THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9509300025
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 53 lines
Virginia Beach won big this week: U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Hogan concluded that the Gaston pipeline is, unlike other options, adequate to Southeastern Virginia's proven need for water. It is among the options least harmful to the physical environment, and most helpful to the economic environment, of every jurisdiction it touches. It is, unlike some options, actually doable.
The only thing the pipeline isn't is actively under construction. The city plans to remedy that shortly as bids come in and contracts are executed.
What a long, strange trip it's been. Un-for-tu-nate-ly, it isn't over yet. Even as Beach officials gas up the bulldozers, North Carolina cranks out more court chal-lenges. And South-side Virginia is likely to restir the political pot.
The pipeline opposition is increasingly shameless: Judge Hogan, you may recall, directed the city and the state to try to reach a settlement. Politics, primarily Virginia's, killed a workable deal last spring. But the negotiations revealed the true goal of the most vociferous opponents either side of the Virginia-Carolina line: not so much to stop the pipeline as to get a piece of it or a payment for backing off.
Judge Hogan's comment on the need for regionalism on water and the lack of it is sad but true:
``Merely because the secretary (of commerce, in approving the Gaston pipeline) recognizes that Southeastern Virginia suffers from a regional (water) problem, and that the project will provide regional relief, does not mean that the party in this case will be able to secure such relief from other localities. If the history in this case has taught us anything, it is that assuming different governmental entities will cooperate is never a sure thing.''
So far, Carolina's legal challenges have doubled the cost of the legal fees the Beach expected to bear for the pipeline permitting process. How much have Carolina taxpayers paid in legal costs, and forgone in economic development, because of their state's dec-ade-long battle against the pipeline? How much have taxpayers nationwide paid for repetitive federal studies, hearings and such by overlapping agencies, courts and bureaucracies, with equally repetitive and pipeline-supportive results?
North Carolina's dislike of those results isn't reason enough, Judge Hogan ruled, to bar the pipeline. Surely he and his colleagues up the judicial command won't find reason to stay it. Let Virginia Beach build it, and let its opponents come to terms with it. by CNB