The animosity between Henderson City Council members John Wester and Elissa Yount flared up Monday night during an argument over the Kerr Lake water contract with the Army Corps of Engineers and a meeting with that federal agency last week.
Yount and Wester were among a group of 15 people who represented the Kerr Lake Regional Water System at Thursday’s meeting at the corps’ Wilmington office. The regional water partners — Henderson, Oxford and Warren County — are waiting on changes to the proposed water storage contract based on that meeting.
The corps’ initial proposal is that Henderson and its partners pay $3.455 million, financed over 30 years at an interest rate of 5.125 percent, to secure the storage of 20 million gallons a day of Kerr Lake water. Those terms would cost the regional system about $225,000 a year, roughly 10 times what the system pays under a water withdrawal contract whose latest extension expires Dec. 31. (One online amortization calculator suggests that 30 annual payments would equal almost $228,000 each; Assistant City Manager Mark Warren provided an estimate in late June, based on a 5 percent interest rate, that the annual cost would be $221,000.)
Based on figures submitted in the spring by EE&T engineering consultant Dean Ramsey in connection with the planned water plant expansion and on calculations City Council candidate Bobby Gupton discussed during the Speak Up Henderson forum before Monday’s council meeting, the impact of the corps proposal could be as little as 40 cents per month per water customer.
The back-and-forth between Wester and Yount, however, focused less on the numbers than on the process and who knows what. The two have clashed several times this year on issues such as the water plant expansion, group health insurance and Embassy Square, and they are competing for Yount’s Ward 3 at-large council seat in the municipal elections Oct. 11.
Monday night, Wester let the council know his displeasure with Yount for publicizing on HomeinHenderson.com what was said at the corps meeting last week. He said it was inappropriate.
After Yount’s article appeared here, Wester talked to The Daily Dispatch about the Wilmington meeting and the water negotiations but offered no details.
Yount said the information she provided is and always has been public information. The contract and the corps’ studies have been available on the corps’ Web site since May, she said. And the Wilmington meeting involved a government entity providing information to elected officials and staff from three local governments.
“Anyone can download the studies and reports and all of the correspondence that they’ve had with the city over the last 30 years,” Yount said.
Wester said the public should be involved, but issues need to be resolved. Wester at different times offered congressional action and litigation as avenues the city might pursue to get a better deal.
Wester, the longest-serving member of the council, used that tenure to add authority to his position.
“There are 30 years of history here, and with all due respect, Mrs. Yount has been to only one meeting with the corps,” Wester said. “She’s not on the regional partnership. She hasn’t been involved with the issues that have brought us to this point. I’m just saying there’s more to the story.”
“You know, you often accuse me of not doing my homework, and I find that now both insulting and incorrect,” Yount said. “I have studied, and I have been at regional meetings. You will remember that I was the one that advocated reinstating the regional partnership because until I got on this council, y’all weren’t meeting as a regional advisory board.”
Wester briefly countered that assertion, but Yount said specific members of the regional partnership board did not even know of its existence.
“I have studied the contract,” she said. “It doesn’t take 30 years to read a contract that’s 30 years old. It takes about two hours.”
“What they gave us came in May,” Wester said.
“What they have given us has come over a period of 30 years,” Yount said. “It plainly said at the end of that time it has to be a water storage contract. We’ve known that for 30 years.”
The 1974 contract between Henderson and the Corps of Engineers is a water withdrawal contract. It was meant to be a temporary agreement until a water storage contract could be arranged. After 30 years, the new deal wasn’t ready, and the two sides have twice extended the contract to provide time for the negotiations.
The corps put Henderson on notice in 1991 that the withdrawal contract would be canceled within three years and that the two sides should begin negotiations within six months on a storage contract as a replacement. A letter from Mayor Chick Young in 1993 shows that Henderson even then was complaining that the contract would be too expensive, particularly given the weak economic condition of Vance County. At that point, the regional system paid $6.06 per million gallons, which led to above-state-average water charges; today, the regional system pays $9.60 per million galllons, which produces below-state-average water charges.
Other than talk, lobbying and various studies, little concrete emerged on the water storage contract until late June, when the corps presented its $3.455 million proposal. City officials have been adamant in blaming the corps for causing the years of delays, which allowed the cost of the contract to increase.
At a meeting of the regional water advisory board in April, former water plant director Mike Hicks said Corps of Engineers representatives had given him a ballpark figure of $4 million to $5 million for the storage contract. That suggested range, higher than the actual corps proposal, did not stop the regional partners from moving ahead at that meeting with plans for the $21 million water plant expansion to a capacity of 20 million gallons per day. Wester chairs the regional board.
Mayor Clem Seifert finally reined in the Wester-Yount discussion Monday night. He noted that the next steps include waiting for the changes from the corps and a meeting of the regional partners to discuss the options. The corps should deliver the proposed changes late this week or early next.
Council member Mary Emma Evans expressed her confusion over the water issue. She was perplexed by the contrast between Yount’s detailed report and Wester’s vague offering.
Yount saw a remedy in Wester’s trying to refute or add to what she reported.
“It’s public information. It’s public business,” she said.
Corps information available online
In a letter to Seifert on June 23, Wilmington District commander Col. Charles Alexander Jr. noted that the Army Corps of Engineers’ required reallocation report on Kerr Lake water is available with its appendixes online. So check them out:
* Appendix A (power benefits foregone)
* Appendix C (Kerr water plan)
* Appendix D (environmental review)