The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted Thursday to give the Historic Rogers Road Neighborhood Task Force six more months.

In the meantime, the county will nail down construction of a new community center.

“I don’t think anyone could say seriously that the work is done. When there’s a community center being built and when people are connected to sewer and can flush their toilets, then the work is done,” Commissioner Mark Dorosin said.

Financing for a $5.8 million sewer system is still on the table. The task force also will talk about the potential for development changing the neighborhood’s character and uses for the adjacent county-owned Greene Tract.

By Tammy Grubb

The Board of Aldermen will meet at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the OWASA Community Room, 400 Jones Ferry Road. (The meeting will be held at OWASA until after the May 8 election, since Town Hall is being used as an early voting site.)

The board will hold public hearings on several items, including a proposed application seeking state Community Development Block Grant funding for a public sewer on Roberson Street. The aldermen have approved building the sewer line in response to last year’s failure of the private sewer line serving multiple businesses in the 100 block of East Main Street. The $238,600 project will extend an existing OWASA sewer main from Maple Street to Roberson Street. The town is requesting 70 percent of the funding from the state program and has asked the county to help provide local funding for the project through the quarter-cent sales tax for economic development.

Other public hearings scheduled for Tuesday will deal with changes to the town’s land-use ordinance regarding compact car and bicycle parking requirements.

The board also is scheduled to talk about OWASA’s draft protocol for when the utility can tap its local allowance from Jordan Lake in times of severe drought and discuss the possibility of additional regulations on predatory towing from privately-owned parking lots.

State regulators slashed a rate request by Aqua North Carolina, the state's biggest private water utility with 88,000 water and sewer customers, including more than 400 subdivisions in Wake County.

The N.C. Utilities Commission approved a 5.3 percent increase for Aqua, representing an additional $2.3 million a year in sales for the company. The rate increase approved is a fraction of the 19 percent the company had originally asked for.

The rate increase will be the company's second in three years, and the request in January elicited hundreds of objections from customers who said they couldn't afford higher utility bills in the middle of a severe economic downturn.

The Public Staff, the state's consumer protection agency in utility rate cases, conducted a months-long audit of Aqua's books and concluded that the company was entitled to a puny rate increase of 1.2 percent.

The utilities commission decision, issue late Monday, essentially splits the difference between Aqua's position and the Public Staff's. Aqua had scaled back its 19 percent request to about 10 percent last month when company officials realized they had aroused intense passions from customers and skepticism from regulators.

Residents from Wake County and outlying areas made an impassioned plea Monday evening to the N.C. Utilities Commission not to allow Aqua North Carolina to raise their water and sewer rates for the second time in three years.

About two dozen people listened more than two hours to public comments challenging the rate request by Aqua, the state's largest private water utility. Aqua charges more than $100 a month for a typical residential customer in North Carolina, about twice the monthly bill charged by Raleigh, Charlotte and other municipal water departments.

The Cary-based company, with 88,00 water and sewer customers in the state, is seeking to raise bills by 20.4 percent for water service and 16.4 percent for sewer service, which would come to about $17 a month extra for a typical residential customer.

"It has gotten to the point where we don't water our lawn, we don't wash our car," Juli Williams, an Aqua customer who lives in Mallard Crossing in Raleigh, told the utilities commission. "I personally go bananas if my 10-year-old wants to fill a water gun in the summer. That's a personal story of how we have to live because of these water bills."

Several hundred protesters are expected in downtown Raleigh this evening to object to their water and sewer bills.

The placard-carriers will be objecting a proposed rate increase by Aqua North Carolina, a private utility that serves communities without municipal water/sewer hookups.

Dozens are expected to attend a public hearing on Aqua's proposed rate hike, to be argued before the N.C. Utilities Commission in the Dobbs Building at 430 Salisbury Street. About a hundred plan to demonstrate outdoors near the commission's office, said organizer Juli Williams, an Aqua customer who lives in the Mallard Crossing community in north Raleigh.

A recent study by the Orange County Health Department and UNC student groups found 10 contaminated wells and 24 out-of-compliance septic systems in the Rogers Road neighborhood.

For some time, neighbors have been asking local governments to connect them to OWASA's water and sewer systems. There is no evidence that the Orange County Landfill is responsible for well contamination, but the community has been asking for compensation for having to live with the odor, noise and traffic for nearly 40 years.

The health department wanted to apply for federal Community Development Block Grant funding last summer but didn't have the necessary data showing well and septic failure. The recent survey will enable the department to reapply this year, according to environmental health director Tom Konsler.

"There may be a need to act sooner than this," said Konsler. "There may be some needs to put some Band-Aids on some of these systems."

Most homes along Rogers Road already have public water, but among 11 households who agreed to have their wells tested, only one met Environmental Protection Agency standards for water quality. Most exceeded EPA standards for bacteria, mineral or chemical content and two contained unsafe levels of the gasoline additive MTBE.

Septic systems were tested at the same 11 homes, plus 34 additional homes that already had public water service. Among all 45 homes, more than half had septic systems that were either malfunctioning, in need of maintenance or otherwise out of compliance with regulations. Ten needed slight modifications, nine needed maintenance, and five needed replacement.