ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 18, 1996 TAG: 9610180068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Some participants in a Virginia Tech-sponsored forum in Roanoke and Blacksburg on Thursday suggested state government needs to take a larger role in deciding how the state's water supplies are allocated.
Some, however, warned that legislators from politically powerful urban areas in eastern and Northern Virginia could change policy to the benefit of their own communities and the detriment of less-populated rural areas such as Southwest and Southside Virginia.
One discussion during the vidoeconference held at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center used the two-decade-old controversy surrounding the Lake Gaston-to-Virginia Beach pipeline to illustrate how current water policy works - or fails to.
Thomas Leahy, Virginia Beach's project manager for the pipeline, said current state law virtually guarantees controversy. The state, he said, essentially threw pipeline supporters and opponents into a room and said, "Work it out for yourself."
Lake Gaston, on the Roanoke River, was first considered as a possible source of water for the rapidly growing Virginia Beach area in the mid-70s. A preliminary study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1978 recommended using the lake, which sits on the Virginia-North Carolina border in Mecklenburg and Brunswick counties, to supply water.
Virginia Beach settled on using the lake as a water source in 1982, but North Carolina, through which the Roanoke River flows on its way to the Atlantic Ocean, opposed a pipeline project. Virginia counties and communities along the river and its tributaries to the west of the lake also were against it.
Opponents feared Virginia Beach's use of the water would harm the river environment and their own ability to draw on the water both upstream and downstream.
But now, Virginia Beach has crossed all the regulatory hurdles, if not all the lawsuits, standing in the way of using Lake Gaston water. Construction of the 76-mile long, 60-inch-diameter pipeline is well under way.
In deciding issues involving the transfer of water from one area to another, the state needs to be more involved, said William Cox, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech and student of the Lake Gaston controversy. "The state," he said, "is not much of a player in these kinds of proceedings."
Wayne Strickland, executive director of the Fifth Planning District Commission in Roanoke, said water allocation is one of many issues on which the state has taken a hands-off attitude. As a result, he said, when his commission was asked to take a position against the pipeline, no member ever thought of getting someone from state government to help the commission understand the pipeline issue.
An effort in the late 1980s and early '90s to get the state more involved in water allocation got nowhere. The Virginia Water Commission, made up mostly of state lawmakers, sponsored hearings and studied possible changes in water policy, including replacing common-law water rights with a state permit system for water withdrawals, but the effort failed to gain legislative support.
Ewell Barr of Danville, president of the Roanoke River Basin Association, said the problem facing those who would develop a state policy to allocate water is that it would likely be written by those who covet the water of others.
The withdrawals by Virginia Beach and other Tidewater communities from Lake Gaston are expected to reduce the lower Roanoke River's stream flow only 1 percent in normal times and 3 percent in a drought, and to lower the level of Kerr Reservoir, immediately upstream from Lake Gaston, only 3 inches during a drought.
It's not those effects, but the precedent that the pipeline will set and the endless demands that will follow on the Roanoke River's water that concern him, Barr said.
Barr said at least five communities are looking at the Roanoke basin, including Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, N.C., but Leahy called their interest unlikely.
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