Water belongs to the county's citizens

Thursday, July 10, 2008 — Sundays’ Letters to the Editor included a communication from Eugene Pickler comparing Stanly County’s recommendation that the state study the impacts of public, rather than private, control of the Yadkin River to the British experience of the 1940s.

Gene Pickler enjoys wide respect in Stanly County, but Mr. Pickler is just wrong here. Mr. Pickler’s comments rested on an incorrect belief that Stanly County wants to “take” Alcoa’s dams.

Here’s what is really going on: Several counties, including Stanly County, are recommending that the state of North Carolina urge the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to consider whether it is in the public interest to give Alcoa a new, 50-year extremely valuable federal hydroelectric license.

Do you have a driver’s license from DMV? Did you ever have to get it renewed?

Well, Alcoa got a license, 50 years ago back in 1958 that was good for 50 years for the exclusive use of the Yadkin River flows for hydropower. The license was granted to Alcoa on the condition that the United States government could get back its control of the Yadkin River at the expiration of Alcoa’s license in 50 years, that is, in 2008. Alcoa also agreed back then on what the price for its entire project, including the dams and power plants, would be if the real owner of the Yadkin River, the United States government, wanted it back to use for other purposes. With the government’s assistance, in 1915, the original licensee received and used the federal eminent domain authority available from its license to condemn private lands it needed for its project; that was because its project was considered in the public interest.

In 1958, a license was granted to Alcoa upon a finding that it was in the public interest. Of great importance were the 900 jobs that Alcoa was to provide at the Badin aluminum smelter. Those jobs are now gone overseas.

Fifty years have passed, the 1958 license has expired and the table is turned. Alcoa wants to claim it owns what it had under a 50-year license that has now expired. Once you get a driver’s license, do you think you now own it forever? Or do you think the police or Highway Patrol will suggest that to keep on driving, you had better make that little trip back to the DMV office for a renewal, which might include new rules before it’s issued to you again?

The leaders of our group that are supporting this Yadkin study bill are strong business people. We believe in private enterprise and we would like to see more of it, in Stanly County in particular.

But Alcoa is barring the county from offering the incentives available from the county’s natural resources, like the flows of the Yadkin River, to other private enterprises by insisting that what it got from the people is now its private property forever. Alcoa’s view actually supports the taking of public water by a private multinational company coupled with the idea that once taken, it and the value remains forever with Alcoa. That wasn’t the original deal; every 50 years, the government wants to re-evaluate what the best use of the river is in order to benefit its citizens.

The state of North Carolina should not deny itself time to study whether a decision involving the control of the Yadkin River, one of the state’s great natural resources, should be left primarily in the hands of a private absentee corporation necessarily driven primarily by the need for profits. This is not a question of free enterprise, but of a government’s responsibility to its citizen — the people to whom that water belongs.

Bruce Thompson

Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein, LLP

Raleigh

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