NC State Audit: 78% of Pre-1983 Landfill Sites Never Investigated for Contamination

A Backlog Eight Decades Deep

North Carolina's Office of the State Auditor published a performance audit on July 13, 2026, examining a state program tasked with finding and cleaning up landfills that operated before the state's modern waste rules took effect ^[1][2]. The Department of Environmental Quality created the Pre-Regulatory Landfill Program in 2007, housed in its Division of Waste Management, to identify, assess, and remediate sites that took in trash before January 1, 1983 ^[1][2]. Nearly two decades later, the audit found the program has identified 688 such sites across the state, but has never investigated 534 of them — about 78% ^[1][3].

That gap matters because it is a gap in knowledge, not just paperwork. The state does not yet know whether the majority of these old dumps are leaking contamination into the ground, the air, or the water nearby ^[1][2]. And proximity raises the stakes: more than 80% of the identified sites sit within 1,000 feet of homes, schools, daycares, churches, or drinking-water wells ^[1][4]. Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican elected in 2024, led the review of a program that predates his tenure and operates under DEQ, an agency that answers to Governor Josh Stein ^[1][2].

What Nobody Disputes

The numbers themselves are not in contention. Auditors put the average cost of investigating and remediating a single site at roughly $1.9 million, which means clearing the full backlog of 534 sites would cost close to $1 billion ^[1][2]. At the program's current pace — about five to six sites fully remediated per year — that backlog would take approximately 99 years to clear ^[1][3].

The program runs largely on a $2-per-ton tax on waste dropped at permitted landfills statewide, with half of that revenue flowing into the Inactive Hazardous Sites Cleanup Fund ^[2][3]. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2025, the program took in $12.7 million and spent $14.5 million ^[2][3]. Auditors also noted that about 78% of the 688 identified sites sit on privately owned land, a fact both the audit and DEQ cite as a real constraint on the state's ability to act ^[1][3]. Where investigations have happened — 97 sites so far — the results have not been reassuring: methane above the lower explosive limit turned up at 23 of them, and the program has secured 370 acres of waste, sampled 1,642 water-supply wells, and provided alternate water to 30 homes ^[2][4]. Notably, DEQ agreed with all of the audit's findings and recommendations, a rare instance of an audited agency not contesting the conclusions leveled against it ^[3][5].

The Math Underneath the Headline

Strip away the framing and the story is a collision between mission and resources. The auditor's office exists to measure agencies against their own stated goals, and measured that way, a program that has examined only 22% of the sites it was created to investigate looks like a stark shortfall regardless of what caused it ^[1]. But DEQ's ability to act is genuinely capped: on roughly $12 million to $14 million a year, the agency can only fully remediate a handful of sites annually, and it cannot legally enter most of the remaining sites without the property owner's consent ^[2][3].

That legal ceiling is where a real, unresolved tension lives. Because most of the identified dumps sit on private land, meaningfully speeding up the program likely requires either substantially more funding, new state authority to enter private property — potentially under "imminent hazard" provisions — or both ^[1][3]. That is not simply a matter of political will; it is a property-rights question with no easy resolution, since expanding the state's power to enter private land carries its own tradeoffs independent of how urgently the cleanup is needed ^[1][3].

How Each Side Frames the Gap

The state auditor's office frames the finding as a matter of basic accountability: a taxpayer-funded program has left the overwhelming majority of known hazardous sites unexamined, and the public cannot be told whether the families living near them are safe ^[1][2]. For Boliek's office, the value of the audit lies in exercising its watchdog role and pushing DEQ toward corrective action, though the fact that the program predates both the current auditor and the current governor — and that DEQ did not fight the findings — limits how much this can be read as a partisan clash ^[1][2][3].

DEQ's position, filtered through its concurrence with the audit, is that the backlog reflects real legal and financial limits rather than neglect: most sites sit on private land the state cannot freely enter, and the funding available covers only a fraction of what full remediation would require ^[2][3]. The agency says it is already working on prioritizing sites, engaging property owners, seeking additional funding, and developing policies to improve property access ^[3][5]. Agreeing with the audit, rather than disputing it, positions DEQ to request more resources from lawmakers instead of defending its record.

For residents living near these sites — including communities near the Buxton Dump on the Outer Banks, which the audit ranked among the state's highest-priority sites — the uncertainty itself is the harm ^[2][4]. Past instances in which contamination was discovered at old landfill sites, including park closures in Durham and Zebulon after lead was found in soil, underscore why unanswered questions about methane, asbestos, or groundwater contamination carry weight for people living, worshiping, or sending children to school nearby ^[2][4]. Ultimately, both the pace of cleanup and any expansion of the state's authority to enter private sites depend on the General Assembly, which controls the program's funding and the laws governing property access ^[1][2].

How the Coverage Split

North Carolina's right-leaning outlets, including Carolina Journal and The Center Square, led with the government-failure angle — emphasizing the $2-per-ton tax, the program's fund balance, and the 99-year timeline as evidence that a funded program underperformed, rather than one that was simply underfunded ^[2][3]. Local and environmentally focused outlets, including WRAL and Coastal Review, foregrounded public-health risk instead, highlighting the sites' proximity to homes and schools and the methane readings found at investigated locations ^[4][5]. Local outlets close to specific communities, such as Island Free Press covering the Outer Banks, localized the story around named sites like the Buxton Dump while still echoing the broader "not doing its job" framing found in the audit itself ^[1]. No coverage located disputed the audit's core figures; the divide was over which cause — bureaucratic underperformance or structural underfunding — best explains them.