They are not public speakers.  They are not tree huggers.  They are ordinary citizens, who farm, nurse, teach, promote Vance County, build houses and on and on, just citizens whose voices have been muffled as they try to slow precious water being taken from their homeland and sold for profit to more populous and thriving areas.  They want to be heard, they want their area around Kerr Lake to grow and prosper.  That’s it.

One must wonder who stifled the media coverage of a citizen’s group effort in Henderson last night. Ordinary folks are trying to slow a government-pushed fast track push to send Kerr Lake water outside of its service area.Those of us with Kerr Lake Park Watch saw WRAL extensively interviewing a City of Henderson official, and then, leave. KLPW’s Frank Timberlake was a speaker last night and sent his opinion to WRAL’s Adam Owens.

“Adam Owens – YOU DIDN’T EVEN STAY FOR THE MEETING! Yours is pitiful coverage of the Kerr Lake Water Withdrawal dilemma. You interviewed the bureaucrat and left. It’s not a debate. It is a battle of citizens against bureaucracy. It is the City of Henderson for profit, and the State of North Carolina for Tier 3 growth, trying to circumvent the intent of the law and to railroad through the Interbasin Transfer of 10 million plus gallons of Kerr Lake water to Franklin County and Raleigh, leaving the potential growth water for Granville, Vance and Warren Counties depleted. Understand that the City of Henderson gets over $2 million dollars a year for the water it now sells Franklin County, but Henderson spent nearly half a million building a pipeline to Franklin County, yet the west side of Kerr Lake doesn’t have any of the KLWRS’s water.

The truth is those 60 or so people last night at the Vance County Commissioners’ Room are trying to get signatures to stop the State of North Carolina’s DENR Division of Water Quality to approve the withdrawal, a process that was kept quiet and reduced from holding 3 public hearings to 1 and from advertising in 47 papers to 3 and the one used to promote the process to inform Vance, Granville and Warren citizens was the Mecklenburg Sun in Clarksville, VA, go figure.

So the band of citizens you left early last night are left with a half-ass story and must get petitions signatures without any strong media help, they must call their legislators and push not to stop the water transfer, but to halt it long enough for any Environmental Impact Study to be properly completed. Then they must decide if their citizen group, “Preserve Our North Carolina Lakes Community” along with the RRBA will take legal action.

All this is about supplying water to Franklin County whose big industries have pulled Governor McCrory’s strings and said, “More water or we go.” For the people in the Kerr Lake area, once the water is sent elsewhere, the pipe will never again be cut off. The people of Vance, Warren and Granville look sadly down at the greedy City of Henderson which operates the Kerr Lake Water Resource System and say to all, “Let them build and expand their businesses here.”

If you want more info from the people and ordinary citizen side, go to the website www.Ej-pp.org. WRAL’S story says there’s a July deadline. The real deadline to stop the water sale and transfer is April 30th, only six days.

Adam, your excuse for leaving early as the group’s leaders begged you to stay, was that you needed some video of the lake. How many hours of B-roll video of Kerr Lake does WRAL have?

I fully expect to see you named as one of the Governor’s spokespeople. That’s what happens to reporters when they lose their objectivity.”

Understand that we at Kerr Lake Park Watch are as much opposed to the fast track approach and rule bending as we are the lack of an Environmental Impact Study being performed. Governor McCrory told us that he would cut red tape but he did not mention that he would lead the effort to circumvent the law or have the laws changed to make that happen, lessening citizen involvement.

It’s your lake up there, take it back or lose it.