"The longer maintenance and upgrading is delayed, the higher the cost will be. The materials cost more, and in many cases, the process costs more.
Pipes that could be repaired by relining now may have to be dug up and replaced at a much higher cost later if allowed to deteriorate, Drew said.
Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan said she remembers well what happened the last time the council deferred raising water and sewer rates. The following year, an even larger increase was necessary.
“We are literally still paying for it now,” Vaughan said.
At its last meeting, the council was one vote shy of the needed 6-vote majority to raise rates."
It's possible she is entirely correct but here is my reply:
"Perhaps repairing current water and sewer infrastructure would be a better use of the $22 Million Dollars the Greensboro City Council plans to spend to provide water and sewer to the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite in Randolph County.
Perhaps the rate increase is actually designed to cover the costs of providing $22 Million Dollars in Water and Sewer lines to the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite in Randolph County?
Too bad we've no transparency in local government as we'll never know for sure"
Until you can show us this isn't yet another backdoor attempt at funding projects the citizens of Greensboro neither want nor need, selling the public on any increase will always be a problem.
And in the same article Ms Ladd addresses a story about Greensboro's water quality that was first broke here on Thursday, June 2, 2016.
"Recent articles by The Guardian listed Greensboro as one of the municipal water systems “cheating” on its lead testing.
Greensboro appeared in a table of cities that the article said “violated EPA guidelines” by instructing residents to open the tap slowly, because slow flow rates cause less lead to be dislodged from pipes. Actually, the instructions said to “gently open the cold water tap” so as to keep the water from splashing out of the bottle, Drew said.
“The Guardian made the assumption that ‘open gently’ meant ‘flow slowly,’ ” Drew said.
Nor did the city violate EPA guidelines, Drew said. Those instructions, used in the 2015 water tests cited by The Guardian, were based on state and EPA guidelines at that time, Drew said."
But as is usually the case with the N&R, Ms Ladd provides no documentation, preferring instead to use only he said, she said accounts.
Vote Billy Jones for Mayor of Greensboro in 2017 and watch things change for the better.
