Agenda - 05-23-1983 - Laserfiche WebLink

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077 not take into account, however, instream flow recommendations recently suggested by the :State. Lake Orange was financed by a County-wide bond referendum. It has been suggested that there was an agreement at the time Lake Orange was built that the waiter was for Hillsborbugh but no solid evidence of this has come forth. I have checked the BOCC Minutes and the language on the bond referendum and found no language to that effect. Mr. Kenneth Brawn with the Public Works Department has indicated that water has been released 1 or 2 times from Lake Orange each year for the past 5 years.; Water is generally released at open gate for 3-5 days to fill Lake Ben Johnson and then at one-quarter gate to keep a constant flow. The allocatio# of water from Lake Orange is not currently a critical issue because there is plenty of water to go around. Because consideratic of this policy could be controversial, the BOCC might simply want to defer any action to a future time when events make action on this problem more necessary. Action, for examplt, might be necessary if the State decides to implement its instream flow recommendations for the Eno as part of the management of all three reservoirs in the Upper Eno Basin. The recant- mendations in thelReport will still have served the purpose of alerting the Board to this gap in overall County water policy. 3. The third recommendation addresses the need for water conservation in times of drought especially where inter-basin transfers of water are taking place. OWASA already has in place a water conservation plan. The various phases of the conservation plan are triggered by the level of University Lake and the mandatory parts of the plan are implemented by adopted Town Ordinances in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. In recent drolight years the BOCC has passed a resolution encouraging water conservation when the towns took such action, but enforcement mechanisms are lacking for northern Orange if we encounter a more severe drought. To implement this recommendation, the BOCC could direct the County Manager and his staff to obtain copies of the Town Ordinances on water conservation, modify them as necessary into language suitable for the County, and bring the draft document to a future BOCC meeting for review. It would also be necessary to enoourage Hillsborough to adopt such an ordinance. 4. The fourth rec6mmendation has to do with protection of five reservoirs identified in the Report as "prime" sites and worthy of preservation. The Planning Board; modified this recommendation to include two additional sites for preservation. They are sites 17 and 18 in the Report near the County line on thelnorth and south forks of the Little River respectively. In selecting from the 28 potential sites identified in the County, the Report cited four criteria which were used to identify the prime sites . They were