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Public water supplies gain protection but opponents say bill still puts wells, wetlands at risk

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kentuckylantern.com – Liam Niemeyer – 2025-03-12 11:11:00

House votes 69-26 to roll back Kentucky’s regulation of water pollution

by Liam Niemeyer, Kentucky Lantern
March 12, 2025

FRANKFORT — A bill that would limit state regulation of water pollution in Kentucky picked up an amendment in a House committee Wednesday morning, but opponents say the changes don’t do enough to protect against groundwater contamination while small streams and wetlands would still be stripped of state environmental protections.

That bill gained House passage Tuesday afternoon along party lines. The minority of Democrats echoed concerns from environmental groups and the secretary of the Energy and Environment Cabinet who said even with the amendment the measure is “very concerning.”

“The bill threatens the water quality of many Kentucky rivers, streams, and tributaries and, as a result, would
significantly compromise Kentucky’s groundwater, impacting the water quality of more than 31,000
private use wells and at least 156 public water systems,” Secretary Rebecca Goodman wrote in a letter to House members.

Audrey Ernstberger, an attorney and lobbyist for the Kentucky Resources Council, told the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee on Wednesday the amended SB 89 “exposes rural communities to pollution risks that could devastate local economies and health.” 

Senate Bill 89 sponsor, Sen. Scott Madon, R-Pineville, and Rep. Jim Gooch, R-Providence, the chair of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said they worked with various groups to add an amendment to SB 89 after fielding concerns the legislation didn’t adequately protect against groundwater pollution, leaving private water wells vulnerable in particular. 

Madon, speaking before the House committee next to a lawyer representing the Kentucky Coal Association, reiterated his reasoning for SB 89 arguing that industries from farming to manufacturing to coal mining would benefit from a limited definition of what waters the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet can regulate. 

​​”The more I learned, the more I realized this isn’t just a coal industry issue. These issues are affecting a wide variety of businesses and job creators across the Commonwealth,” Madon said.

Madon pushed back on criticisms that the bill would threaten groundwater, saying he worked with the drinking water utility Louisville Water Company on changes to the bill. 

Vince Guenthner, a senior utilities consultant for the Louisville utility, told the Lantern he worked with Senate President Robert Stivers, Gooch, Madon and Kentucky House leadership on changes to SB 89. Guenthner said he believed the changes protected Louisville’s water supply along with “a vast majority” of public drinking water supplies in the state. He said his conversations with lawmakers did not discuss private drinking water wells. 

Rep. Jim Gooch, R-Providence, suggested the limitations on regulating state waters could be revisited in the future. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer)

The amended SB 89 passed the House committee with all Republicans except one voting in favor of the bill. Democrats opposed the bill, citing concerns from environmental groups that the bill could harm the private drinking water sources of rural Kentuckians. 

Gooch said he met with the Energy and Environment Cabinet on changes to the bill but that it was his understanding the cabinet believed the changes did not go  “far enough” with water protections. The secretary of the Energy and Environment Cabinet in a letter dated Wednesday expressed she still has “grave concerns” about the amended version of the legislation.

Energy and Environment Cabinet spokesperson Robin Hartman in a statement said SB 89 fails to protect drinking water sources for families and farmers and that the state, under SB 89, would “become the only state in the nation that has handed over its authority to regulate water resources to big business and outside interest.”

“As Audrey Ernstberger with the Kentucky Resources Council so aptly stated, this bill is an irresponsible, dangerous and deliberate choice to cater to a few at the expense of many,” Hartman said, referencing Ernstberger’s testimony to the legislative committee.

When asked about concerns from environmental groups about the amended bill still not adequately protecting groundwater, Gooch told the Lantern lawmakers would be willing to revisit the issue if “a well is not being protected, especially private wells.” 

“Too many people in the state depend on those, and we’ll be looking at that,” Gooch said. “It might be in a couple years we may have to come back and tweak something.” 

Gooch characterized one environmental lobbyist’s testimony as “hyperbole” during the Wednesday committee hearing.

Changes don’t alleviate environmental groups’ concerns

Environmental groups and a representative of a Letcher County nonprofit law firm in Eastern Kentucky in testimony honed in on strong concerns they still had about the bill’s impacts on groundwater and the state’s water resources at large, asserting the changes didn’t go far enough to protect Kentuckians from potential water pollution. 

The amended version of SB 89, like the original, still changes the definition of “waters of the commonwealth” by removing “all rivers, streams, creeks, lakes, ponds, impounding reservoirs, springs, wells, marshes, and all other bodies of surface or underground water, natural or artificial.” The state definition is changed to instead mirror the federal definition of “navigable waters.” The bill also still sets bonding requirements for coal companies seeking permits for long-term treatment of water leaving mine sites. 

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that drastically cut the federal government’s ability to regulate bodies of water and wetlands led to the Biden administration weakening federal rules on water pollution. Litigation over how expansive protections are under the Clean Water Act has continued over decades as various federal administrations have tried to define “waters of the United States” in more broad, or restrictive, terms. 

The bill’s amendment expands the definition of regulated state waters beyond the weakened federal standard in specific, limited cases, though not in ways that alleviate concerns from environmental groups.

The amendment would add to the state definition sinkholes with “open throat drains;” naturally occurring “artesian or phreatic springs” and other springs used as water supply sources; and wellhead protection areas, which are surface and subsurface areas surrounding a water well or wellfield supplying a public drinking water system. 

Ernstberger in an interview with the Lantern said the specific examples included in the bill’s amendment don’t account for the variety of geological features involving groundwater such as karst aquifers. In testimony before the committee she said tens of thousands of agricultural wells along with private drinking water wells in rural Kentucky remain vulnerable to pollution. 

“SB 89 also excludes off-stream ponds, reservoirs and headwaters. To say that none of these water resources require the same level of protection as our rivers and lakes is not just irresponsible. This is dangerous,” Ernstberger said. 

Nick Hart, a water policy director for the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, in testimony called on the legislature to preserve the existing definition of regulated state waters and instead take time to study the economic and statutory impacts of SB 89. 

Rebecca Shelton, the director of policy at the Letcher County-based Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, told lawmakers about how she uses a filter for a water well on her Eastern Kentucky property because the water contains heavy metals and bacteria. She said she’s paid thousands of dollars to install the filter and maintain it and worries how SB 89 could impact other private well owners. 

“I’m fortunate to have had these choices and the ability to pay for them. Yet I know there are still areas of Letcher County that do not, where households do not even have the option of hooking up to the public water system because the lines don’t run to their house,” Shelton said. 

Rep. Bobby McCool, R-Van Lear, the only Republican to vote against the modified bill passing the committee, cited concerns about private water wells and impacts on utilities for his opposition. McCool represents Martin County that has for years dealt with infrastructure woes with its public drinking water utility. 

“I certainly appreciate the efforts in trying to help with the coal industry,” McCool said. “I just cannot take the risk of hurting the water system.” He said he wasn’t confident concerns about private wells were “taken care of.” 

On the House floor, McCool was one of seven Republicans to join the minority of Democrats in opposing the bill. The House passed the measure 69-26, sending it back to the Senate to either concur with or reject the House changes.

Rep. Chad Aull, D-Lexington, on the House floor repeated what Goodman, secretary of the Energy and Environment Cabinet, wrote in her letter. Kentucky would be the only state to cede its authority to define its own regulated waters, she said, which in turn could cost it “primacy” or the right to manage federal regulatory programs. “This is not where Kentucky needs to be the exception,” she said.

Aull said, “We put at risk our drinking water supplies for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our people. This bill fails to consider how Kentucky’s water chemistry is dependent on the entire watershed including those seasonal streams, and that underground and interconnected waterways will lose protection.”

Gooch responded by characterizing Aull’s comments as “hyperbole” similar to how he characterized the comments from an environmental lobbyist earlier in the day.

“There are people who we could not write an amendment that would please all of them,” Gooch said.

Rep. Suzanne Miles, R-Owensboro, who voted in favor of the bill advancing, said the amendment came about from multiple people working on the changes.

“I think it’s very important for all of us to recognize we all want clean water, and that is the intent of amending and just reassuring that we’ve protected the water,” Miles said.

This story has been updated with the House vote, a letter from Kentucky Energy and Environment Secretary Rebecca Goodman and a statement from an Energy and Environment Cabinet spokesperson.

Energy and Environment Secretary Rebecca Goodman’s letter to House members

SB 89 Concerns Letter to House Members

Utilities dependent upon groundwater

sources_draft3

Domestic use wells impacted by groundwater

Domestic Use Wells Impacted by Ground Water

Nick Hart with the Kentucky Waterways Alliance speaks against SB 89 as bill sponsor Sen. Scott Madon listens in the background. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Liam Niemeyer).

Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

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News from the South - Kentucky News Feed

Franklin man charged after marijuana operation found in home

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www.wnky.com – Amelia Brett – 2025-07-10 14:04:00

SUMMARY: A Franklin, Kentucky man, Terry Moss, 60, was arrested following an investigation by the South Central Kentucky Drug Task Force on July 10. Authorities discovered an indoor marijuana cultivation operation at his residence on South Main Street. Moss faces multiple charges, including marijuana cultivation (five plants or more) with firearm enhancement, marijuana trafficking with firearm enhancement, drug paraphernalia possession, and first-degree possession of controlled substances including hydrocodone. The search uncovered several marijuana plants, processed marijuana, two firearms, drug paraphernalia, prescription pills, and U.S. currency. Charges will be presented to a grand jury. Multiple local law enforcement agencies assisted in the operation.

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100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial

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kentuckylantern.com – Berry Craig – 2025-07-10 04:40:00


A century ago, John T. Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convicted for teaching evolution, violating the Butler Act. The 1925 “Monkey Trial” symbolized the clash between urban modernism and rural fundamentalism. Despite Scopes’ conviction and $100 fine, the trial became a cultural milestone, broadcast live and attracting global attention. William Jennings Bryan prosecuted, while Clarence Darrow defended Scopes, highlighting tensions between science and religion. Though fundamentalism prevailed legally, public opinion shifted toward science. Today, as Christian Nationalists challenge church-state separation again, experts warn the principle requires active defense. Scopes died in 1970, remembered as “A Man of Courage.”

by Berry Craig, Kentucky Lantern
July 10, 2025

Today I’m remembering what Lela Scopes told me about her famous brother for my Paducah Sun story going on 46 years ago.

She said before John Thomas Scopes left to teach science and coach football at Rhea County High School in Dayton, Tenn., in 1924, he explained, “I’m going there because it’s a small town with a small school where I won’t get in any deep water.”  

The skinny, bespectacled, freckle-faced 24-year-old from Paducah ended up the defendant in one of history’s most sensationalized courtroom battles.  

A century ago this month, Scopes was convicted of violating the Butler Act, a Volunteer State law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. His punishment was a $100 fine. 

But the “Monkey Trial” grabbed newspaper headlines worldwide. Dozens of reporters converged on Dayton. So did tent revivalists and swarms of hucksters hawking popcorn and pink lemonade and hustling Bibles and souvenirs, including stuffed monkeys. 

John Thomas Scopes, second from left, stands in the courtroom during his trial for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to high school science students in Dayton, Tenn., July 1925. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“The State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes” was also the first trial broadcast live on radio.

I interviewed Lela Scopes in August 1979, when I was a Sun feature writer. She also said John had worried about what their mother might think of the trial: “He was afraid it would get in the Louisville paper, Mother would read about it and think he was a hothead.”

Anyway, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” and now is one of those rhyming times.

“Public education is once again under siege from a sustained effort by Christian Nationalists to blur the line between church and state,” warns A.J. Schumann, a youth organizing fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Like today, the 1920s were times of “rapid social, economic and cultural change,” said David Krueger, professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah. 

Scopes admitted he covered evolution when he substitute taught for the absent biology teacher. (In their zeal to ban evolution, Tennessee lawmakers failed to remove the state-approved biology textbook, which included evolution.)

Scopes believed in evolution and agreed to stand trial on principle. 

The trial, which began on July 10, 1925, and concluded on July 21, was essentially a clash of competing values: urban science and modernism versus rural, old-time Protestant fundamentalist Christianity. 

A historical marker stands near the entrance of Oak Grove Cemetery in Paducah where John Scopes is buried next to his wife Mildred. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Berry Craig)

“The cause defended at Dayton is a continuing one that has existed throughout man’s brief history and will continue as long as man is here,” Scopes wrote in “Center of the Storm,” his 1967 memoir. “It is the cause of freedom, for which man must do what he can.”

The attorneys embodied the collision of values. Tennessee summoned William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska as special prosecutor. A fundamentalist champion, he had been a Democratic congressman, secretary of state and three-time Democratic presidential candidate. 

The American Civil Liberties Union hired Clarence Darrow to lead Scopes’ defense team. Darrow was widely considered the country’s top defense lawyer. He was from Chicago, believed in evolution and was an agnostic.

Bryan and Darrow dueled like gladiators in the sweltering midsummer East Tennessee heat. The courtroom became so hot that the trial was moved outdoors to the tree-shaded courthouse lawn where the crowd of spectators grew even larger.

Bryan got a conviction as expected. But progressives, including liberal Christians, believed science and reason had vanquished “EVIL-lution” in the court of public opinion. They pointed to July 20 when Darrow called Bryan to the stand as a Bible expert.

“There was no pity for the helplessness of the believer come so suddenly and so unexpectedly upon a moment when he could not reconcile statements of the Bible with generally accepted facts,” The New York Times reported. “There was no pity for his admissions of ignorance of things boys and girls learn in high school, his floundering confessions that he knew practically nothing of geology, biology, philology, little of comparative religion, and little even of ancient history.” 

… separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”

– A.J. Schumann, Americans United for Separation of Church and State

In “Only Yesterday,” his 1931 chronicle of the 1920s, Frederick Lewis Allen wrote:  “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”

Allen and the progressives of his day missed the mark. Donald Trump and his Republican Party owe a big part of their electoral success to white Christian evangelicals of the “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” persuasion.  

Schumann warned that “today’s Christian Nationalist rhetoric echoes the anti-modernist anxieties of the 1920s — fear that secularism is destroying ‘traditional values’ and that public institutions should reflect a ‘Christian America.’” 

He wrote that the First Amendment safeguards all Americans “from having any single belief system imposed on them by the state,” a fact that seems to be lost on much of the GOP these days.  

Schumann concluded that the Scopes “trial reminds us that the separation of church and state is not something we can take for granted. It is a principle that must be actively defended, especially in moments of cultural anxiety and political division, when calls to return to some mythic past grow loudest.”

Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. He is buried in the family plot in Paducah’s Oak Grove Cemetery next to his wife, Mildred, and close to Lela, who died in 1989 at 92. “A Man of Courage” is his epitaph. A state historical marker at the cemetery’s main entrance tells about him.

John Scopes died in 1970 at age 70. His gravestone bears his epitaph, “A Man of Courage.” (Kentucky Lantern photo by Berry Craig)

Scopes said not a word during the trial. He got his chance at the end.

After the jury delivered the expected guilty verdict and the judge fined Scopes $100, one of his lawyers pointed out that the defendant had been denied the right to speak before sentencing. 

“Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute,” Scopes said. “I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideals of academic freedom, that is to teach the truth as guaranteed in our Constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.” 

After Scopes finished, the judge repeated the fine. The verdict was later overturned on a technicality, Schumann wrote, but the Butler Act wasn’t repealed until 1967.

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Kentucky Lantern is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com.

The post 100 years after John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, education is again on trial appeared first on kentuckylantern.com



Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content presents a viewpoint that emphasizes the importance of separating church and state and supports scientific education, framing the Scopes Trial as a historic battle between modernism and religious fundamentalism. It highlights concerns about contemporary Christian Nationalist influence on public education, particularly critiquing elements within the GOP, which indicates a critical stance toward conservative religious politics. However, it maintains a respectful historical recount and balanced tone by providing factual background and quoting multiple perspectives, reflecting a generally moderate but slightly progressive viewpoint favoring secularism and academic freedom.

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Hot and humid with a few PM showers for Thursday

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www.youtube.com – WLKY News Louisville – 2025-07-09 21:36:36

SUMMARY: Thursday in Louisville will be hot and humid with highs in the low 90s. After a break from 90-degree days, summer heat and humidity return, continuing through the weekend. Mostly dry and sunny conditions are expected Thursday and Friday, with isolated afternoon and evening showers possible. Temperatures will rise to the mid-90s Saturday and Sunday, with feel-like temperatures near 100 due to humidity. A few late-day storms may occur over the weekend but should fade overnight. The pattern of highs around 90 degrees will persist into next week, with scattered storms likely by Wednesday.

WLKY meteorologist Eric Zernich’s Wednesday night forecast

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