East Charlotte won’t be seeing any big-name stars from the movie business anytime soon: City Council voted yesterday against giving Studio Charlotte more time to finalize plans to turn the 80 acres that once housed Eastland Mall into movie studios.
In the latest “is Duke Energy trying to pollute our drinking water?” news, DENR officials say Duke pumped 61 million gallons of water laced with coal ash into the Cape Fear river at its retired Cape Fear coal plant. “Regulators discovered both ash ponds were several feet below their regular levels, during an inspection last week following the Dan River spill,” WFAE reports. “The pond level is supposed to be high enough that the heavy ash can sink to the bottom, and less polluted water is discharged into a tributary that flows into the Cape Fear River. But with water in the pond so low, [DENR] spokeswoman Susan Massengale says the state environmental agency is concerned about what’s discharging.”
Tourism officials and the Charlotte Bobcats want some money. They submitted a list of improvements to the city for Time Warner Cable Arena totaling $41.9 million. Its lease “calls for the city to make improvements to the building to keep it among the most modern in the NBA, to ensure the team can ‘maintain economic competitiveness and revenue potential.'”
This guy belongs in The Blotter: A Lincolnton man was arrested yesterday for pretending to be a podiatry student, persuading a woman to take off her shoes while shopping at Walmart, and then sucking her toes.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2014.
That “regulators” discovered the coal ash spill into the Dan River is a misleading statement that implies that the DENR was responsible for uncovering the problem. The Waterkeeper Alliance discovered the issue and documented it with aerial photographs. It was not the DENR but local activists that caught Duke pumping the coal ash into the river.