The number has dropped in the last five years, from more than 8,500 to fewer than 7,000. Some had simply been misclassified as public systems, and others have been merged into larger systems. But North Carolina still has more systems than Florida, which has twice as many people, and more than Texas, an area five times as large.

Bill Holman, a former secretary of environment and natural resources, is now executive director of the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, a state agency that awards grants to help communities protect and restore water quality. He said that compared to other states, North Carolina's drinking-water protection program is in the bottom half.

The fundamental problem, he said, is that North Carolina hasn't had the political will to tell people they can't have their own little water system. If the state eliminated some of the smaller systems, he said, people would get better water at lower rates.

"An inordinate amount of time gets spent by regulators trying to get these systems into compliance," Holman said.

He said small towns and their lobbying arm, the N.C. League of Municipalities, have resisted consolidation. "Some people would lose their turf," he said.

Legislation defeated

Sen. Fletcher L. Hartsell Jr., a Republican from Concord, has introduced legislation in the last three General Assembly sessions to push poorly performing systems to hook up with municipal, county or regional systems.

Hartsell said the League of Municipalities and the N.C. Rural Water Association, a nonprofit organization that offers training and technical assistance to member water systems, defeated the bill the one time he got it out of committee and to the Senate floor, in April 2001.

If he's re-elected in November, Hartsell said he'll introduce it a fourth time.

"There's always concerns that there's going to be some kind of forced connection, or takeover, and I understand that," he said. "But, frankly, our responsibility is to look after the water supply."

Kimberly Hibbard, associate general counsel for the League of Municipalities, said the bill didn't guarantee that smaller systems hooked up to larger systems would be compatible in terms of water pressure, disinfectant and other features. Also, requiring such hook-ups could put unfair and costly burdens on public systems and, ultimately, taxpayers.

"The decisions to interconnect systems should be made on the local level, based on whether it's practically feasible and economically feasible," she said.