Mebane’s city council has agreed to support a grant application that, if approved, would bankroll a study about the potential pooling of resources between Mebane’s water and sewer services and the privately-operated Orange-Alamance Water System.
The council’s members formally lent its support to this grant application earlier this month after a brief discussion about the prospective merger with Orange-Alamance, which provides water to a relatively small area along the border between the two counties.
Kyle Smith, the city’s utilities director, recalled that officials with Alamance-Orange had originally approached the city about the pursuit of this state-funded grant, which could yield $50,000 toward a feasibility study about this marriage of utilities.
“This study will look at multiple aspects of each system: our infrastructure conditions, our assets, our maintenance, our operations – things like that,” Smith went on to explain during his pitch to the council.
“Neither of us is committed to complying with any of the outcomes of the study. It is just a study to see what it would look like if the two systems would combine.”
Tim Bradley, Mebane’s mayor pro tem, recalled that a potential union with Orange-Alamance has been periodically broached throughout his time on the council, although the added that the issue has always been short circuited by questions about the compatibility of the two water systems.
“A least at the end of the study we’ll have the questions [answered],” he added, “[allowing the council] to make any decisions or not make any decisions.”
The council went on to vote 4-to-0 on September 8 in favor of a resolution in support of a grant application to a reserve fund that the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality maintains to finance this sort of “merger and regionalization” study.
Bradley presided over that evening’s meeting in the absence of Mebane’s mayor Ed Hooks.
