SYLVA - No one disputes that Bonita Fox and her family needed help after benzene, a cancer-causing chemical, turned up in the well that serves their string of four small homes, lined up like boxcars along the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway in Jackson County.

The benzene makes the water undrinkable, state officials say. Two of Fox's grandchildren, ages 1 and 3, can't even bathe in it, while the rest of the family is limited to five-minute showers.

The solution that state and county officials have devised is hard for some advocates for clean drinking water to accept. The state plans to spend nearly $740,000 to run a two-mile water line to the narrow valley that the Fox homestead overlooks. The project will consume the entire $300,000 state lawmakers put in the 2006 budget to identify contaminated water systems, notify users and pay for improvements.

The water line appears to be by far the state's most costly remedy, per household, for a fouled drinking water supply.

Officials with the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the N.C. Rural Center, which also funds water projects, could not cite a project that cost more per household. The second most costly is a $4.7 million grant to the Beaufort County town of Chocowinity in 2002 that served 58 households. That comes to about $80,000 per household, less than half the cost per household of the Sylva project.

Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat, and Hope Taylor, executive director for the nonprofit Clean Water for North Carolina, fought for the special fund that is paying for nearly half the project. They said they want Fox and her family to get help, but they are alarmed at the amount of money being used to help so few people.

"I don't know that it was a real wise use of those funds," Harrison said. "I think we could have helped more by providing notification and testing for hundreds of citizens with that money."

More troubling, Taylor said, is that many other communities had sought help for contaminated wells over the past several years, but DENR officials put the Fox family at the top of the list without conducting an evaluation to see whether its members were the most deserving.

Taylor said she is not objecting to DENR's plans to use the $300,000 for the water line. But she wants the agency to develop a better use for the $615,000 that lawmakers put in the fund last year. She wants a plan that is more cost-effective and treats communities fairly.

"This is about preventing bad decisions in the future," she said.

Haphazard oversight

In March 2006, a News & Observer series exposed a haphazard patchwork of state and local oversight of private drinking wells. Although more than 2 million North Carolinians drink from private wells, the state did not require those wells to be tested.

The series prompted legislation in 2006 that required counties to test all new wells. It also helped build support for the emergency clean drinking water fund, which is named for Rep. Bernard Allen, a Raleigh Democrat who died in 2006. Allen's Southeast Raleigh neighborhood was plagued with contaminated wells; he had unsuccessfully sought to help other communities avoid such a fate.

Don't drink the water

Fox, 52, learned about the contamination a year ago. State tests found benzene levels in her well of 24 parts per billion, nearly five times what the federal government considers safe for drinking. The state began testing nearby wells, finding two that had benzene, but below the federal standard, which makes them ineligible for the Bernard Allen fund. The state recommended that those two homeowners not drink the water, and they will have access to the new water line.

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