Despite serious misgivings among some local officials, OWASA is moving forward on discussions with the City of Durham, Chatham County, Orange County, and other neighboring jurisdictions to secure future access to Jordan Lake water.

There is a lot of pressure from Chatham County because they over-built beyond their capacity to provide water during the high growth heyday of the Bunky Morgan era.  OWASA is a valuable ally to these other jurisdictions because it owns a prime piece of land on the west shore of Jordan Lake that is ideal for a water intake.

Press release:

Neighbors Burlington, Graham and Mebane have hired a law firm to fight the "Jordan Lake Rules" that the NC Division of Water Quality presented to the Environmental Management Commission. At issue is the unacceptable levels of nitrogen and phosphorous put into the Haw River, and thus Lake Jordan from upstream waste water and storm water runoff. Not very neighborly of them to want to keep dumping excess nutrients downstream, but as with all things the fight is really over the money that it would cost to retrofit existing infrastructure.

http://tinyurl.com/4hse63

http://tinyurl.com/4eyabw

Here are some hastily scribbled notes from last night's forum to meet the new cast of county commissioner candidates hosted by the Dem Women of OC.

From the DWOC handouts :

OC is going to a 7 member CC Plan; D1 = 3 members, D2 = 2 members + 2 "At Large" members. District 1 is the 71,389 people in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School District. District 2 is the 44,142 of us that make up the rest of the rest of the county. In 2008 4 commissioners will be elected. D1 gets 2 seats, D2 gets one seat and one "At-Large" seat. 3 Commishes are not up for re-election until 2010: Alice Gordon, Barry Jacobs and Mike Nelson.

From notes:

Valerie Foushee D1 - (D-CH) uncontested "safe seat" - spoke on community mental health needs and diversity in housing, said state offered current county commissioners only 2 choices in raising taxes: land transfer tax or sales tax, which she sees as more regressive

• Local water supply and demand and weather forecasts for coming months;

• Short and long-term financial implications and strategies for the drought;

• The options, costs and timetable for addressing the “Worst Case” drought scenario (no rainfall for many months); and

• Proposed changes in OWASA’s water conservation standards and parallel local water conservation ordinances to further limit outdoor irrigation in Stage Two and Stage Three water shortages. (Stage Two restrictions are now in effect.) The proposed changes would generally prohibit irrigation with hand-held hoses, soaker hoses, drip irrigation and micro-spray systems in Stage Two and all irrigation with OWASA drinking water would be prohibited in Stage Three.