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What is the Water and Sewer Management and Planning Boundary Agreement?
A perspective from Terri Buckner
On June 14, 2023, Aaron Nelson, Executive Director of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, petitioned the Chapel Hill Town Council to extend the 15-501 southern boundary of the Water and Sewer Management and Planning Boundary Agreement (WASMPBA) down to the Chatham County line (1 mile) and 1/2 mile on either side of 15-501.
Mr. Nelson made the same request a few years ago and Mayor Hemminger and the Council denied his petition. His current request claims this boundary modification will bring more affordable housing and missing middle housing to town.
Town staff have been working on a response to this petition which they will be presenting to the Town Council on September 20. For that reason, a brief history of the Water and Sewer Management and Planning Boundary Agreement will help those who wish to understand more about the petition and the upcoming staff response.
In 1987, Orange County, Carrboro and Chapel Hill, in response to ‘urban growth pressures occurring at the fringes of the Chapel Hill and Carrboro planning jurisdictions,’ entered into a Joint Planning Agreement (JPA).
The agreement designated land uses as urban, transition, rural buffer, or watershed. Further, it identified a process for joint development review within the transition areas and created a map to define the boundaries of each land use. That map has been updated several times over the past 30 years as rural transition areas have moved into Urban Services Boundary (the rural buffer area around Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough).
The JPA did not originally prohibit municipal water and sewer services outside of the Urban Services Boundary. But between the time when the JPA was signed in 1987 and 2001, OWASA had received multiple requests to serve disjointed areas of the county with individual pump stations, which are technically and environmentally inefficient. These requests created a concern that any growth adjacent to those areas could legally tap onto those systems which would invalidate the carefully crafted Joint Planning Agreement and facilitate sprawl.
To formalize where municipal water and sewer lines could be built out, the Water and Sewer Management and Planning Boundary Agreement (pronounced wah-sam-ba) was signed between Orange County, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough and OWASA in 2001. The first and primary purpose of that agreement was to create a county-wide service area for future water and sewer expansion and establish guidelines for dealing with private water and sewer in those areas where public service was not available.
The most recent JPA map shows the section of 15-501 referenced by Mr. Nelson’s petition to lie within the Joint Planning Area. It also borders the University Lake watershed (critical) at the tip end and lies partially within the Jordan Lake watershed (protected). Although the area lies within the JPA, it is also one of Chapel Hill’s extraterritorial jurisdictions (ETJ). ETJs are areas where residents do not receive municipal services, do not pay town taxes, and cannot vote for town leaders, but where all growth decisions are controlled by town planning statutes. So Mr. Nelson’s petition falls under the town of Chapel Hill’s zoning jurisdiction but any changes to WASMBPA requires approval by the other partners.
OWASA requires new water and sewer lines be paid for by the first developer to open a new service area. That developer is then repaid proportionally when additional developments connect to the infrastructure. In other words, opening a new area to OWASA service is expensive for any developer (or the town). Developers pay for the infrastructure cost through the price of the homes they sell but any existing residents in the area would be required to pay a fairly substantial fee if they wanted to connect to the service. That fee was roughly $10,000 per home in Rogers Road.
Decades ago, our elected officials envisioned a comprehensive growth plan that would ensure a responsible tradeoff between urban growth and protecting our natural resources and areas of rural character. If that vision is going to be modified, as this Chamber petition is proposing, it needs to be done in the daylight by fully informed, community participation.
These are just some of the questions I hope will be addressed by the staff presentation on September 20:
1) How much would such an expansion cost and how will it be paid for?
2) Based on past growth patterns, what is the likelihood of achieving affordable housing by expanding the OWASA service area?
3) How will residents in the ETJ, who are not represented on the Town Council, be included in decisions about the proposed expansion?
4) Are OWASA water and sewage treatment facilities sufficient to handle this proposed growth within their current capacity?
5) Would this extension be the first step toward annexation of that portion of the ETJ?
Terri Buckner served on the OWASA Board of Directors for both the town of Carrboro (2 years) and Orange County (8 years).
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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