City-County Water Spat Awash in Lack of Expertise

By Ray Gronberg, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.

Feb. 9–DURHAM — A fed-up Mayor Bill Bell made clear this week that he’s tired of the sniping two county commissioners have directed at the city’s water-supply planning.

“I want our county people to know we haven’t been sitting around with our thumbs up our behinds,” Bell told City Council members Thursday after administrators briefed them on talks about the future use of Jordan Lake. “If they genuinely think we don’t have a concern about this, then they’ve been off in Neverland somewhere.”

The mayor’s comment came a day after County Commissioner Becky Heron and Commissioners Chairwoman Ellen Reckhow laced into city water managers during a meeting of the Joint City/County Planning Committee.

Both commissioners voiced doubts about the city’s planning, particularly whether it has accounted for Durham’s likely population growth and the possibility that weather patterns might change.

Reckhow said she’d like planners to re-run their short-range supply forecasts to account for the possibility of a dry spring, and said elected officials need more data about per-capita water use so they can better judge zoning requests.

Heron, meanwhile, questioned whether Jordan Lake is reliable as either a short-term reserve or long-term water source.

“It’s fine to say they’re going to give us this or promise us that, but if Jordan Lake doesn’t get more water in it, I don’t know where they’re going to get the water to keep their promises,” she said.

City Council members present at the joint meeting didn’t say much in answer to the commissioners, save to agree administrators need to share information with both boards.

But in Thursday’s council work session, they joined in the chuckling provoked by Bell’s “thumbs” comment.

Durham commissioners rarely need to discuss water policy, as the county government doesn’t own or operate a water system.

It was clear Wednesday that some basics were foreign to them. Heron’s comments about Jordan Lake, for example, glossed over the regional reservoir’s near-full status.

Only one system, Cary’s, is drawing city-size amounts of water from it, and the lake receives inflow from a watershed more than twice as big as that of Raleigh’s Falls Lake. Also, state and federal regulators carefully control Jordan’s use.

Reckhow strayed onto similarly shaky ground by suggesting the city’s safe-yield estimates represent the maximum delivery potential of its reservoirs.

They don’t. A reservoir’s “safe yield” is like a speed limit, a statement of the maximum amount of water its owner should use. It can break the limit if it wants, though only at a greater risk of running short.

For example, engineers rate Durham’s two reservoirs able to deliver 37 million gallons a day with only a one-in-50 chance of falling short in any given year.

But if officials were willing to chance a one-in-20 chance of running short, the two lakes could deliver 42 million gallons a day, Deputy Water Management Director Vicki Westbrook said.

Meanwhile, the city’s weekly remaining-days-of-supply estimates make the worst-case assumption Reckhow was looking for. In calculating them, officials always figure Durham’s reservoirs aren’t receiving any inflow, even if in fact they are.

As for water and zoning, water managers typically assume the average household uses 6,000 gallons each month. From there, it’s simple to calculate that a 1,000-unit subdivision requires about 200,000 gallons a day.

Despite their annoyance, city officials haven’t always shown a firm grip on basics themselves.

For instance, on Monday Bell questioned whether the city should reduce its purchases of Jordan Lake water to save money. But those buys underpin the city staff’s strategy for making Durham’s water stockpiles last through the summer.

Normally, the council spends little more time than the commissioners on water policy, leaving it to administrators. By contrast, elected officials in neighboring Orange County more routinely take an interest.

There, prominent politicians like Orange County Commissioners Chairman Barry Jacobs and Chapel Hill Town Councilman Bill Strom did pre-election tours on the board of the Orange Water and Sewer Authority that immersed them in daily discussion of water policy.

No Durham politician now in office, city or county, has comparable experience.

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Copyright (c) 2008, The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.

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