For those who don’t read The Daily Dispatch, here’s the latest on the city’s “negotiations” with the Army Corps of Engineers on a water contract for Kerr Lake.
If you boil the story down, here’s what you’ll find:
* The corps still hasn’t told the city anything that wasn’t expected.
* The corps doesn’t believe, and isn’t ever likely to believe, that Henderson is getting a raw deal. Aside from the corps’ argument, stated here by others in the past, that the lake added more value to the property tax base than it took away, there’s the question of why should Henderson, Oxford and Warren County get consideration for land that was taken from Vance County?
* City Council member John Wester continues to play those surprise cards close to his vest, unless he’s bluffing.
* We’re still waiting for miraculous congressional intervention.
* The clock on a price higher than $3.455 million at 5.125 percent interest is ticking. Assistant City Manager Mark Warren is reported to have said that we’re unlikely to get a better deal than the current offer.
* The cost of the current proposal would be no more than 77 cents a month, or $9.24 per year. And, as Wester has correctly pointed out many times in reference to the water plant expansion, as the Kerr Lake Regional Water System increases sales, the average residential customer bears a shrinking share of such fixed costs.
Again, we say do the deal and move on.