Get the water flowing
Friday's lead editorial.
Greensboro quit trying to pump up a regional water project when council members concluded last week that the city’s help wasn’t wanted.
“In other words they just skipped the whole step of having the PTWA turn us down again,” City Manager Mitchell Johnson wrote in an e-mail to High Point officials Monday.
PTWA is shorthand for the Piedmont Triad Regional Water Authority, which created Randleman Lake and still has to build a water-treatment plant on its shores. Plans also call for a pump station on N.C. 62 to push Randleman water toward Greensboro and High Point. In February, the two cities offered to jointly finance, build and operate that facility, saying their experience with similar projects means they could finish faster and at less cost.
The water authority board rejected the original proposal, then asked for revisions. Every time one issue was addressed, another would be raised, Johnson said.
“We could go back and forth on it for a long time,” he said Wednesday. “We didn’t sense there was really an interest on their part to do it.”
“The water authority would never let High Point and Greensboro do it,” Greensboro City Councilwoman Trudy Wade said. “I didn’t want to be responsible for any more delay than we already have.”
High Point City Manager Strib Boynton thinks Greensboro gave up too soon. He said authority board members told him the cities’ offer was acceptable with modifications, which High Point agreed to make.
But authority member Tom Phillips, a former Greensboro councilman, said it was hard to overcome a sour history.
“There are some members of the water authority that would not trust anything that High Point says,” he said. “And High Point isn’t alone on that,” he added, alluding to Greensboro. “This thing’s gone on a long time.”
Resentments go back to the formation of the project, which Randolph County members saw as using their land mostly for the benefit of the Guilford County cities.
High Point Mayor Becky Smothers finds it frustrating that decisions are made for reasons “that have very little to do with the project,” lamenting that the authority now will build the pump station “and they’ll send us a bill. Cost-containment is not an issue for them.”
Phillips said it is, asserting “absolutely” that the authority can build the pump station just as well as could the cities. “There’s not going to be a problem of delivering water.”
The target is late 2010.
“I assume they’ll do what they’re supposed to do,” Johnson said.
“We’ll be there with our lines,” Boynton said. “I’m sure Greensboro will, too. I’ll bet you the water authority won’t be ready.”
What once was touted as a model of regional cooperation now shows the strains of distrust and resentments. Maybe it’s too late to expect amiability, but all parties owe a professional attitude. Their job is to pump clean water to communities that have waited long enough.