THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 1, 1994 TAG: 9406300204
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
Take the first flow of water from the Gaston pipeline, whenever it comes, and douse that fire in the belly of bureaucrats for the power to make or, much more fun, break a project.
Last week's decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to hold Virginia Beach's lifeline to the future hostage to yet another environmental-impact study is bureaucratic officiousness at its worst. Legislators at every level of government give unelected officials far too much power which they far too often use to impede rather than accomplish useful goals; goals such as providing water for a city pop. 420,000.
This decision is also environmental law at its worst. Study after study has shown that the impact of the Gaston pipeline on North Carolina's natural environment is negligible; but to block the pipeline time and again, Carolina has had to show no proof of its claim of dire damage. Even if the impact were the next notch up from negligible, the fish population should have to adapt to the human, not the other way around. Evolution is a process which involves humankind and which environmental activists can't wholly repeal, however convinced they may be that billions of years have now produced the evolutionary peak: plentiful fish and angry folk. Maybe people belong on the endangered-species list. Or maybe just environmentalists, like bureaucrats, with sense.
Besides, Carolina actually gives two whits more about walleye's habitat than it gives about yak's milk. No reasonable water-supply option considered before the city settled on the Gaston pipeline got North Carolina's nod, except (with the heaviest irony) the Gaston pipeline. So why the unbridled opposition to it now? What does North Carolina really want? A share of the water for its own thirsting northeast? A four-lane road, as state Sen. Marc Basnight seemed once to suggest, across the states' line? An eternal leg up on its competition to the north, parched for economic development and tourism? What? And why doesn't Virginia Beach ask?
Plan A, the Gaston pipeline, got the nod mostly on merit - adequate water supply with minimal environmental damage - and math. It still does. Reasonable alternatives would start from square one in the environmental regulatory maze; the city would start millions in the hole. Plan B was . . . well, Plan B is now to make the heavy investment in Plan A pay.
Whatever recourse the city has through the courts it should pursue - and enlist the assistance of other cities and states equally vulnerable to a neighbor's obstructionism. Let the congressional delegation - whom, curiously, FERC notified first - muster what political clout it can to reverse the agency's decision, hasten its environmental study or require federal agencies to honor other federal agencies' environmental conclusions. So far, congressional clout can't wet your whistle, much less wash your car. If the delegation can't come through beforehand, the U.S. Senate race in November looks wild, woolly and significant enough to draw White House attention.
But it's time as well to try to resort to sweet reason. Given the sour history, that's asking a lot, and not just of Jesse Helms. But pursuing that overture from a Tar Heel senator - by a council delegation? by a blue-ribbon commission? - would cost little but pride and maybe, just maybe would cost less in funds and frustration than continued confrontation. by CNB