NEWS
by Jake Frankel
jfrankel@mountainx.com
251-1333, ext. 115
Merrill drops election lawsuit, will run for Buncombe Commissioner again next year Eight months after last year’s election, Republican Christina Kelley G. Merrill is dropping a lawsuit challenging results that showed her just 18 votes shy of winning a seat on the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners. The Fairview resident says she’ll mount a campaign for a seat on the board next year. An unofficial tally of results on election night, Nov. 6, 2012, showed Merrill with a lead, but it was erased in subsequent tallies when a number of provisional ballots cast by residents of the left-leaning Warren Wilson
NEWS
by Margaret Williams
College were added. On Nov. 28, the Buncombe County Board of Elections voted 2-1 along party lines to deny Merrill’s request to discount the ballots of Warren Wilson residents from the District 2 race, and a subsequent Dec. 7 hand re-count of District 2 ballots showed Ellen Frost with a 18-vote win, giving Democrats a 4-3 majority of the board’s seats. A week later, the bipartisan North Carolina Board of Elections voted unanimously to dismiss Merrill’s charges that local elections officials violated any laws in counting the ballots of Warren Wilson students.
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However, even as the election results were subsequently certified and the board has proceeded with carrying out county business, Merrill had said she’d continue fighting the outcome in court — until now. “In the face of ever increasing county spending, higher property taxes and corporate welfare, I will now focus my efforts on running for County Commissioner in 2014,” she wrote in a press release. Frost, the only incumbent up for reelection in District 2 next year, hasn’t announced whether she plans to seek another term. X
251-1333, ext. 152
@mvwilliams
Residents win appeal in CTS case The U.S. Fourth Circuit of Appeals has ruled in favor of 23 local citizens pressing to get electronics manufacturer CTS Corp. to clean up the contaminated site on Mills Gap Road in south Asheville and compensate affected homeowners. Their case could now go to trial or move up to the U.S. Supreme Court, says Tate MacQueen, a Buncombe resident instrumental in the push to get the property declared a federal Superfund site in 2011. About three years ago, Mills Gap residents filed a complaint against CTS, which operated an electroplating plant on the site for several decades and is blamed for contaminating soil, ground-water supplies and streams with such known carcinogens as trichloroethylene (the same chemical involved in a contamination case at Marine base Camp LeJeune). A lower court ruled against the residents, saying it had been more than 10 years since the
contamination occurred and was discovered, MacQueen explains. CTS closed the plant in 1986. Contamination was reported and documented not long afterward, but no substantial cleanup has been done to date. It wasn’t until 2009 that two of the property owners in the suit — David Bradley and Renee Richardson — learned that their well water also showed unsafe levels of TCE and other toxins linked to company disposal practices at the facility (see “Off Target,” July 13, 2010, Xpress). Many of their neighbors joined in the suit, which failed at the district level. The Appeals Court overturned that decision, voting 2-1 in the residents’ favor. Although many affected residents are now on municipal water, they continue to face serious health problems ,and some feel that they can’t sell their homes and property, says MacQueen, who has been involved in the case since learning about it after a July 2007
Xpress investigation (see “Fail Safe?”). Wells in the schoolteacher’s own neighborhood, less than a mile from the site, have tested positive for TCE in recent years. MacQueen, who has been a vocal critic of local, state and federal agencies involved in the case, says, “It’s always been about [uncovering] the truth about what CTS did with its waste and the impacts of that toxic waste.” Protecting Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER) — a local group also involved in the fight against CTS — released a statement on the decision, emphasizing, “Contaminants continue to migrate from the site, [and we believe] the court’s decision to be of utmost import in holding CTS Corp. accountable for its contamination. ... POWER sincerely hopes that this decision will lead to much higher degrees of corporate accountability when it comes to toxic contamination.” X
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