2006 Rural Partners Forum
Remarks by Bill Holman
I’m going to start out with some obvious things and then maybe go to some more provocative things. But like the food supply that Larry was just talking about, obviously water is essential to life on Earth. We can’t live without it. We use it to grow food and fiber. We use it to produce energy that Catherine is familiar with, and Secretary Tolson is going to talk about in just a few minutes. It takes a lot of water to cool those nuclear and coal-fired power plants and turn those turbines. Obviously we drink water, we grow our crops with it, we manufacture with it, bathe in it, fish in it, swim, boat, recreate, etc. In fact, a large part of our travel and tourism economy is founded on clean water. Folks go to our coast, to the outer banks (now to the inner banks), they go to these wonderful recreational lakes we have across the state. They go for the water. They go to look at it, they go to swim in it, they go to fish in it, they go to retire by it. It is not only important to our environment, but it is important to our state’s economy.
Yet despite all that, like the food supply Larry just talked about, we take it for granted. If you will, indulge me in a little bit of environmental history. And I say this to sort of queue-up for the challenges ahead, but a couple of the most successful things we have done as a nation have to do with water. We had a public health revolution at the turn of the 20th century, back when my granddad was coming along, and that was about protecting our water supplies and treating our drinking water, and it made all of us live longer lives. It made us a lot healthier, so now we can worry about obesity and cancer instead of dying of typhoid fever and things that were very common not too long ago.
We had a second environmental revolution in the ‘70s when we passed all these major environmental laws, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and that sort of thing. We went from barely-treated industrial, human and animal waste running down our rivers and contaminating our estuaries and our lakes – thanks to a lot of regulation, a lot of public and private investment and a lot of education – to a state where, despite large economic growth in our country and large population increases, most of our streams are cleaner today than they were 40 years ago.
And as a state, we have taken some very important steps in water management. I’m very proud I have sort of played different roles, advocate, bureaucrat, and now I am in the incentives business. But as a state we have done some very progressive things in water quality and quantity. The General Assembly created the program I run now, the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, to provide incentives to protect and restore water quality. The 1997 General Assembly established the Clean Water Responsibility Act, which was a comprehensive overhaul of our water quality laws. In 1998, the Clean Water Bonds provided additional funds through the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Rural Center to help primarily rural communities with their water and wastewater needs. And recently, the legislature set up a new commission called the State Water Infrastructure Commission to try to pull together the different local, state and federal funding partners and look at how to respond to these tremendous needs we have in drinking water, wastewater and storm water.
But having said that, by and large we still take this resource we have, this wonderful resource, for granted. I would submit that today abundant and relatively clean water is a real advantage that rural North Carolina has. It’s an advantage urban North Carolina has as well. We don’t have to create it. It’s here. But if we don’t put in place the right policies and make the right kind of public and private investments we will lose this abundant and clean resource that is critical for our public health, our environmental health and our economic health.
Now I am from an urban area, but I think urban North Carolina sees its water challenge as one of: where are we going to get the water for our growth and where are we going to discharge it into? The latter, I think they would submit, is a somewhat simpler task. I think rural North Carolina has a greater kind of water challenge, a three-fold challenge, because you are going to have to compete. There is going to be competition in our state for water resources.
So how does rural North Carolina compete for water resources with your more numerous and prosperous urban friends? There is an access issue to water resources in rural North Carolina. Today, I think many of you know, we still have folks in North Carolina who don’t have access to safe drinking water. They may be on shallow wells. We also have a lot of folks that don’t have adequate wastewater treatment. Folks in rural North Carolina need the same access to basic infrastructure as folks in urban North Carolina. And then there is the challenge of water as an economic resource. Again, it helps sustain our travel and tourism industry, our quality development. So how do we keep it clean to keep those things going?
If we are going to compete in this new global economy, we will have to better understand our assets. Water is our asset. We need to really better understand what we’ve got and how we collect it and treat it, distribute it, collect it again, treat again, discharge it, reuse it—you know, how it fits in both our urban and rural economic strategies. There are a number of important forces at play. First we’ve got to take into account global warming. That is going to have an impact on our water quality and quantity. We won’t argue the science today. We’d need another conference to talk about that, but I think the main thing we need to understand is if we have higher temperatures it affects the hydrologic cycle, that is how much water we get. It is going to affect how much it rains, when it rains, how hard it rains. It affects how much water evaporates from our reservoirs, drought frequency, flooding. All those things we have to begin to adjust and model. All our past models are based on what we thought the climate was going to be. It may affect the soil moisture, it may affect groundwater levels. A sea level rise will put more pressure on salt water encroachment into the aquifers of our coastal counties. Now that is a national issue and as international issue. I’m not very confident our dysfunctional national government is going to do anything about it for a few more years, but I do want to commend our governor and our General Assembly. They’ve created a commission on global climate change, and they are starting to work on this problem. I think they are beginning to understand some of the economic opportunities that may be involved in carbon sequestration and ecosystem services and that sort of thing.
Another obvious pressure on our water resources is our population growth. We really haven’t had that many conflicts in North Carolina, relative to other states, over water. It has pretty much been that there’s been enough to go around, enough for urban and rural, enough for industry, agriculture, municipal, etc. You know, it’s pretty peaceful in our state compared to a lot of other places. Even in the South. I mean, folks in Atlanta have been at war with Florida and Alabama going on 20 years now about the Chattahoochee River. So we have been lucky in that regard. But as our population increases it is going to put more demands on our water resources. We now have about 8.5 million people. As Larry Wooten said, we are going to basically grow by 50 percent by 2030. We will have about 12 million folks here in 2030, and all of them are going to take baths and drink and wash their cars and use water. And some of our population growth is in water short areas. The Piedmont is a wonderful place to live, but it doesn’t have the same kind of water resources, frankly, as the mountains or the coastal plain. So places like Greensboro have had to build a big new reservoir. We’ve had some competition already for supply. Back when I was at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources we had a fight over a 10 million gallon inner basin transfer of water for Cary and Apex out of the Cape Fear River into the Neuse River, and they were going to put it back. It was a big fight and they promised to put it back in 10 years. Now we have a big fight in Concord, Kannapolis versus the Catawba River folks. They are talking about 36 million gallons a day. These are the kinds of struggles we are going to begin to see. And that population is going to put more demands on our water infrastructure. The water infrastructure does not exist for 12 million people in North Carolina today. It barely exists for eight and a half. That is going to require, I think, substantial public investment.
Not only is the population increasing, but we are seeing increasing water use. I think we all understand water is a finite resource. There is only so much of it there, and our water use per capita has actually been increasing. Mark Twain, about 150 years ago when he was in Nevada, gave one of my favorite quotes on water policy. He said, “Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.” And I think that is some of what we are headed for. Again, there is going to be a lot of competition not only for irrigating our crops, but also our golf courses and our lawns and our office complexes. And we use drinking water to do that. Maybe there are some better ways to do things. And most of this water use in North Carolina is going to be driven by people. Much of our really water intensive industries, textiles for example, used a lot of water. Well, the textile industry is not using that much water any more as a lot of your small towns will tell you. But we are still seeing increasing water demand and that is based just on more personal use.
I’d also note that as vital as water is, it is probably useful to put it in some context. Most of us pay less for our water, sewer and storm water services that our county or municipality provides us than we pay for gas and electricity or cable or satellite TV or a telephone. You know, 10 years ago after Hurricane Fran hit Raleigh, I was without power and TV for eight days, but I sure was glad I had water, so I think even though we are paying less for this we depend on it quite a bit, and the market may – especially as we have more competition – be a bigger factor in how we look at water policy in the future.
A few recommendations to consider that I just want to throw out to get a discussion going: There are other forums where these things can be debated. Our keynote speaker talked about 21st Century strategies to tackle these issues, and I submit we need some 21st Century water strategies to match up with our 21st Century economic strategies. I think it is time to really overhaul and integrate our water quality and quantity laws. The last major water quality change was about 10 years ago in 1997. And the General Assembly really made a good effort to try to pull together some of these different programs and try to get them more focused on goals in each river basin. It was a great step forward. Unfortunately, most of our water supply – the quantity side of our laws – are much older. The State Water Supply Planning Act was passed in 1989, with only minor amendments since. Our Inner Basin Transfer Law was passed in 1991. Now a lot has changed in that time. Again, our climate is warming, our population is increasing, our water use is increasing. These conflicts we are having between communities, between users, water users, are starting to increase. I think it would be wise, hopefully starting in the next legislative session, to look at some better structure to these laws before these conflicts get really intense, before we throw it to the courts, so we can have water policies both on the quality and quantity side that are fair, that are reasonable, that are responsible, and move the state forward.
We have a lot of growth in the state. That is a positive on the economic side. It can have some negative environmental impacts. I think we need to grow smarter, grow better. I think that can be done, but it’s something we need to be looking at. We need good data to make these kinds of water decisions. I want to commend the Rural Center for its Water 2030 Initiative. It really provided policy makers like myself and the General Assembly and others a newly updated comprehensive assessment of the capital needs for water, sewer, storm water in all 100 counties, and began to give us some insight into the estimation of water demand in the future and again helping us anticipate, “Well, where are these conflicts going to come?” You can look at a few communities beside each other; they are both projecting their needs and they are planning to use the same river. There’s going to be some conflict coming. It may be time to go ahead and start getting people to come together and work together on that. I would submit we need this kind of systematic update of our water needs at least every two years, very much like the transportation improvement program is updated every two years. A lot of other things that are important to the state to guide us need frequent updates.
I am in the water financing business now, and the General Assembly has been very generous in their appropriations, but I think it would be useful to have some dedicated funding stream for water investments. We have identified together about $16 billion of capital needs over the next 20 years. Now local folks are going to pay for most of that. Local governments are the primary service providers. But I submit the state needs to help, and we need to find out an appropriate role and an appropriate source of funding so the state can help its local partners address these needs. As the water use increases, the competition increases and we are going to have to be more efficient. We waste a lot of water in North Carolina. I believe if we are more efficient and we use some of these wastewater reuse techniques, there will be enough water to go around if we work together and use the technology that is available.
I think there are some other opportunities out there, again, where we can match up the needs of urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina. Urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina both are going to need abundant and clean sources of water for drinking, but also for industrial use, for agricultural production. We’ve got a lot of land owners. You know, we’ve got a lot of investment tied up in land. For example, in my city of Raleigh, it would be really beneficial to folks who drink water in Raleigh and use water for industrial processing in Raleigh to work with all the folks who own the land in the Falls Lake watershed in creating the buffers and wetlands needed to protect that water source. And, basically, to provide some compensation to them so those ecosystem services of clean water and clean air are provided to an important regional water supply and an important area of the state. Thank you.
