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A..y ..j 3 that attempted to negotiate solutions to a number of conflicts that have come up. I am aJ.so very pleased that we have such a ~.arge crowd in attendance tonight because I believe this is one of the more important issues that governments of our three jurisdictions will work on. I believe that it is important not only because of the substance of what we are going ,;._~ to be talking about here tonight but also because of the process that we went though to try to come to this agreement. To my knowledge, this is the first time that the three governments have engaged in such a long negotiating process in which we attempted to recognize the interests of each community as well as our joint interests and put them together into a unif~.ed set of agreements. During the past four months, an eight member task force of elected officials from Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Orange County met six times and a three person subcommittee held another dozen meetings to work out an agreement dealing with a number of related issues concerning further watershed protection and joint planning. The group prepared a 13 point agreement in principal designed to deal with these issues in a coordinated manner. The agreement has been adopted by each of the three governments and wi7.1 be discussed tonight at this public. hearing. I think that it should be stressed that this was put forward by representatives of each of the three jurisdictions, but it a.s by no means an accomplishment of any one person. xn order to put this public hearing in context for you, I would like to speak briefly about the major issues that we worked on in that negotiation process. only two of those issues are going to be discussed in detail here tonight, but they are related to the other issues. I think it is important to understand the whole package in order to understand the two matters that are being heard tonight. The first issue is that not enough is known about the capacity of our..., water supply watersheds to tolerate development without harming the water supply. Growth is occurring in the watershed. The proposal made by the. group was to commission a study of the carrying capacity of University Lake and Cane Creek watersheds. The alternative to that proposal would be to continue to rely on existing local government development standards, that is the standards of orange County and Carrboro in these watersheds. The second issue is that Carrboro desires additional space for growth, but the residents of Calvander and other rural areas want to maintain the status quo. This has brought a conflict.. The proposal that the committee came forward with is to redirect Carrboro's growth away from the University Lake watershed where it historically has held extraterritorial jurisdiction to the Bolin Creek drainage basin to the north where public gravity sewer can be provided and where future developers will not endanger the water supply watershed. The Committee suggests three possible ways to do this. One of them is to exchange the extraterritorial jurisdiction from the University Lake watershed on either a per acre or dwelling unit equivalency basis, i.e., to exchange it from Un~.versity Lake watershed to the .Bolin Creek drainage basin. A second possible proposal ass to extend Carrboro's transition area to a transition area under the joint planning agreement further north into the Bolin Creek drainage basin. The third proposal is to defer further requests from Carrboro for annexation and water and sewer extensions into the watersheds until the capacity study is complete. The alternative to this would be to maintain Carrboro's present extraterritorial jurisdiction and transition areas which the committee feels would leave a great deal of pressure on the University Lake watershed. The third issue is maintenance of the rural buffer which could be