CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Duke Energy was in a bind.

North Carolina regulators had for years allowed the nation's largest power company to pollute the ground near its plants without penalty. But in early 2013, a coalition of environmental groups sued to force Duke to clean up nearly three dozen leaky coal ash dumps spread across the state.

So last summer, Duke Energy turned to North Carolina lawmakers for help.

Documents and interviews collected by The Associated Press show how Duke's lobbyists prodded Republican legislators to tuck a 330-word provision in a regulatory reform bill running nearly 60 single-spaced pages. Though the bill never once mentions coal ash, the change allowed Duke to avoid any costly cleanup of contaminated groundwater leaching from its unlined dumps toward rivers, lakes and the drinking wells of nearby homeowners.

Passed overwhelmingly by the GOP-controlled legislature, the bill was signed into law by Gov. Pat McCrory, a pro-business Republican who worked at Duke for 28 years.

"For decades, Democrats have stifled small businesses and job creators with undue bureaucratic burden and red tape," McCrory said at the time. "This common-sense legislation cuts government red tape, axes overly burdensome regulations, and puts job creation first here in North Carolina."

Environmentalists saw the legislation, and its little-noticed provision benefiting Duke, differently.

"This sweeping change gutted North Carolina's groundwater law," recounts D.J. Gerken, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

The level of coordination between Duke and North Carolina's lawmakers and regulators had long been of concern to environmentalists. But when a Duke dump ruptured on Feb. 2 — spewing enough coal ash to coat 70 miles of the Dan River with toxic sludge — the issue took on new urgency.

Federal prosecutors have launched a criminal investigation into the spill, issuing at least 23 grand jury subpoenas to Duke executives and state officials.

The first batch of subpoenas were issued the day after an AP story raised questions about whether North Carolina regulators had helped shield Duke from a coalition of environmental groups that wanted to sue under the U.S. Clean Water Act to force the company to clean up its coal ash pollution.

Still, regulators alone could not protect the company from its huge liability if the environmental groups persevered in court. So Duke officials lobbied — successfully — to change state law, itself.

Their vehicle was the Regulatory Reform Act. And they took aim at a provision that had been on the books for decades, requiring Duke to halt the source of contamination if its subterranean plumes of pollution crept more than 500 feet from its ash dumps.

North Carolina's 14 coal-fired plants have 33 waste pits. Each is surrounded by a "compliance boundary," with monitoring wells tracking the spread of underground pollution.

A compliance boundary is like an early warning system. If groundwater contamination inside the line exceeds state environmental standards, a company is supposed to take corrective action. The goal is to stop the spread of pollution to neighboring properties, as well as rivers and streams.

But that wasn't happening. Instead of enforcing the limit, state officials were letting Duke continue to pollute groundwater inside its compliance boundaries around old ash pits without taking any action to stop the contamination. At some plants, regulators even let Duke redraw its compliance boundaries when it looked like contamination might cross the line — a stalling tactic to avoid the cost of cleanup.

Emails show close ties between Duke, NC regulatorsPlay video

Data collected from Duke's own monitoring wells showed contamination beyond that 500-foot limit at several of its properties, with high levels of arsenic, selenium, lead and other poisonous contaminants found in coal ash.

After examining results from test wells at the ash sites, the Southern Environmental Law Center found that many exceeded state water-quality standards. Lawyers believed state officials were interpreting regulations to allow the company to profit rather than protect public health and the environment.

On behalf of Cape Fear River Watch, the Sierra Club, Waterkeeper Alliance and the Western North Carolina Alliance, the law center asked the state Environmental Management Commission to instruct the state to "interpret the groundwater protection rules as they were written."

The environmental groups wanted the commission to order regulators to force coal-ash operators to take immediate corrective action when toxic chemicals in groundwater exceeded state water quality standards at or beyond the compliance boundary.

The commission ruled against them, so the environmental groups appealed in state court.

That's when Duke's lobbyists began reaching out to lawmakers.

George Everett, the director of environmental and legislative affairs for Duke, said the company wanted the law changed to "be consistent with the rules."

"We advocated for the same position that the agency has used for 30 years," he told The AP.

Republicans took control of North Carolina's legislature in 2010 for the first time since Reconstruction and cemented full control of state government with the inauguration of McCrory as governor last year. That put them in prime position to implement an ardently pro-business, anti-regulation platform.

In talks with conservative legislators, Duke's lobbyists framed its problem as a property rights issue.

Rep. Chuck McGrady, one of only two Republican members of the state House to vote against the final version of the bill, recalls talking with Duke's lobbyists about the change in the groundwater contamination rules.

"They said it was a fairness issue, that they shouldn't be held responsible for the migration of pollution on their own site, that whatever costs they would need to bear should be in direct relationship of the migration of that pollution off their sites," said McGrady, whose Henderson County district borders some of Duke's dumps

Working closely with lawmakers, the lobbyists helped craft a provision to conform to the way state regulators had been interpreting the law. The change would allow Duke to contaminate groundwater until it crossed onto a neighbor's property.

Duke Energy and its executives have donated millions in recent years to both Republicans and Democrats. Though 2013 was not an election year, records show the company continued to give generously as its lobbyists sought to protect its ash pits.

A political action committee underwritten by Duke employees sent another $95,000 to Republican legislators and groups that support their campaigns — nearly five times the amount provided to North Carolina's Democratic legislators over the same time period

Rep. Tim D. Moffitt, an Asheville Republican who chairs the House Regulatory Reform Committee that crafted the bill, got a $4,000 check, the maximum contribution allowed by state law. Asked this month how Duke's provision was inserted, Moffitt said he had no idea.

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FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2014 file photo, Amy Adams, North Carolina campaign coordinator w …

Other GOP leaders interviewed by the AP also said they had no knowledge about who inserted the change.

Duke spokesman Thomas Williams said the company doesn't discuss its lobbying activities for specific legislation.

"Our PAC has supported both parties over the years, some years the Democrats receive more than the Republicans and vice versa," he said.

McCrory spokesman Josh Ellis insisted that the change in the law didn't change anything at all.

He's right: The compliance boundaries are still in the same place, but only because the state environmental agency has not yet drafted new rules to comply with the new law, as required.

"They are pretending that the law had nothing to say about the compliance boundary moving," said Gerken, the environmental lawyer. "They're wrong. It directed DENR to change the rules to be consistent with the law."

He said the provision dramatically altered the way the state is supposed to monitor groundwater violations, including eliminating a mandate to clean up contamination inside the compliance boundary.

"The reason for the compliance boundary is there is no magic switch you can flip to stop groundwater from migrating. So once it reaches the property line it is going to cross the property line," he said.

The effect of the change in the law played out earlier this month in a North Carolina courtroom.

In a March 6 ruling, Wake County Superior Court Judge Paul Ridgeway found that last year's lawsuit filed by environmentalists seeking to require the state to enforce the 500-foot contamination limit is now moot — citing the Regulatory Reform Act that became law in August.

Another section of the new law gave the state's blessing to another way for Duke to avoid liability for pollution: It could buy up residential properties abutting its leaky dumps.

Even before the new law passed, this gambit already had been put into practice.

Duke bought land near the Lee Steam Electric Station along the Neuse River in 2012 to extend the compliance boundary to the east, said Susan Massengale of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources. And the company tried to buy neighboring land at its Cliffside Steam Station along the Broad River.

Records show that Progress Energy, which was acquired by Duke in a 2012 mega-merger, bought five acres adjacent to its coal-fired power plant near Asheville for about $1.1 million — a price tag far below what it would have cost to clean out its leaking coal ash pits.

"Note that additional property has been purchased which results in a slight shift of the compliance boundary," plant manager Garry Whisnant wrote to state regulators.

As a result, groundwater monitoring wells in the old compliance boundary would no longer be used, Whisnant said. Instead, the company wanted to build two wells on the new property.

The land is in the Lake Julian Trails community, a cluster of townhomes downhill from an ash pit.

"It was just part of the unfinished development that had not had any homes on it yet," said Linnea Dallman, former president of the Lake Julian Homeowners Association.

At first, residents weren't sure why the power company wanted the property. But they became suspicious when workers put up a black fence to seal off the land and posted no-trespassing signs.

Janet Casperson, the mother of a 2-month-old girl, said she's worried. She and her husband moved in the house in February, 2011, getting a really good deal on a new townhouse along a quiet cul de sac. They knew about the ash dump when they moved in, but they weren't that concerned — until recently.

Over the last year, Casperson watched workers collect soil samples from her neighborhood. There's often activity on Duke's fenced-off land.

For the most part, the community has been kept in the dark, she said.

"Do they think that we're stupid? That we're not going to figure out what's going on?" she said.

Massengale said the addition of land does not automatically change the compliance boundary: "Moving the compliance boundary would require a permit modification at which point staff would have to confirm the change."

Gerken said the Lake Julian Trails is an example of how Duke is manipulating the system, calling it a "shell game." He said the Asheville ash dump has serious problems with toxic groundwater contamination. But instead of cleaning it up, the company has calculated it is cheaper just to buy more land to pollute.

"The state is supposed to require Duke to come in and take action to stop contaminating groundwater," he said. "Rather than take action when contamination hit that line, Duke had a better idea. They bought the neighboring property, moved the line further out, started over again, sampling at a new well, trying to avoid taking the action we contend they should have taken years ago."

___

Biesecker reported from Raleigh. Follow him at Twitter.com/mbieseck

Follow AP correspondent Mitch Weiss at Twitter.com/mitchsweiss

When a power company faced pressure to clean up groundwater near its plants, its lobbyists sprang into action.
'Shell game'

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Denouncing Russia's actions in Crimea as nothing more than a "land grab," Vice President Joe Biden warned Russia on Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe will impose further sanctions as Moscow moved to annex part of Ukraine.

With few good options, the United States was scrambling for ways to show it won't stand idly by as Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty for the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea to join Russia. So far, Putin has been undeterred by sanctions and visa bans levied by the U.S. and the European Union, and there's no U.S. appetite for military intervention.

"Russia has offered a variety of arguments to justify what is nothing more than a land grab, including what he said today," Biden said in Poland, which shares a border with both Russia and Ukraine. "But the world has seen through Russia's actions and has rejected the flawed logic behind those actions."

Biden arrived early Tuesday in a region on edge over Russia's nascent aggression in Crimea. Amid eerie echoes of the Cold War, U.S. allies including Poland have raised concerns that they could be next should the global community be unable to persuade Putin to back down.

The first round of sanctions having failed, Biden promised more would be coming, as he declared that Russia's actions constituted a blatant violation of international law.

In London, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the U.K. was suspending military cooperation with Russia in light of the crisis over Ukraine. He said the U.K. is suspending military export licenses to Russia, has canceled naval exercises and suspended a proposed Royal Navy ship visit to Russia.

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U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, left, and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk look at each others durin …

The White House, meanwhile, announced it was inviting the leaders of the G-7 group of nations to a meeting in Europe next week to discuss further action.

Biden said virtually the entire world rejects the referendum in Crimea on Sunday that cleared the way for Russia to absorb it.

"It's a simple fact that Russia's political and economic isolation will only increase if it continues down this dark path," Biden said.

For his part, Putin seemed to shrug off the tough talk from the West, describing Russia's move to add Crimea to its map as correcting past injustices. In an emotional, live speech from the Kremlin, he said that "in people's hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia."

Russia's move in clear defiance of its neighbors and the U.S. ups the pressure on Biden to convince its NATO allies that the U.S. won't roll over. After meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Biden headed to the Poland's presidential palace to consult with President Bronislaw Komorowski.

In sessions Tuesday in the Polish capital and later in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, Biden was to discuss the crisis with the leaders of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia — three Baltic nations that are deeply concerned about what Russia's military intervention in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula might portend for the region.

All four countries share borders with Russia; Poland also borders Ukraine.

Biden's visit to the region is part of a broader U.S. campaign to send a clear signal to Putin following Sunday's referendum in Crimea, which the U.S. has dismissed as illegal. In coordination with Europe, the Obama administration has frozen the U.S. assets of nearly a dozen Russian and Ukrainian officials. But Putin appears to have reacted with a shrug, and Obama's critics contend the U.S. steps thus far amount to a slap on the wrist.

The vice president slams Russia's actions toward Ukraine, calling them a blatant violation of international law.
'Flawed logic'

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — At 7 in the morning, they are already lined up — poultry plant workers, housekeepers, discount store clerks — to ask for help paying their heating bills or feeding their families.

And once Metropolitan Ministries opens at 8 a.m., these workers fill the charity’s 40 chairs, with a bawling infant adding to the commotion. From pockets and handbags they pull out utility bills or rent statements and hand them over to caseworkers, who often write checks — $80, $110, $150 — to patch over gaps in meeting this month’s expenses or filling the gas tank to get to work.

Just off her 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift, Erika McCurdy needed help last month with her electricity and heating bill, which jumped to $280 in January from the usual $120 — a result of one of the coldest winters in memory. A nurse’s aide at an assisted living facility, Ms. McCurdy said there were many weeks when she couldn’t make ends meet raising her 19-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter.

“There’s just no way, making $9 an hour as a single parent with two children, that I can live without assistance,” said Ms. McCurdy, 40, a strong-voiced, solidly built Chattanooga native.

She was so financially stretched, she said, that she and her daughter often sneaked into her son’s high school football games free during halftime because she couldn’t afford the $6 tickets. (She proudly noted that her son, Charles, had made the All State football team.) As for her daughter Jer’Maya, who mimics Beyoncé’s every move on her mother’s iPhone, Ms. McCurdy said, “She’d love to take ballet and piano lessons, but there’s no way I can afford that.”

Having worked as a nurse’s aide for 15 years, Ms. McCurdy has been among the nearly 25 million workers in the United States who make less than $10.10 an hour — the amount to which President Obama supports increasing the minimum wage. Of those workers, 3.5 million make the $7.25 federal minimum wage or less.

And like many of them, Ms. McCurdy hasn’t been able to rely on steady full-time hours — she has often been assigned just 20 hours a week. Even if she worked full time year-round, her $9 hourly wage would put her below the poverty threshold of $19,530 for a family of three.

Climbing above the poverty line has become more daunting in recent years, as the composition of the nation’s low-wage work force has been transformed by the Great Recession, shifting demographics and other factors. More than half of those who make $9 or less an hour are 25 or older, while the proportion who are teenagers has declined to just 17 percent from 28 percent in 2000, after adjusting for inflation, according to Janelle Jones and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research.

Today’s low-wage workers are also more educated, with 41 percent having at least some college, up from 29 percent in 2000. “Minimum-wage and low-wage workers are older and more educated than 10 or 20 years ago, yet they’re making wages below where they were 10 or 20 years ago after inflation,” said Mr. Schmitt, senior economist at the research center. “If you look back several decades, workers near the minimum wage were more likely to be teenagers — that’s the stereotype people had. It’s definitely not accurate anymore.”

In Chattanooga, the prevalence of low-wage jobs has contributed to the high poverty rate: 27 percent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line, compared with 15 percent nationwide. Women head about two-thirds of the city’s poor households, and 42 percent of its children are poor, nearly double the rate statewide.

“The face of poverty in this community is women, especially women of color,” said Valerie L. Radu, a professor of social work at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga.

This city was not always a magnet for low-wage jobs. For much of the last century, the city, which hugs the Tennessee River, was a manufacturing hub with dozens of apparel factories, textile mills and metal foundries.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, almost all the factories and foundries were shuttered, and with them disappeared thousands of manufacturing jobs that had once lifted workers, even ones without high school degrees, into the middle class or to the cusp of it. In their place have come thousands of service-sector jobs: at the aquarium and Imax theater built to lure tourists and at hotels, nursing homes, big-box stores, brew pubs, fast-food restaurants, beauty salons and hospitals.

Discount stores dot the landscape, including a Family Dollar downtown near the upscale Bluewater Grille, reflecting how much American cities have experienced a hollowing-out of the middle class.

“Chattanooga has a twofold problem: the low level of educational attainment and the traditional jobs that these people move into have largely disappeared,” said Matthew N. Murray, an economist at the University of Tennessee. Just 23 percent of Tennessee adults have a bachelor’s degree.

JeraLee Kincaid, 23, is an $8.50-an-hour cashier who works at the checkout booth at a parking garage next to the Marriott Courtyard hotel downtown. A solid student in high school, Ms. Kincaid, who lives with her mother, planned to study computer programming in college, but instead her family decided that she needed to help pay the medical bills of a 5-year-old niece who has leukemia.

Low-wage Workers Struggle to Join Middle ClassPlay video

“She can’t eat, talk or walk by herself,” said Ms. Kincaid. She says she feels stuck, but also grateful that her boss is trying to help find her a scholarship to attend college.

When Volkswagen opened a $1 billion assembly plant in 2011, 80,000 people applied for 2,000 jobs paying an average of $19.50 an hour. Many low-wage workers, like Ms. McCurdy — a high school dropout who later obtained her high school equivalency diploma — would have loved to work there, but they faced difficulty mastering the math tests given for jobs that involve advanced machinery.

“We understand that more individuals have to get some kind of higher education degree or certificate to have a chance in this world,” said Chattanooga’s mayor, Andy Berke. “We don’t want the South to be a place where businesses go to find low-wage, low-education jobs. That’s a long-term problem that midsized cities in the South face.”

Here as well as elsewhere, a college degree cannot guarantee a good job.

Landon Howard graduated from the University of Tennessee campus here four years ago with a bachelor’s degree in social work, but has been unable to find a job in that field. Instead he is a prep cook at the trendy Tupelo Honey Cafe. Often scheduled for just 15 to 20 hours a week at $9.50 an hour, he usually takes home less than $200 a week.

“I’ve had to move back in with my parents,” Mr. Howard said. His most urgent concern is his lack of dental insurance. “One of my teeth is cracked,” he said. “There’s a big gaping hole. I don’t know if I’m going to lose it.”

Ms. McCurdy, as a parent in a modest income bracket, would not usually be eligible for the state’s Medicaid program, although her children would, but she was accepted because of a heart condition requiring costly medications.

Her family has had to make many sacrifices since she was laid off in 2012 from her job as a full-time nurse’s assistant in the emergency room of Memorial Hospital.

Her fall to $9 an hour at the assisted living facility from $13.75 at the hospital forced her to give up a 2,000-square-foot home in Harrison, a local suburb, “which is beautiful, and you have better schools,” she said.

“It was a good life,” she added. “You didn’t have to worry about violence or anyone breaking in.”

After being laid off, “I realized I couldn’t afford to stay in a house where the rent was $625 a month,” she said. So she found a $400-a-month, 1,100-square foot house in Brainerd, known for its gangs and violence. “I stay in at night,” she said. “I put bars on the windows.”

The new house has two modest bedrooms, a largely unfurnished living room, a bathroom and a small shotgun kitchen “where I got to move the table when my son gets up from dinner,” she said. “Imagine being in a two-bedroom place with a 6-2, 280-pound boy and a little girl. Me and my little girl share a room.”

They also share a bed, but Jer’Maya keeps her dolls, books and clothes in Charles’s room, among his footballs and athletic gear. Ms. McCurdy receives $400 a month in food stamps. Without it, she said, “we wouldn’t be eating.”

Still, Ms. McCurdy worries about her children’s future.

“I have a son that’s graduating in May,” she said. “He’s looking at college. My heart is pounding 99 miles per hour. If he goes on full scholarship, I’ll still need to support him — how to pay his cellphone bill, how to pay for transportation and food during vacations.”

Her February utility bill just arrived and it stunned her: $320. She may again turn to Metropolitan Ministries for help, although she says she hopes the $3,000 or so she expects to receive from the earned-income tax credit will help her pay that bill — and also buy a new living room couch.

Rebecca Whelchel says she has seen big changes in the clientele since she became the executive director of Metropolitan Ministries eight years ago.

“It used to be that folks came in with a single issue — it was like, ‘I have to buy a new tire because my tire blew out,’ or, ‘I’m short on my electrical bill,’ ” Ms. Whelchel said. “Now they come in with a rubber band around a bunch of bills and problems. Everything is wrong. Everything is tangled with everything else.”

At age 34, Nick Mason earns $9 an hour as an assistant manager for a Domino’s, overseeing a crew of six. “I don’t think $9 is fair — I’ve been working in the pizza business for 19 years, since I was 15,” he said.

He attended the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, studying to become a registered nurse, but he dropped out as a sophomore when his marriage fell apart. He returned to work full time, and he and his children moved in with his parents in the suburb of Hixson.

“I just wish we could have our home, but I can’t afford to,” said Mr. Mason, father of 7-year-old Halle and 5-year-old Eli. “That’s what the kids keep asking for.”

“We’ve had to sacrifice a lot of things,” he continued. “I’d love nothing more than to give them what they deserve. As a single father, it’s impossible. I put my kids in karate about a year ago. They loved it, but I got to the point where it was a choice between paying for a cellphone or karate, and as a manager, I need a cellphone for people to keep in touch with me.”

Mr. Mason has heard the criticisms: Stop complaining about your pay; just go back to school and that way you’ll find a better-paying job.

“I would love to go back to school,” he said. “It’s easy for people to say that because they haven’t been in my shoes. I’m already busy every minute of the day. I already don’t get to see my kids enough. I doubt I’ll be able to afford school, and I don’t know where I would find the time.”

His big hope is to be promoted to run a Domino’s, which might mean earning $15 an hour.

Ms. McCurdy, who applied for two dozen jobs this winter, delivered good news with a big smile. She was offered a job as a full-time nurse’s aide on the transition medical floor at Erlanger Health System, a hospital.

“They’re paying me $10.64,” she said, an improvement over the $9 an hour she had been earning. “That gives me a little room to breathe.”

Despite full-time jobs, low-wage workers fear falling behind on bills and risk losing basic utilities.

There’s just no way'