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SUMMARY ORANGE COUNTY WATER SUMMIT MAY 16, 2002 The Orange County Board of Commissioners met on May 16, 2Q02 at 4:Q0 p.m. at the Southern Human Services Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for a water summit. COUNTY COMMISSIONERS PRESENT: Chair Barry Jacobs and Commissioner Moses Carey COUNTY COMMISSIONERS ABSENT: Margaret W. Brown, Alice M. Gordon and Stephen Halkiotis COUNTY ATTORNEY PRESENT: S. Sean Barhanian COUNTY STAFF PRESENT: County Manager John M. Link, Jr., and Clerk to the Board Beverly A. Blythe {All other staff members will be identified appropriately below) NOTE: ALL DOCUMENTS REFERRED TO IN THESE MINUTES ARE IN THE PERMANENT AGENDA FILE IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE. NOTE: THIS WAS NOT AN OFFICIAL MEETING SINCE ONLY 2 COUNTY COMMISSIONERS ATTENDED. THIS VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT WILL BE PLACED IN THE PERMANENT AGENDA FILE IN THE CLERK'S OFFICE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE. 1. INTRODUCTION A. Opening Remarks Chair Jacobs made opening remarks. Welcome. We are pleased to have sa many people that we wanted to have here today at this water summit, which is hosted by the Orange County Commissioners. Commissioner Moses Carey is sitting over here by the window. Commissioners Margaret Brawn, Alice Gordon, and Steve Halkiotis will probably be here by and by. We will take time, sa that everybody who is sitting up here can introduce himself or herself. I will be glad to recognize other people who are here. If you are representing one of the water providers, and you would like to come sit up here, there is still roam. So please feel free. My name is Barry Jacobs, I am also one of the Orange County Commissioners. We are pleased to host this water summit. We wanted to start off with a little comment from Ambrose Pierce to set the tone, and it's a definition of neighbor. "A neighbor is one wham we are commanded to love as ourselves and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient." We are all neighbors, but if we da not communicate, then we develop misunderstandings. Sometimes personalities get in the way. Sometimes we simply do not recognize that we have common interests. So what we really are all about is trying to get beyond the frictions and divisions. We assume that the water providers who are here today are here out of a sense of self- interest. Self-interest is good in this setting. What we want to do is talk about the issues that brought us to came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to have this water summit and to have these players in the same place at the same time. We are proud in Orange County of how long we have been committed to protecting watersheds, water supplies. We, in fact, in discussing this meeting, we protect the water for all of the municipalities and for Orange-Alamance. Everybody who is here, we help protect your water, because we protect the watersheds. We are not a water provider. Obviously, we cannot keep on doing things the way that we have been doing them over the course of the years. As growth takes place, it changes some of the equations, it bumps us against one another, and it starts to affect the resources that we have. We are obviously also in a difficult financial climate, more difficult for some than for others, but difficult for all of us. That may not go away. That may make us look at things a little bit differently. And we are also in a changed climate period, whether it is temporary or not. We went to capacity use in the Eno River system two and a half months before we normally do because of drought conditions. We are working on an update of our comprehensive land use plan. We first did it 20 years ago. Obviously it has been amended many times since. But we are trying to incorporate a lot of the thinking that has changed and also trying to incorporate the plans of those who have a participatory role in how Orange County grows. When we talk about learning the challenges and concerns of the water providers, we think it would be useful to have same common understanding of what we are each doing, a common language, and a common sense of at least understanding. Before we can even talk about collaboration or cooperation, we need to at least understand where the other person, or in this case, entity, is coming from. I think all of the