man and woman use a net in a river

On a rainy April morning, Ashley Gibbon kicked rocks that line the bottom of the Swannanoa River while Art Mandler used a net to catch any aquatic invertebrates she’d dislodged.

The two volunteers with the Stream Monitoring Information Exchange then carried the net to the bank, picked out the insects with large tweezers, and dropped them into ice trays—part of population surveys the group uses to measure the river’s health. 

The efforts of folks like Gibbon and Mandler have started to feel more mandatory than voluntary in recent years, as government water-monitoring jobs disappear or go unfilled. Between 2008 and 2018, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality lost 34 percent of its pollution-control funding and saw its staff reduced by a third. As of last year, around 14 percent of positions in the department were vacant.

Storms Reback reports on the citizen-science programs that are stepping up to fill the gap amid ongoing fights over budget and staffing at state agencies.

River Rescue

Gov. Roy Cooper keeps asking for more money to protect North Carolina’s rivers and lakes, and the General Assembly keeps saying no. Citizen scientists are taking up the slack.

“There’s still so much we’re not doing,” said Ann Marie Traylor, the executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Quality Institute, which was leads volunteer surveys. “The focus tends to be on these larger, more charismatic rivers, but there are a lot of headwater streams and tributaries to those that aren’t being monitored at all.” 

Have a news tip for our team? You can reach us at scoops@theassemblync.com.

A Good Day at NCPA

We recently learned that our reporters had an impressive run in this year’s North Carolina Press Association awards: 11 first-place awards and four second-place finishes.

For the second year in a row, The Assembly has won the Duke University/Green-Rossiter Award for Distinguished Newspaper Work in Higher Education Reporting.

Michael Hewlett won the Media and the Law Award of Excellence, sponsored by the NC Bar Association, for his coverage of the case of Charles McNeair. Hewlett and Jeffrey Billman also won the Henry Lee Weathers Freedom of Information Award for their coverage of transparency and press access in the juvenile court system, and along with Anne Blythe took home a beat news reporting award for our courts newsletter.

Billman, along with our colleagues at WBTV in Charlotte, won the investigative reporting award for last fall’s three-part series on the state child welfare system, “Best Interest of the Child.”

Other first-place winners:

What We’re Reading

But What About the Brain Worm? Third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear on North Carolina ballots this fall, but Cornel West will not, The Washington Post reports.

Big In Japan: Candymaker Morinaga has announced plans to open a second factory in North Carolina. As Axios Raleigh points out, it’s one of several Japanese companies that have located here in the last decade, bringing a projected 4,379 new jobs.

DEI Compliance: WUNC surveyed the state’s 16 public universities about what they are doing to comply with the Board of Governors’ recent ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Our Recent Stories

How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics 

An upstart effort to get more working-class people to run for political office takes root in Ashe and Alamance counties.

Shibumi Has Taken Over N.C. Beaches. Next, The World.

The ubiquitous sun shade is on a quest for coastal domination—and isn’t afraid to fight other companies for it.

Thin Blue Line

A police shooting in Cherokee County raises questions about who decides whether a legal boundary has been crossed.

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