Town may close water plant

Hillsborough eyes switching services to Durham system

DURHAM -- Hillsborough officials are looking to Durham as a place where they might buy all the town's drinking water and dispose of its sewage.

If the idea goes forward, Hillsborough would close its recently renovated water treatment plant in favor of piping in water from Durham's system. Sewage also would be piped across the Orange county line for processing in Durham.

The arrangement potentially could yield millions of dollars in annual fees paid to Durham, but it would also require the city to spend millions to expand the supply and treatment infrastructure to meet added demands.

"We've been talking to them for about a year," Hillsborough Town Manager Eric Peterson said last week. "It's simply a concept at this point. We're still studying it."

Hillsborough, which has about 6,000 residents, is working with outside consultants to conduct two studies -- one for water and one for sewer -- that look at the technical issues and the potential costs of forming an "equity partnership" with its larger neighbor.

Under the potential terms, Hillsborough would continue meter reading and billing services for its residents.

Peterson said he expects both studies to be complete in January. "That will give us an idea whether it is financially feasible and whether it's worth continuing talks," Peterson said.

Hillsborough draws its water from two reservoirs and the Eno River. But water supplies have been so limited in recent years that Hillsborough has had to limit development.

The town's drinking water also failed to meet federal and state safety standards in 2005 because of the detection of chemical byproducts called trihalomethanes, some of which have been linked to cancer in lab animals.

The town adjusted its use of chlorine in its chemical disinfection process to address the problem and says its water has tested within federal safety limits since May. To return to federal compliance, though, the town must meet standards for at least one year.

Durham has had some problems of its own. In March, a child was found to have been poisoned with lead after drinking the tap water in his South Durham apartment -- only the second such case in North Carolina history linked to a public water system. A flurry of water testing by public health officials followed, finding other homes contaminated with lead across the city.

The most likely source of lead contamination in drinking water comes from the corrosion of aging plumbing fixtures and lead-laced pipe solder in homes built before 1985, when a statewide ban on lead use went into effect.

The chemical processes used to treat city water can have a great effect on the amount of lead leaching from the pipes.

Durham acts decisively

While Durham officials publicly maintained the issue was a "plumbing problem" in private homes, the city in June suspended the use of a suspect chemical, ferric chloride, at its Brown water treatment plant.

Durham performed federally mandated screening of water samples from 69 homes in September.

City officials have announced they passed those tests, though state regulators have not yet confirmed those results.

Durham is taking steps to increase its water treatment capacity by expanding the Brown plant, increasing the size of one of its reservoirs and purchasing an old quarry on the city's north side that could hold 1.3 billion gallons of water from the Eno. However, the state limits how much water the city can draw from the scenic river.

Peterson said Durham first approached Hillsborough in 2005 about potentially releasing water from the town's reservoir to help fill the city's quarry -- the request that led to the current negotiations.

While officials in Hillsborough are talking openly about the proposal, some on the Durham City Council were caught unaware.

"The staff hasn't said anything, to my knowledge, about selling water to Hillsborough," Council member Thomas Stith said Sunday.