CJ editor Rick Henderson —- who’s dominated coverage of the Alcoa-Yadkin River Trust story, makes an appearance in this Winston-Salem Journal write-up as the hearing to renew Alcoa’s dam permit gets underway:
Alcoa’s backers say the state’s plan amounts to a government takeover of a private business.
Rick Henderson, the managing editor of the Carolina Journal, a publication of the John Locke Foundation, said one advantage of having a business operate the dams is that it can be fined or penalized if it runs afoul of water-quality issues.
“If the state takes charge of those facilities then the taxpayers become responsible for that sort of thing,” Henderson said.
With that in mind, River Keeper’s Dean Naujoks sums up the case:
“It gets down to ‘Did the state use the full scope of its authority in protecting the water quality of the Yadkin River and protecting the public health?’ And we think we have a very strong argument to say, ‘No, they did not,’” Naujoks said.
In other words, the state didn’t do its job, so let’s turn the dams over to……. the state.
There’s lot of that logic going around these days.
