstream communities. It is considered one of the nation's most environmentally endangered rivers, and state and federal rules require developers and road builders to mitigate any harm they cause to the river and its tributaries to protect its water quality.
Roads and other development can't move forward unless that mitigation is in place. Typically, it means purchasing "credits" that represent restored rivers and wetlands elsewhere within the basin to make up for what is being destroyed.
The state Transportation Department is one of the biggest customers for mitigation, and in 2000 it paid EBX, a Maryland company, $7 million in credits to restore and preserve streams and wetlands on eight sites within the river basin.
Last year, EBX proposed selling some of those sites again to the environmental agency, this time under two other programs that mitigate pollution runoff. The environmental agency paid $911,000 for the work.
But the company was resubmitting the same sites that the transportation department had largely used to make up for wetland destruction. The report found some of the acreage — worth $212,000 — had not been bought by the DOT and therefore was not sold twice for mitigation.
Senate leader Marc Basnight, a Manteo Democrat, said through a spokesman that the environmental agency now admits it made a mistake. Basnight ordered the review after The News & Observer reported the EBX payment last week.
"It was an honest mistake with no intention of wrong doing," said Basnight's spokesman, Schorr Johnson. "It will not happen again."
The report, however, notes that a memo from the environmental agency's assistant secretary, Robin Smith, claims the EBX sites "did not impose additional costs on taxpayers."
"These claims are at odds with Program Evaluation Division findings, which are based on information provided by DENR itself," the report said.
The environmental agency said it has imposed a moratorium on purchasing credits from previously used sites until new rules can be devised to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
