Agenda - 10-30-2002 - 1 (AOG) - Laserfiche WebLink

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7 potentially we could take water, and it's also adjacent to our raw water intake, I forgot to mention that. We do have emergency raw water intake on the Eno River that we can take up to five million gallons a day from the Eno as long as the flow is above 30 CFS from March through June and 10 CFS the rest of the year. We're not taking water from the Eno right now because of the low flow and the time of the year. But we have taken some water from there this year. We have that potential. As a part of the permitting, we would probably get a permit to withdraw greater volumes from the Eno during high flow periods. We could fill that reservoir from Lake Mickey, Little River, or from the Eno. Our planning is looking at that potential from all three. Like this year, Lake Mickey filled up and overflowed. Little River is still not full. So, in that case, we could have been pumping some water from the Flat River into Teer Quarry even though there might not have been any flow in the Eno River, because there was water still available in the Flat River. Normally, though we would expect to fill that quart'during high flows, whether they be in the Flat, Little, or Eno Rivers; and then pump it down in low flow periods. Ed Kerwin: When do you invoke mandatory conservation? At what supply inventory do you start requiring restrictions in irrigation and that type of thing? Terry Roland: We don't have a magic level because it is very dependent on the time of year when that occurs. We've never gone to mandatory conservation but one time in my 28 years with the city and that was before Little River Lake was completed. We have gone to stage 11, or voluntary conservation, several times in the past, but we've gone to mandatory only once. Mainly because, when we go to mandatory, we start impacting people's lives pretty dramatically and their ability to make a living, so we don't do that unless it's really pretty serious. But we have a model that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill helped us prepare that we use to evaluate our water supply and what the probabilities are of sustaining the current demand and we track that constantly. And we use that really as our tool to determine when we need to go to higher levels of conservation. It depends on where we are in lake levels and what time of year. The earlier in the year that we're at lower levels, then the sooner we would have to enact more stringent conservation. The current levels that we're at right now, the model is predicting average daily demands, we're still at 100% meeting our demand. Now, you have to understand, and sometimes people forget this when they see the levels at Lake Mickey and Little River go down, the reason we have those lakes is to draw them down for water supply. If we never drew them down, we wouldn't need them. It's normal for those levels to go down and we really have to make that decision on a week to week basis. We did get approval from the City Council this year, a change in our ordinance, which would allow the City Manager to make that call so we could enact more stringent stages of conservation a little more quickly. And that's not just for a drought situation, but some other emergency—either a disaster or whatever. We could get in a situation where we would need to go to stringent levels of conservation up to and including the complete shut down of some customers and we hope we never have to do that. We will do what we have to do to keep everybody with water. Chair Jacobs: We know that the Durham staff is working with the Orange County staff about possible changes in the urban growth boundary. Could you just explain a little bit about—we know it comes into Orange County—but what's involved and how do you structure water rates for customers who are outside your boundaries? Terry Roland: We only have two classes of customers, and that is inside and outside the city. We also have our bulk customers. Inside and outside the city, if they are Durham City customers, the outside customers pay double the inside rates. The urban growth boundary was started in about 1974 by the city as a way to manage growth, and I think it's served the city well. The boundary has been amended several times over those years as the city grew and grew out to the boundary that existed. It's always been established sort of in terms of how those areas could best be served with water and sewer. That's been used to help determine where the boundary was. But it was also a growth management tool so that we didn't have a lot of leapfrog type of development. And so it's served the city well in that regard. Inside the urban growth boundary, but outside the city, water lines can be extended, but there is no city participation in that. Inside the city water line extensions, the city may participate in that if they choose to. It sort of depends on the project and what the circumstances are. But outside the urban growth boundary, if a developer wants to extend the water system within the urban growth boundary, then that extension is all at their cost. We do allow extensions outside the urban growth boundary for public health reasons. Those have to be certified by the County Health Department as a certifiable public health problem. We also allow extensions outside the urban growth boundary to serve schools and industries, but that takes special action of the City Council to allow for extension outside the urban growth boundary. And then, of course, we do allow extensions outside the urban growth boundary for interconnections with other utilities basically allowing those customers to take