economically distressed community<\/a>, investments are being made.<\/p>\nVan Geons said the county is currently in active competition for projects that could generate $40 billion in investment and more than 15,000 jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cRemoving the water from the Cape Fear unfairly jeopardizes our ability to compete for these projects and will dramatically limit future opportunities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Local business owner and member of the Greater Fayetteville Chamber, Peter Pappas, said the Chamber\u2019s board passed a resolution against the transfer.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo company is going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a community whose water supply is uncertain,\u201d Pappas said. \u201cThis raises the cost of doing business for every industry in Cumberland County.\u201d<\/p>\n
Angie Hedgepeth, government affairs director for Long Leaf Pine Realtors and co-chair of the Greater Fayetteville Chamber’s Government Relations Committee, said she represented more than 2,500 realtors in a nine-county area.<\/p>\n
Long Leaf Pine opposes Fuquay-Varina’s request, Hedgepeth said.<\/p>\n
Fishing and boating<\/p>\n
Craig Williams, owner of Deep Creek Outfitters situated along the Cape Fear River on Person Street and the Cape Fear River, estimated that about 8.5 feet of water in the river is supplying Fayetteville.<\/p>\n
He said that if the request is approved, there will not be enough water for boaters and anglers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s all these folks want, is just put the water back in the river,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\n
Aaron Sweat, owner of Cumberland Marine in Stedman, said the river has been affected by past hurricanes causing log jams and that the Linden area only has ankle-deep water.<\/p>\n
He encouraged officials to look at flow rates when considering Fuquay-Varina’s request.<\/p>\n
Public safety<\/p>\n
Cumberland County Emergency Services Director Gary Crumpler said rural fire protection depends on water from streams, ponds and the Cape Fear River. He said there is a concern that less water will create a greater burden when a drought hits, drying out vegetation and causing the river\u2019s levels to drop.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis creates a dangerous combination for our communities and for the firefighters who serve them during large emergencies \u2026 Any change that reduces natural storage or water flow increases the burden on emergency services and lengthens response times and effort,\u201d Crumpler said.<\/p>\n
Legal points<\/p>\n
Fayetteville resident Kristie Allen said North Carolina\u2019s inter-basin transfer law was designed as a basin balance and safeguard.<\/p>\n
\u201cIBTs are supposed to be a last resort after reasonable alternatives have been exhausted with explicit protection for the donor basin and careful attention to cumulative impacts,\u201d Allen said. \u201cThe Fuquay-Varina petition turns this sequence upside down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former state representative and local attorney Billy Richardson said he helped write the law cited for the transfer request in 1993.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reason that law came into effect was because Wake County was taking water out of the Cape Fear long before 1993, in the 1980s, and taking it out of the Cape Fear basin and putting it into the Neuse River basin, already reducing our flow,\u201d Richardson said.<\/p>\n
He said that further downstream toward Bald Head Island, sediment is building up because the water flow can\u2019t push it toward the ocean and that ships are hampered from getting to Wilmington because of the flow capacity and sediment.<\/p>\n
He said Fuquay-Varina has had years to plan and the General Assembly passed laws requiring this.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they wanted water out of the Cape Fear, they should have built a treatment to send it and put it back into the Cape Fear River,\u201d Richardson said.<\/p>\n
Environment<\/p>\n
Jonelle Kimbrough, executive director of environmental nonprofit Sustainable Sandhills, which serves 11 counties, said an inter-basin transfer will threaten the quality of the region\u2019s water and have impacts on the environment, economy and culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to experience the enforcement of water rationing measures, higher utility rates and stymie economic opportunities here while development to our north (goes) unchecked,\u201d Kimbrough said.<\/p>\n
She said the Cape Fear River is already polluted by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, called PFAS, which are man-made chemicals used in products like nonstick cookware and firefighting foam.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis IBT could cause a proliferation of these chemicals across our state and present further challenges as our region attempts to mitigate the harm,\u201d Kimbrough said.<\/p>\n
PWC<\/p>\n
Richard King, chairman of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission Board, said PWC opposes Fuquay-Varina’s request to pull water from the Cape Fear River basin without returning it.<\/p>\n
King said it is PWC\u2019s responsibility to protect 250,000 people who rely on the river for safe, reliable drinking water, and 900,000 people downstream would feel the impact, as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will also shift the financial burden of treatment upgrades onto communities like ours, who will be forced to spend millions to manage the reduced flows and more concentrated containments,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n
Treatment and testing costs will increase, meaning rates will increase, he said.<\/p>\n
Misty Manning, chief operations officer for PWC, said if the transfer is approved, PWC will see a 1.1% reduction in available flow.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an unacceptable burden for PWC to accept when a feasible alternative of returning treated wastewater exists,\u201d Manning said.<\/p>\n
Cape Fear Valley<\/p>\n
Tavarus Gray, corporate director of engineering for Cape Fear Valley Health, said the hospital\u2019s water, power, heating, cooling and sanitization rely on a reliable water flow.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can not provide high-quality care on a reduced or unpredictable water supply,\u201d Gray said.<\/p>\n
Impact to military<\/p>\n
Army veteran Miguel Arroyo spoke about concerns that droughts and flooding already impact the Cape Fear River and also what it would mean for Fort Bragg.<\/p>\n
Fayetteville resident Charlie Allen said that Fort Bragg is home to several top Army commands, Special Forces and the nation\u2019s immediate response force, the 82nd Airborne Division \u2014 all of which he said depend on reliable water from the basin for aviation, training, maintenance, hospitals and housing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Cape Fear gets less reliable, that is not just a local headache; that is a national readiness problem,\u201d Allen said.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n
The next public hearing for Fuquay-Varina’s transfer request is 6 p.m. Dec. 9 in the ground-floor hearing room of the Archdale Building at 512 N. Salisbury St. in Raleigh. Sign-in and speaker registration for the hearing will begin at 5:30 p.m.<\/p>\n
Participants who wish to speak must attend in person.<\/p>\n
Another meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. Dec. 11 at the Chatham County Agriculture and Conference Center, 1192 U.S. Hwy 64 West Business in Pittsboro. Sign-in and speaker registration start at 5:30 p.m.<\/p>\n
A training session on accessing a virtual hydrological model used to evaluate alternatives for Fuquay-Varina’s request is Dec. 16. Registration is required, and those interested in the training can email maya.holcomb@deq.nc.gov to enroll.<\/p>\n
DEQ will also accept written comments on the request until April 1, 2026.<\/p>\n
Comments can be mailed to Maya Holcomb, Division of Water Resources, 512 N. Salisbury St., Raleigh, N.C., 27604, or by email to maya.holcomb@deq.nc.gov.<\/p>\n
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a Fayetteville hearing on Fuquay-Varina’s request to take water from the Cape Fear River basin, speakers told…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":430559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[691,200081,3059,58470,200082,2488,5495,17091,746,23697,1074,1089,67808,67003,200083,1075,454,7007,23700,2487,5376,4548,18302,425,2650,728,1077,17878,451,50,450,457,1076,6218,200080,159,645,2490,1078,646,67,132,68,17084,527,10270],"class_list":{"0":"post-430558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-bragg","10":"tag-county","11":"tag-cumberland","12":"tag-cumberland-county","13":"tag-enabled","14":"tag-energy","15":"tag-energy-u0026-utilities","16":"tag-environment","17":"tag-environmental","18":"tag-exclude","19":"tag-exclude-from-paywall-logic-testing","20":"tag-fort","21":"tag-fort-bragg","22":"tag-fort-liberty","23":"tag-from","24":"tag-government","25":"tag-green","26":"tag-green-living-u0026-environmental-issues","27":"tag-highlights","28":"tag-issues","29":"tag-liberty","30":"tag-living","31":"tag-local","32":"tag-local-government","33":"tag-local-news","34":"tag-logic","35":"tag-nc","36":"tag-negative","37":"tag-news","38":"tag-overall","39":"tag-overall-negative","40":"tag-paywall","41":"tag-rivers","42":"tag-scarcity","43":"tag-science","44":"tag-story","45":"tag-story-highlights-ai-enabled","46":"tag-testing","47":"tag-u0026","48":"tag-united-states","49":"tag-unitedstates","50":"tag-us","51":"tag-utilities","52":"tag-water","53":"tag-water-scarcity"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}