From today’s Durham Herald Sun:

By Ray Gronberg : The Herald-Sun
gronberg@heraldsun.com
Feb 23, 2008

DURHAM — The state government’s prodding has Durham and other area governments looking more closely at the idea of building a new water intake on Jordan Lake, but it’s also beginning to trigger some pushback.

Opposition is coming from Orange County, where Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton is arguing officials should “take Jordan Lake off the table” unless other governments enact curbs on suburban, car-dependent growth similar to those his town and Chapel Hill have.

He contends that for now, the infrastructure-dictated limits on the use of Jordan Lake’s supply potential are one of the few constraints that exist on the area’s growth.

And “until our neighbors are exercising the kind of self-restraint that Orange County has been pursuing — and doing so in a legally binding way through joint planning agreements — it doesn’t seem wise to me to give those local governments still more access to drinking water,” Chilton argued in an online Web posting this week.

His comments Friday were equally pointed.

“If we’re going to pay millions and millions of dollars to pull water out of there, and what we’re doing is continuing [to grow as] we’ve always done, and getting to the point where even that isn’t enough, what’s the point?” he said.

Chilton made his comments as Durham officials were finishing the draft of a resolution that would endorse the idea of joining forces with Chatham County, Orange County and the Orange Water and Sewer Authority to develop a second intake.

Jordan Lake is theoretically capable of providing Triangle cities 100 million gallons of water a day. But Cary has the only intake and its associated water plant can treat a maximum 40 million gallons a day.

Placing a second intake — and likely a second water plant — on the west side of the lake could relieve that bottleneck. Regulators in the state Division of Water Resources are pushing the idea because Jordan’s watershed is much larger and therefore more drought-resistant than those of other reservoirs in the area.

Advocates believe there are other advantages, starting with the mere redundancy inherent in having a second intake. Having just one means a breakdown or some other problem at Cary’s intake could have ripple effects throughout the region, Durham Deputy City Manager Ted Voorhees said.

Jordan water could also provide the margin of safety the region needs if changes in global climate invalidate some of the key assumptions engineers made in years past when they were planning the small reservoirs serving most of the area’s cities.

There are researchers who believe “we’re moving out of a period of weather predictability” where planners could rely on conditions staying within a certain range, Voorhees said, echoing the point of an article in the Feb. 1 issue of “Science” magazine.

If they’re right, and local conditions become more extreme, the proper response is to “change the margins of safety [for water supplies] to make them bigger,” particularly by accelerating long-term projects like the second intake, Voorhees said.

Chilton’s views matter because officials in Chapel Hill and Carrboro have stepped in before to deter OWASA — the utility that serves their towns — from joining initiatives that could promote growth in neighboring counties.

The most notable example came in 1988 when Chapel Hill’s Town Council, worried about supply talks between the utility and Chatham County, threatened to fire its five representatives on the OWASA board and replace them with new appointees.

Merely voicing the threat sufficed to squelch those negotiations. The memory of it also deterred cooperation between OWASA and Chatham County throughout the 1990s and the early years of this decade.

But the town’s underlying policy didn’t succeed in its intended purpose of limiting growth in Chatham County. Officials there have approved the construction of thousands of new homes this decade.

This time around, it’s not clear how much leverage Chilton and any like-minded southern Orange officials have, not least because Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy shares at least some of the worries Voorhees mentioned and seems open to at least talking about an intake partnership.

“We don’t know whether we’re looking at long-term change in our weather patterns,” Foy said earlier this month. “If that’s the case, the assessment we’ve made about our water supply is going to be challenged.”

At the same time, Foy said, Chapel Hill has “a very strong interest in making sure growth in this area is done right, at a relatively slow pace that can be absorbed.”

Meanwhile, Chatham County is considering running a pipeline to Cary’s water plant and drawing its share of lake water there, Voorhees said.

Durham needn’t necessarily work with OWASA to draw more water from Jordan. One option available to it is helping pay for an expansion of Cary’s water plant and relying on its existing intake, Voorhees said.

This entry was written by Mark on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 and is filed under Issues, News. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.