OWASA Outreach

In today’s mail:

Dear Candidates:

We believe our community’s water resources are a very important part of the quality of life in Carrboro and Chapel Hill, and we hope that you will contact us whenever you want information about our drinking water and wastewater management services, plans and policies.

We welcome the opportunity to provide you information at any time during and after the election season. Please feel free to visit our offices at 400 Jones Ferry Road and our Website, www.owasa.org; and to contact us by telephone or email.

Please feel free to get in touch with us about items such as:

• the OWASA Board’s policies,
• our plans for meeting future water supply and demand needs,
• the reuse of highly treated wastewater,
• our budget and capital improvement program,
• customer service policies,
• the operation and maintenance of the water and sewer systems including our treatment policies,
• our 50-year Master Plan, and
• the OWASA Board’s Conservation Goals and Objectives

OWASA is a public agency, our meetings are open to the public and our policies, plans and other documents are public records with limited exceptions under State law.

About two months ago, I contacted Ed Kerwin, Executive Director of OWASA, to get some data on UNC’s water/sewage usage profiles for the last decade and to get OWASA’s projections for UNC’s usage profiles for both Main Campus and Carolina-North. I approached Mr. Kerwin as a citizen, via email, so I got what I would expect the standard treatment.

That treatment?

In short-order I was swimming in more data than I originally requested. For instance, instead of the executive summary on UNC’s usage history, I got more than 10 years of data – broken out by a number of categories – with month by month statistics – and explanations of expected trends.

Not the behavior one would expect if you’ve read some rather interesting claims made during this election cycle.