Faster water delivery remains high priority
Today's lead editorial:
Talk about troubled waters. A helpful offer from High Point and Greensboro was rebuffed by the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority last week with suggestions that the cities are all wet.
Mitchell Johnson and Strib Boynton, city managers for Greensboro and High Point, respectively, proposed taking responsibility for designing, financing and building a pump station on N.C. 62. The facility will push Randleman Lake water to Greensboro, High Point and Jamestown.
The project is assigned to the authority, and last week the authority decided to keep it -- rejecting Boynton's contention that letting Greensboro and High Point do it "can save potentially two to three years in how much time it takes to deliver water to our cities."
"The reality is, it's a roadblock that's going to slow us down,"John Kime, the authority's executive director, said. The authority already has plans in place and a process for securing funding, he added.
Tom Phillips, an authority board member from Greensboro, was more blunt Wednesday, calling Boynton's assertion "nuts. It wasn't going to save any time."
The authority's first priority is building a water-treatment plant large enough to produce 12 million gallons of clean water a day and capable of later expansion. The authority hopes to begin construction before July, with completion by late 2010 or early 2011.
The pump station will take less time. It can be started during work on the treatment plant but finished at the same time, the authority says.
Boynton doubts the authority's ability to take on two tasks at once, but Phillips says it's "not a problem at all."
It better not be, because it won't be acceptable if the authority doesn't fulfill its promise. Greensboro's urgent need for a new water source makes speed imperative. The cities build pump stations routinely, so the statement that they somehow might delay progress by constructing this one seems odd. Because the station will have to connect with the Greensboro and High Point hydraulic systems, the greater the involvement of Greensboro and High Point the better.
Greensboro City Councilwoman Trudy Wade, who supported the High Point-Greensboro offer, wants to examine the issue further at a council briefing Tuesday morning. Good. Authority representatives and city officials for Greensboro and High Point should talk about achieving greater cooperation with a common goal in mind: the delivery of drinking water as soon as possible. Trading disparaging remarks isn't making progress.
It's time to build a bridge over troubled but slow-moving waters.
Due to recent automated spamming attacks on our blogs, we are temporarily requiring commenters to authenticate themselves via TypeKey® before posting comments to any News & Record blog in order to prevent denials of service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.