Governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, Says He Won’t Quit

RUSSELLVILLE, Ala. — The governor of Alabama wanted to talk about broadband.
But because the governor was Robert Bentley, who is confronting a deepening political morass after acknowledging last week that he had sexually charged conversations with a top aide, that was hardly how a news conference could unfold in this northwest Alabama city. Instead, he had to start by discussing whether he would be able to keep his job.
“I have no intentions of resigning,” said Mr. Bentley, a Republican in his second term. “My intentions are to try to make this state better. My intentions are to try to work through all the difficulties that we’re going through.”
Within hours, Rebekah C. Mason, the governor’s senior political adviser and the woman with whom he engaged in suggestive conversations, captured on tape, said she had quit. And by day’s end, it was uncertain whether it would be politically feasible for Mr. Bentley, 73, to remain in office in this state, which has a gaudy history of scandal but has been in something of a morals-driven meltdown since the governor’s admission last Wednesday.
Some lawmakers are talking of impeaching Mr. Bentley. The governor’s former pastor spoke of “church discipline” and said that Mr. Bentley was no longer a member of the Tuscaloosa congregation where he was once a deacon. And as audio recordings of the governor’s conversations with Ms. Mason were replayed and dissected across the Internet, even Mr. Bentley’s proficiency at phone sex has been a subject of conversation.
“As far as my situation is concerned, it is really just a shock to people, and, you know, I understand that,” Mr. Bentley said on Wednesday in an interview, his first since he acknowledged the nature of his behavior with Ms. Mason. Mr. Bentley, who complained about “a lot of errors and misconceptions and opinions” on social media, said a fuller account would someday put his behavior in a better light. “I still feel that, in time, all of this will come out, and everything will be exposed.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Bentley, who was elected statewide in part because of his reputation as a churchgoing, squeaky-clean public official,  said that his conduct had not been “all that egregious,” but also said, “All I can say is that I think I let people down, and that disturbs me more than anything else.”
People here have been hearing plenty about what happened.
According to the monitoring service TV Eyes, Alabama television stations have mentioned Mr. Bentley, whose wife of 50 years filed for divorce last year, more than 700 times since last Wednesday. In the entire month leading to Mr. Bentley’s news conference, the stations had referred to him on fewer than 650 occasions.
“It’s totally humiliating,” said State Representative Allen Farley, a Republican who last year spoke with Mr. Bentley about rumors of sexual impropriety. “This man has got to understand that every day he’s in the governor’s office, this circus will go on.”
Alabama was mired in scandal well before Ms. Mason became a household name. A former governor is serving a prison term for corruption, and the speaker of the State House of Representatives is to stand trial this year on charges of ethics violations.
“We’ve bottomed out,” Mr. Farley said. “We’ve got a speaker of the House that’s got 23 felony violations for using his office for personal gain, and now we’ve got a governor who’s using his office for God knows what.”
The State Ethics Commission said this week that it would investigate whether Mr. Bentley and Ms. Mason had committed wrongdoing. The state attorney general’s office has declined to say whether it has opened an inquiry.
Mr. Bentley has denied a physical relationship with Ms. Mason, despite recordings in which the governor refers to “when I stand behind you and I put my arms around you and I put my hands on your breasts.” In an excerpt published by the Alabama Media Group, he also said, “If we’re going to do what we did the other day, we’re going to have to start locking the door.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Bentley has not said how long the inappropriate phase of his relationship with Ms. Mason lasted. Referring to that controversial period, he said, “We understood at that time the boundaries, I should say, and we still do.”
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
It was not clear whether Ms. Mason’s resignation would help Mr. Bentley to regain his political footing and whether a scheduled appearance at a prison in Wetumpka on Thursday might carry a semblance of normalcy. In a statement released by Mr. Bentley’s office, Ms. Mason said, “My only plans are to focus my full attention on my precious children and my husband who I love dearly.”
Before Ms. Mason’s departure, speculation about Mr. Bentley rained down on the governor’s office.
In the interview, when he referred to last week’s news conference as “a firing squad,” Mr. Bentley confirmed some details of a report by Yellowhammer News, which said Tuesday that he and Ms. Mason had shared a safe deposit box at a bank in Montgomery.
He denied that Ms. Mason owned the box, but said that she was designated to have access to it if he died.
“I couldn’t ask my attorney to come down and sign for it,” said Mr. Bentley, who added he would release a video message in the coming days to “get my message out unfiltered.”
“I want them to hear from my lips because when I was in the press conference the other day, that’s kind of a shock thing,” he said. “I can’t answer everything, and in fact, I couldn’t answer everything that day because I didn’t know what was coming out. I really didn’t. I had never heard any of this stuff. I didn’t know.”
But there are doubts that the scandal will fade from view anytime soon. “It’s not football season,” said Paul DeMarco, a Republican former member of the Legislature.
And around the state, there are questions of what more might come — or, as State Senator Dick Brewbaker put it, whether “this gets any weirder.”
27Comments
“I really hate that this happened to the governor, but he did it to himself,” Mr. Brewbaker, a Republican, said. “It just shows that any governor who serves two terms and can leave office without scandal has really accomplished something in Alabama.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/us/governor-of-alabama-robert-bentley-says-he-wont-quit.html?partner=msft_msn&_r=0

Read More

Schools Nationwide Still Grapple with Lead in Water

Nicolaus Copernicus Elementary, a 98-year-old school building in Jersey City, N.J., where 16 of 19 water fountains and coolers were found to have lead levels higher than permissible.CreditKirsten Luce for The New York Times

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Anxious parents may wonder how a major school system like Newark’s could overlook lead in the drinking water of 30 schools and 17,000 students. The answer: It was easy. They had to look only a few miles away, at the century-old classrooms of the schools here, across the Hackensack River. The Jersey City Public Schools district discovered lead contamination in eight schools’ drinking fountains in 2006, and in more schools in 2008, 2010 and 2012. But not until 2013 did officials finally chart a comprehensive attack on lead, which by then had struck all but six schools.
This winter’s crisis in Flint, Mich., has cast new attention on lead in water supplies. But problems with lead in school water supplies have dragged on for years — aggravated by ancient buildings and plumbing, prolonged by official neglect and tight budgets, and enabled by a gaping loophole in federal rules that largely exempts schools from responsibility for the purity of their water.
Children are at greatest risk from lead exposure, and school is where they spend much of their early lives. But cash-starved school administrators may see a choice between spending money on teachers or on plumbing as no choice at all.
“They feel it’s almost better not to sample, because you’re better off not knowing,” Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech University civil engineering professor who has fought for lead safety nationwide, said in an interview.
The problem is persistent and widespread. Baltimore’s public schools switched entirely to bottled water in 2007 because ripping out the lead plumbing would have been impractical. Sebring, Ohio, found elevated lead levels in August after workers had stopped adding an anti-corrosion chemical to the water supply.
The Los Angeles Unified School District allotted $19.8 million in September to retrofit or remove its 48,000 drinking fountains to erase a small but tenacious lead threat. Ithaca, N.Y., schools switched temporarily to bottled water in January after water tests found elevated lead levels at two schools.
Congress could easily have cracked down on lead in schools. In fact, it once did. The 1988 Lead Contamination Control Act required schools to scrap lead-lined water coolers, test drinking water and remedy any contamination they found. But a federal appeals court struck down part of the law affecting schools in 1996. And while some states have devised their own lead-testing rules, federal lawmakers have yet to revisit the issue.

The only regulation left is a 1991 rule by the federal Environmental Protection Agency requiring periodic tests for lead and copper by most public water systems, whether the supplier is a big utility or a well in a trailer park or campground.
But although schools and day care centers are the main sources of water for children on most weekdays, only the few schools that operate their own wells fall under the rule. The vast majority of schools use treated water from utilities.
And while the utilities test their water, virtually all lead contamination occurs inside schools — in lead pipes, water-cooler coils and linings, and in leaded-metal fountains and taps.
“If you’re a mom-and-pop coffee shop in Sparta, New Jersey, and have a private well, you’re required to certify every quarter,” said Robert Barrett, the chief executive of Aqua Pro-Tech Laboratories, a New Jersey environmental testing laboratory. “But if you’re a school, you don’t have to do anything.”
Mr. Barrett, whose firm tests water in 13 states, said the Newark and Flint revelations prompted reassessments by schools and other institutions that had not scrutinized their plumbing in years, if ever.
“No one was testing,” he said. “Now all of a sudden they’re all going crazy.”
In Newark, where school officials disclosed elevated lead levels earlier this month, Mr. Barrett’s firm began testing water systemwide on March 19. Students at the 30 schools now drink bottled water, and the youngest students were offered free blood tests.
There, as in Los Angeles, high lead levels persisted even though workers flush the water pipes every weekday to push out lead that accumulates overnight. Nor did some filters on Newark school fountains reduce contamination sufficiently.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says children whose blood lead content exceeds five micrograms per deciliter — less than a millionth of an ounce in a pint — should see a doctor. High blood lead levels can stunt a child’s mental development and damage a range of organs. But even smaller amounts can affect children’s intellectual development, and the agency says no level of lead is safe.

The E.P.A.’s 1991 lead rule — the one that requires most public water systems to periodically test for lead and copper — limits the amount of lead in drinking water to no more than 15 parts per billion. The rule is being revised, though, and that limit could soon be lowered. Even though the rule does not apply to most schools, districts that do monitor drinking water generally use it as a guideline.
Tainted water is not the biggest source of lead exposure in humans; on average, the E.P.A. says, it makes up about a fifth of contamination. Pregnant women working in schools are at greatest risk because fetuses are most profoundly affected by contamination. Women face an increased risk of miscarriage, along with potential organ damage and developmental problems in the baby.



Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/us/schools-nationwide-still-grapple-with-lead-in-water.html?partner=msft_msn&_r=1

Read More