The Water Crisis

On October 25th, a joint meeting between the towns of Boone and Blowing Rock, ASU, and Watauga County discussed the feasibility of a "Water Partnership" among those entities. Almost all municipal and county elected officials were there -- for good reason. Boone and Blowing Rock have essentially run out of water, ASU's supply is weak, and the county has no water service.

Jeff Hughes, director of the UNC School of Government Environmental Finance Center, told the group of two options: The first would be a water system run by the town, by the county, or by both entities together. The second would be a separate water and sewer "authority," a new unit of government that could own assets, assume debt, and borrow money totally independent of the municipalities, the county, or the university. The governing board of a water "authority" could be elected or appointed or both

The water issue is complicated: dwindling resources, many entities seeking it, and any solution promising a huge price-tag for the necessary facilities and infrastructure to collect raw water, to guarantee its purity, and to distribute it to users. An additional important complication from a comprehensive planning perspective is that Watauga County government wants water on its main highway corridors but shows no noticeable inclination to enact land-use planning to control density, set-backs, buffers, etc. The chair of the County Commission said that the Town of Boone just needed to respect the fact that the county doesn't have zoning rules.

Fortunately, no decisions were made at this meeting. All agreed to talk within their various entities and come back together in a month or so.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN. An autonomous Water/Sewer Authority with an appointed board not directly accountable to the citizens, acquiring water at enormous cost to taxpayers, and running that water to traffic corridors wholly unregulated for growth is not a recipe that we'll want to taste the results of. Who does this benefit? Likewise, a partnership between town and county, where the county intends to enrich a limited number of landowners along our most-traveled corridors while refusing the town's restrictions on development, appears on the face of it to be a lopsided arrangement and not a solution aimed at protecting the welfare of all our citizens.

There exists strong opposition to any county water system. D. Greene and K. Carter are likely to be leaders of that opposition. Add to that the worries of the progressive community about uncontrolled growth, and you've got a most unlikely coalition poised to fight.