Tuesday night Commissioner Peter Thibodeau’s attempted to repeal the ban on connecting manual or automatic irrigation systems to the town’s water supply, but he found himself as the lone proponent.
          “I personally think it’s a good thing and don’t see a reason to change it,” Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said.
          “I’m very concerned about the message its sending” to people who may want to build or buy in town, Thibodeau responded. The message is: welcome to Wake Forest, but no water.
          Stinnett and Commissioner Frank Drake both said that was about right.
          Thibodeau said he wanted to repeal the ban – which only affects irrigation systems installed since last May when the board voted unanimously to approve the ban – because he sees it as “an inappropriate invasion into homeowners’ lives and unnecessary.” People who build or buy homes in the $300,000 and $400,000 range “are expecting to have irrigation systems, and I see no reason why we should manage the City of Raleigh’s water supply.”
          Although he voted for the ban, Thibodeau said he had been thinking the ban over since last year and may have been caught up in a “chicken little mentality” because of the drought. “I think we’re reaching too far into a homeowner’s property. We’ve got a nice full lake. I don’t see why we need to tell the homeowners they can’t have a connection without drilling a well.”
          “I thought we did this as a way to conserve water, period,” Mayor Vivian Jones said, “not for the drought but because we thought conserving water was a good thing to do.”
          “Wasn’t another reason the peak water usage in July and August and having to buy more water from Raleigh?” Stinnett asked. Under the terms of the water and sewer merger, Wake Forest must keep its peak use under 4.91 million gallons a day or purchase more water capacity from the city.
          The ban was to conserve capacity, Deputy Town Manager Roe O’Donnell said. After the merger agreement was signed in 2005, town officials began discovering that the new residents – the town has added about 7,000 residents in the last five years – were using much more water than older residents because of irrigation. The town was within 100,000 gallons a day of reaching the peak use, O’Donnell said, but Raleigh then instituted mandatory odd-even watering which eased the situation.
          O’Donnell said that after looking over thousands of accounts, he found that the average water user with an irrigation system uses 600 gallons more than one without irrigation.
          Thibodeau said in asking to consider repealing the ban ne was “thinking of the bigger picture. We want to attract people to Wake Forest.”
          The ban does not seem to have been a factor, Drake said, adding later that his wife, a lawyer, deals daily with home buyers, developers and builders. To his knowledge, he said, no one has said anything to her about the ban.