Minutes - 20090521 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Document Availability •Clerk to Board of Commissioners •County Budget Office •Orange County Library •Chapel Hill Public Library •Carrboro/McDougle Branch Library •Cybrary, Carrboro •Cedar Grove Branch Library •Orange County Website •www.co.orange.nc.us 3. Public Comment Danna Bailey said that she lives in Efland Cheeks and the County is about to increase rates for water by 300% for only 200+ people. She is a single mother with four children. She asked that the County Commissioners try and find another way to fund this rate deficit. Sam Gharbo spoke about the Efland sewer rate increase. He said that back in 1984 when the Efland-Cheeks Elementary School sewer failed, the County put in a sewer system to keep the school's system afloat. The County asked the residents to help defray the cost. The Board projected that 212 people were needed at$15.20 to subsidize the entire project. At that point, people signed up. Over the next 20 years, there were many proposals and a bond to expand the system. There has been a lot of talk and desire to do more for that system to expend it. Currently, there are 213 customers and two subdivisions — Richmond Hills and Ashwick—which comprise about 100 of those 213. Forty-five percent of the 213 are low- income. The County paid $15,000 to come up with a new rate plan to make the Efland sewer system self-sufficient. If this is implemented, Efland sewer will be the third highest sewer rate in the State. He said that the question that the County should have asked the group that created the new rate system structure was, how big does it have to be and how many people have to be on the system so that the Efland Cheeks customers can pay the average rate for the State. He said that it is wrong and unethical to ask someone who uses 6,000 gallons of water four years from now for a family of five to wash, clean, and flush to pay $121 a month. He said that this is a bad time to be looking at this. He said that people in Efland are willing to pay their fair share, but after 20+ years of talking about doing more and expanding the system, the rate should not go up so much because there are budget issues. He said that the people of Efland helped Orange County during this time. Robert Dowling, Executive Director of Orange Community Housing and Land Trust, submitted a letter: "Dear Chair Foushee and Members of the County Commission: I would like to thank the Commissioners for all the support you have provided to this organization during the last decade. The growth and success of the Land Trust (soon to be Home Trust) would not have been possible without the support and participation of the County. Thanks to that support, Orange County has become a model in providing inclusionary housing that strives to be permanently affordable. In fact, on May 29th we will be hosting visits from two groups that hope to learn about inclusionary housing and the Community Land Trust model. One group is from Charlotte, NC and the other is from Charleston, SC. In our budget request for 2009-10, we requested the same allocation that we receive in the current fiscal year, which is $149,000. We understand this is a particularly difficult year as the County seeks to reduce its overall budget. We have participated in the cost cutting by reducing our 2008-09 budget by more than 10%. However, in 2009-10 we will be increasing our