Minutes - 20070524 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Mr. Miller said that Orange County can influence this body of rules. One way is in the public hearing and public comments period. Also, the County can lobby the General Assembly when it considers it sometime in the 2008 session. However, the reductions have to be achieved somehow. Commissioner Nelson said that most of the upper New Hope area is already built out, so this would mainly involve retrofitting development. Dave Stancil said that most of this relates to the rural buffer. Syd Miller said that whatever is built there has to be dealt with in some way. Commissioner Nelson said that he has heard people say that southern Orange County is doing a good job of keeping the lake clean by using buffers, etc. He asked how this could happen to the lake. Syd Miller said that it is a shallow piedmont lake and these kinds of lakes are sensitive to nutrients. Also, the highly built areas in Chapel Hill and Durham put a lot of stuff in the watershed and it makes its way dawn into the lake. Commissioner Jacobs made reference to the background information in the abstract, specifically, "Over the last 20 years, water quality has become an issue for Jordan Lake," and said that he did a story in 1979 for the Charlotte Observer. He read part of this article. "Critics of the Jordan Lake project, including federal and state water quality experts warned that parts of the lake would be so clogged with algae that it would smell and taste bad, making the lake a possible health hazard, unsuitable for many of its intended uses. `It makes little sense for us to sit around now and talk about how green the Jordan may run,' said Howard Lee, Secretary of Natural Resources and Community Development while touring the Jordan project recently. `It makes more sense for us to get ahead of the game by laying plans for responding to those water quality problems as they develop.' The state originally had no special plan for monitoring water quality in Jordan Lake. Then the project was slowed for several years by a lawsuit by the Council of North Carolina environmental group and Durham and Chapel Hill, upstream municipalities which discharge nutrient-laden affluent into the New Hope. Besides questioning the lake's water quality, their suit argued that completion of the project would lead to expansive and extraneous water treatment costs for upstream municipalities, likely to be blamed for fouling Jordan Lake. There was also a quote from Jim Wallace, Mayor of Chapel Hill, "There will be a lot of crow eating, and I don't expect to be eating the crow." Jim Wallace was also a member of the State's Environmental Management Commission and a leading critic of the project. Commissioner Jacobs said that it has been almost thirty years later, and in a lot of ways, what the leaders of Chapel Hill, Durham, and the Conservation Council predicted have come to pass. The costs and the burdens are going to be born by the municipalities that are at the headwaters of the lake and the state is slow to respond. Because it is going to be the rural buffer, it means that the agricultural community in Orange County is going to have to bear the burden of keeping the water clean for the downstream municipalities. He asked where is the reciprocity and if there has been any discussion with some of the municipalities that benefit from this clean water about contributing funds to conservation easements and other programs for retrofitting either the municipal areas or the rural areas of Orange County and Durham County. Syd Miller said that what was predicted years ago has come to pass, but not as bad as what was predicted. He said that, within the rules, there is a mechanism far nutrient trading. He said that he thinks local governments should lobby the state hard for putting forth some funds to help implement the remedy, because there is a disparity between who benefits and who pays. Chair Carey suggested that staff draft comments before the break related to what had been said tonight.