York Citizen Tells JCC Supes that Regional Water Supply Plan is Flawed

By Desiree Parker Saturday, September 24, 2011

A retired physicist from York County who disagrees with a regional, long-term water supply plan wants James City County supervisors to consider his concerns when they vote on whether to support the plan Tuesday.

Don Phillips, a retired NASA physicist, told his own York County supervisors last week the same thing he shared with the James City County supervisors: he disagrees with this projection. Phillips feels the HRPDC’s plan is flawed because it ignored limits to population growth in nearly built-out areas, and it assumed a constant increasing water demand when that’s not necessarily the case. James City County Service Authority General Manager Larry Foster, who helped with the plan, says that the data is based on local projections and historic water use and that he believes the plan is reasonable.

Phillips did his own calculations of water supply needs for the peninsula based on a James City County population of 157,000 in 2050. He estimates the area will have an extra 20 million gallons per day by that time, while the HRPDC estimates a 5 million gallon-per-day shortfall in roughly the same period.

“The difference is clearly due to the failure of the HRPDC to take current population growth and water use trends into account in making their demand projections,” Phillips wrote in an email to York Supervisors last week (which he later sent to James City County supervisors).

In an essay explaining his argument, Phillips says while there was a high level of water demand in the region in the 1990s, this dropped off in the subsequent decade because areas such as Hampton and Newport News were close to buildout and population growth slowed, while at the same time more water efficient residential and commercial appliances and practices meant less water demand.

The HRPDC “ignored limitations to population growth and assumed constant, rather than changing water use per person,” Phillips says in the essay.

He argues that the local jurisdictions “pay the HRPDC extra for planning exercises like the Water Supply Plan. It is time that they start getting a higher quality planning product for their taxpayers’ money.”

Foster says all the utility directors in the region “have done substantial work on the plan,” and that the directors used population projections from their local governments as well as historic water use data in their work.

The HRPDC plan “may be more conservative,” Foster says, “but we feel these are fair and reasonable projections of what future use will be.”

The state requires the plan be updated every five years, Foster points out, so the HRPDC can make adjustments based on any new data.

Of Phillip’s plan, Foster says, “his isn’t a flawed model, we’re just more conservative. We’d rather plan for the worst. We are responsible for water supplies in our areas… and we have to look very far out [in the future] because it takes so long to establish new water supplies.”

The York supervisors voted to support the plan last Tuesday. The James City County supervisors will consider it Tuesday evening at their regular meeting. The meeting will take place at 7 p.m. in Building F of the county government complex on Mounts Bay Road.