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Tomorrow, Thursday, you can start buying
your scratch-off and other tickets for
the North Carolina Education Lottery,
which ought to be sued for false
advertising. The money that will go to
the state’s schools, only 35 percent of
the total ticket sales, will largely
replace not add to what the state is
spending on education now.
Of course the big winner is
Tom Shaheen, the lottery’s executive
director, and his staff. Shaheen has a
yearly salary of $235,000 and will get a
nice little bonus of $50,000 for
starting it on time. The rest of his
staff have equally tasty salaries.
Back in the 1920s, a
hostess (I think her name was Texas
Guinea) used to greet patrons at her bar
and gambling establishment very
honestly: “Hello, sucker.” The lottery
bill should have specified those words
would be on every ticket.
* * * *
Let’s see.
Wake Forest has been advised
by Raleigh not to enact its own water
conservation measures to help level off
peak use and regulate the use of lawn
irrigation systems.
Rolesville has been told,
flat out, not to annex what will be a
pricy subdivision and furnish it with
water because it lies partly or entirely
in the future watershed for the Little
River reservoir, which Raleigh will need
soon.
Meanwhile, so that its own
builders and developers are not hampered
by watershed regulations, the city wants
to do away with the designation of the
Richland Creek watershed as a future
drinking water supply watershed. The
city fathers and mothers are sure they
will never need a water intake on the
Neuse River.
Who said the city would
protect the rights of the towns in its
suburban water/sewer system? Who voted
for us to give up our independent
system?
* * * *
This may be shaping up to be
another drought year. Dale Crisp, head
of Raleigh’s public utility system, is
reported to have predicted that. He has
to look at Falls Lake, which has been
consistently at 250.7 feet above mean
sea level, almost a foot below its
normal level and 2 to 3 feet lower than
it usually is this time of year after
the winter rains. If it is this low when
the city’s water use is in the 41- to
45-million-gallons-a-day range, what is
going to happen this summer when it
soars to 60-plus?
Remember that Raleigh does
not have a comprehensive water
conservation program and has sold its
water at very low rates for years,
encouraging wasteful use. If Wake Forest
is finding its summer water-use peak
much higher than expected because of
lawn irrigation, the same must be true
of Raleigh’s high-priced new
subdivisions like Wakefield.
It all means that Raleigh
probably will continue to operate the
Wake Forest water plant, which can
deliver 1.2 mgd routinely, even up to 2
mgd for a short time, from the Smith
Creek reservoir.
The Wake Forest
commissioners and town staff have been
talking a lot about the 4.91 mgd peak
capacity we are allotted under the
merger agreement. That 4.91 mgd has
three parts: 2.71 mgd which was the
total amount of water the town could
receive under the contract with Raleigh
when the merger went into effect, 1 mgd
the town agreed to purchase at a cost of
$3 million when it signed the merger,
and the 1.2 mgd from the town water
plant.
If the water plant is
decommissioned, Raleigh has to make up
the 1.2 mgd from Falls Lake, something
that would be very difficult in a
drought year that begins with a low lake
level. |
