The Chapel Hill Town Council took an important step to help protect local watersheds after unanimously adopting a study on Lower Booker Creek last Wednesday.

Mayor Pam Hemminger said it was the job of local governments to manage and maintain their watersheds.

“We currently have citizens and homes and roads and businesses flooding out,” Hemminger said. “I see this as a real take-some-action, get-some-things-done to help that situation.

“But it also improves the water quality that we’re responsible and charged with improving.”

The study was commissioned by the council in 2014 and was completed by W.K. Dickson, a consulting firm based in Raleigh. It examined what happened in Lower Booker Creek during rainfall, identifying problems and coming up with a prioritized list of solutions. Town engineer Chris Roberts said the amount of impervious surfaces such as pavement and concrete can have an impact on nearby watersheds.

“Lower Booker Creek actually has the highest amount of existing impervious today of the five subwatersheds,” Roberts told the council. “And that’s really related to the commercial corridor along Fordham. The other subwatersheds are more residential.”

W.K. Dickson created a list of projects that would help solve these problems. These projects range in cost from $200,000 to upwards of $4 million. The total cost of these projects will be nearly $30 million, but Roberts said there was no way to calculate what the exact cost will be right now.

“When you get ready to move forward with a project,” Roberts said, “obviously, the final cost is going to depend on the market conditions at that time.”

While all councilmembers expressed support for adopting the study and beginning to plan for some of these future projects, some on the council expressed concern. The original proposal included the study and recommendations as part of the 2020 Comprehensive Plan. This was done to make a strong statement to show how serious the town is about fixing these issues and to give the study more authority. However, councilman George Cianciolo said he was not in favor of this idea.

“To incorporate what we don’t yet know into the comprehensive plan, once again, can be misleading to the public,” Cianciolo said. “In looking at some of this, there’s a potential that we’re going to need land acquisition. We don’t know the cost of that land acquisition.

“Until you begin your actual design, you don’t know what the actual construction costs are. I know we have estimates here, but we don’t know what those are.”

The final version of the study was adopted, but not as a part of the comprehensive plan.

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