The other day I wrote about DEQ mishandling the spills of GenX into the Cape Fear River and added that, before the legislature gives DEQ another $3 million to spend, we need to know whether the problems have been fixed.

Lisa Sorg, of the liberal nonprofit NC Policy Watch, didn’t see eye to eye with me.

Ms. Sorg agreed DEQ had made mistakes – she wrote that when DEQ said, in June , that it “had stopped all GenX discharges” into the Cape Fear River it had been wrong. And she added that “DEQ seemed caught off-guard by the GenX revelation, and we still aren’t sure who knew what when…”

However, she then said the legislature should give DEQ more money to spend.

That logic is difficult to accept: DEQ made mistakes, so we should give DEQ $3 million more to spend.

Shouldn’t we, at least, fix the mistakes first?