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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0012, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this relatively brief but rich interview, Edward S. Johnson describes one group's efforts to prevent the construction of a reservoir on Cane Creek. Johnson describes the emergence of a coherent grassroots opposition to the project, directed by the Orange Water and Sewer Authority (OWASA), and describes how the opposition worked. This grassroots movement was still working to prevent the project at the time of the interview—by proposing alternatives and attacking OWASA in court—but Johnson is resigned that the project will go forward. Developers certainly thought so and were already building in hopes the reservoir will raise property values. This interview is useful for its explanation of grassroots opposition to disruptive projects and for its discussion of the need for absolute solidarity in a successful movement.
Edward S. Johnson describes the emergence of a coherent grassroots opposition to the Cane Creek Reservoir project and describes how the opposition worked.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Today is October 28, 1985. This is Patricia Sloan; I'm interviewing Ed Johnson regarding Cane Creek and some other things of general interest to the Oral History Class. (pause) Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed on such short notice. How much time do we have?
Let's see,...Its a quarter of three; I'd like to be done by a quarter after three or three thirty.
OK. I'd like to know a little bit, if I could, about you and your family as well as your involvement in the Cane Creek controversy, and what things you consider to be particularly interesting in relation to that. We're also interested in the sense of community, and what kinds of feelings different people had according to their family backgrounds. (untelligible) So if we're not through today, I may want to make another appointment to talk with you further.
OK.
Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your family?
I'm a Chapel Hill native. My parents, especially my father, was on the
faculty here. He's now retired. They themselves were Texas natives and
they came here in 1924 I believe as graduate students. He was in
Sociology and my mother was in History. The got their Ph.D.s in the late
20s and then stayed on in faculty positions. I was born here, grew up
here. I got my Ph.D. here in the early 60s
(Some shifting, voice recording check at this point)
If you don't mind my sitting at your feet.
OK.
It turned out to be more than just a pleasant community.
Yes. When I moved out I was aware of the plans that the university had
to build a reservoir out there, and since the property that I owned
boardered on Cane Creek I took some pains to be sure that the reservoir
wasn't going to flood me out. And the plans at
that point—this is early 70s—were still up in the air, but it looked
like no version of the reservoir was going to put water up next to where
I was going to build a house or to block off access. So I went ahead and
bought the property and built the house; and had lived in it two or
three years, and had joined the local church and was meeting all the
people, when OWASA, which at that point in 1976 was just recently formed
as a legal entity, put out a news story-I believe it was August of
1976—to the effect of that, Indeed, they were going through with the
University's old plan of building a reservoir on Cane Creek.
This aroused some consternation in the community. There had been rumors
around for quite a few years that the University wanted
There was another meeting the next week; and there seemed to be general community opposition to the reservoir; and also a lot of ignorance about what the law was, and whether there was any recourse at this late date, and so on. So there was a lot of information-gathering to be done; and various of us set about doing various things.
A rather neat thing about the community is that it contains a diverse set
of people. There are a number of old farming communities that go back
200 years—The Kirks, and The Lloyds, and The Snipes, and The Teers, and
so on, and The Crawfords have been around for generations. There were a
number of people, such as me, who had moved into the community and some
had University ties. There were, here and there, a lawyer or an
executive of some sort or whatever—people who had had some contact over
the years with bureaucracies. It turned out that one of the talents that
we needed was dealing with bureaucracies. And there was another group of
people. At that time we referred to them as “hippies” but they were
basically counter-culture types who moved out in the country to get away
from everything. They were into arts and crafts and conservation and
organic gardening and so on. And all three
groups were together at this meeting.
This was the first time that a lot of us had laid eyes on people
Well, we contacted lawyers, eventually hired some; acquainted ourselves with laws, Environmental Impact Statements and such and found that OWASA had been cutting a lot of corners and did not know, apparently, that they had to file an Environmental Impact Statement because the corps of engineers had jurisdiction over Cane Creek because the flow average throughout a year was 20 million gallons a day down the Creek. I think at that point the corps of engineers had recently been given jurisdiction over all creeks up to the head-waters where the flow was five million gallons a day. So this means that the corps of engineers, although they did not want the authority, had authority over anybody who wanted to impede the water. That, of course, meant that OWASA had to file an Environmental Impact Statement.
Well, our first legal action involved an injunction against OWASA for
getting on the land and surveying. This was a much objected-to practice
by the landowners; they did not want OWASA
people on their land surveying. We took that to court, and lost it; but
I guess we also demonstrated with that action our determination. The
focus of attention then shifted to the Environmental Impact Statement
and that turned out to be a highly complicated affair. It was laden with
politics and power and also a lot of bureaucratic paper-shuffling. It
turned out that there was another legal hurdle that OWASA had to get
over; and that involved the acquisition of land. It looked like, from
our opposition, it looked to OWASA as if they were not going to simply
buy the land by waving dollars. It looked indeed as if they were going
to need condemnation authority. OWASA, being a strange legal beast, did
not automatically have the power to condemn land.
Water authorities, which OWASA was one of, and I think there may be only one other in the state, the enabling legislation only dates back to the late 60s or early 70s. The legislature saw fit to require that the authorities apply to the state government for condemnation powers and in so doing they had to meet several criteria: Showing that their choice of a reservoir site was the best possible one and that water quality was going to be high and a number of other criteria, including some social impacts. So this provided another forum for us to meet and challenge OWASA.
OWASA's application for the condemnation permit was where the first
battle occurred. There was a public hearing and both sides presented
witnesses. The Environmental Management Commission then reviewed the
record and granted OWASA their condemnation permit. We challenged it at
the Superior Court level; lost; and then took it to the North Carolina
Court of Appeals which overturned the action and sent it back. I guess
they were saying, in essence, that the Environmental Management
Commission cut corners, followed improper procedures and they had to go
back and do it right. And so that whole set of actions had to be
repeated. And the second time around OWASA was again granted a certificate of condemnation and we again
appealed it and—if memory serves me—that action now is still out there.
I think it could be resurrected but it is almost a moot point right now
... but it is possible it could be resurrected...In the meantime, the
corps of engineers (after a lot of diddling around) finally granted
OWASA a permit to construct the dam.
Now all of this activity commenced in 1976; and it was going, tooth and nail, probably through about 1982, perhaps. My dates are a little fuzzy.
That's OK.
We were fighting fiercely, the community was mobilized, we were having
fund raising events—two major ones a year and several minor ones a year.
We were using the money to pay legal fees and were somewhat optimistic
that eventually we could prevail. Then something happened that was a
severe blow to us; and what happened was that a major land owner, who
owned the dam site and several hundred acres of the reservoir site, cut
a deal with OWASA and got out of the fight. And that was a severe blow
because one way we had been keeping OWASA at bay was that they did not
have access to the dam site. It was on private property and they were
unable to acquire it. Well, as soon as they acquired that, that put the
whole fight in a different light. There were legal ramifications and
also there was a very serious matter of community morale and solidarity.
I would say that perhaps that was the turning
point in the fight and if that had not occurred, things would have
turned out in a vastly different way.
That land sale acted like the unblocking of a log jam and various other
land owners began to sell too and this was encouraged by the fact that
OWASA was now making moderately generous offers to land-owners whereas
before they had not been. So they wound up acquiring a good deal of
land, and in fact they have acquired all of the land they need with the
exception of approximately sixty acres owned by The Teer family; and I
am not sure what is happening with those
negotiations right now.
The Teer family has been here, oh, perhaps a hundred years. They have
been in the dairying business since the 1920s, and they are afraid that the presence of the reservoir is going to
put their
There's a lot of confusion here; nobody knows really what the facts are. They're trying to forecast the future and nobody knows for sure. In any event, The Teers have held out. They're still waiting, as far as I can understand it, for OWASA to make some kind of concrete offers and representations about helping to ensure them that they can stay in the dairying business.
In the meantime, OWASA has cleared off a lot of land where the reservoir will be, and they have built a small temporary reservoir inside the big reservoir's basin. They felt they had to do this because University Lake, in a dry year, is simply not adequate to supply the town, even if you add in the capacity of the rock quarry which they acquired several years ago.
After this started.
After the start of the Cane Creek issue, it became apparent to them that they were not going to be able to get a reservoir at Cane Creek on line as nearly as quickly as they thought and they did several things. They acquired an abandoned rock quarry and they built emergency water lines—one to Durham and a second one to Hillsborough. So with these emergency measures, they have been able to weather the moderately routine droughts we get here in August, September, and October. But they felt that they needed still another back-up supply so they have recently spent a million dollars on this sort of ‘mini-lake’ in the middle of what will, later on, be a large reservoir.
Well, that's sort of a thumb-nail sketch of the whole situation. I'm sure you have some more specific questions you would like to ask.
Yes. I looked at the Environmental Impact Statement and the summary of various sites that were being considered and I wondered if you had any reaction to how those arguments were presented. I know that you said that it was based on procedures rather than content, but I was stuck by the lack of parallelism even in the way they presented the data.
Well, early on we realized that if we were going to successfully fight against the reservoir at Cane Creek, we were going to have to provide alternatives and there were two that we thought were viable. One was an enlargement of University Lake. This got us into quite a squabble with OWASA and their Engineering Company consultants. We discovered that when OWASA took over the utilities from the University, they did not acquire University Lake outright. They acquired I guess a 99-year lease on the water, the dam, and a small strip around it; the University retaining rights to the bigger buffer strip around it.
Throughout this whole controversy, the University has loomed like a great hulking presence in the background. They have made their feelings known quietly to the members of the OWASA Board of Directors and I think OWASA knows which side of its bread is buttered. They know that the University does not want University Lake enlarged.
But they have the power, with the condemnation power that you mentioned earlier to condem the area around University Lake?
No. The condemnation permit was very specific to Cane Creek. But we've calculated that they could have enlarged University Lake to quite a large size and not have to acquire much private land, maybe a hundred acres or less compared to something like 750 acres at Cane Creek.
We—doing engineering calculations on lake size is not too difficult once you know a few rules; and so we made some calculations and we thought that they could get ten million gallons of water a day, which is their target amount, from an enlarged University Lake. But the University nor OWASA wanted to listen to that alternative.
Our second alternative was Jordan Lake. In 1976 when we began this, it had not yet been impounded. Indeed, this was towards the end of another legal wrangle over whether it should be impounded in the first place. And a federal judge in 1975 I think had finally said the case for it is much better than the case against it. So let's impound it.
The best information that we had-and all of this information came out of
the corps of engineers hearings and the federal case on the
reservoir-the best forecast about water quality was that it was going to
be adequate for drinking water supplies. Indeed, that was
Anyway this [Jordan Lake] was an alternative we always put forward as a viable one. And we got economists to look at it and it turned out, in our view, to be a very economical alternative. The water supply was going to be quite large-25 million gallons of water a day was well over twice what OWASA wanted; and we thought it would last well into the next century, maybe much more than that ... But the whole issue of water quality was raised against us, and because the reservoir was not there ... everybody was going on the basis of forecasts, and the forecasts were always hazy and fuzzy enough so that nobody could be sure. So we were always hoping that while our fight was going on with OWASA, the reservoir down there would finally be impounded and the water could be tested.
And we were frustrated because one thing after another happended. One frustrating thing was that they found some seepage inside the dam down there. Some people said that this was just routine, you would expect a dam to have some water flow down its core and others were worried; and it eventually meant that there was another year's delay impounding the reservoir.
And then, when it was finally impounded, the water quality experts say “Well it takes a year or two or three at least for the whole thing to settle down before we can get any good data on it.” So we never really had hard data on it until it was basically too late.
If the timing had been different, then we probably could have prevailed
simply by presenting the Jordan alternative as the best one. I still
think it's going to be a cheaper alternative than Cane Creek. Cane Creek
is going to wind up being vastly more expensive than people
Plus the past ten years of legal wrangling will be added on.
Yeah, part of this was going on during a period of rapid inflation, so as we delayed it, inflation inched the price up. A lot of things have gone on. I guess maybe the best argument in favor of the reservoir [at Cane Creek] is water quality, it is somewhat a pristine watershed ... Although not as pristine as OWASA presents it. There is a large number of dairies in the area, and a lot of farming, and the Bingham township, where it is, is rapidly growing, so it is somewhat sub-urbanizing out there. And people are sort of the enemy of water quality. People have a way of using chemicals in the backyard and weedkiller on the lawn and so on and all of this stuff eventually gets into our reservoir. And I don't think there is any way to prevent it.
One of the fears we've had and expressed from the very beginning is that
the sheer presence of the reservoir was going to act as a developmental
magnet. It wasn't very long after 1976 that we began to see ads in the
newspaper—“Lots on the proposed Cane Creek reservoir for sale” ... And
this has continued. There have been a number of developments out there.
We have headed off one or two that looked like they were going to be
high density, low-quality kinds of developments; but it's coming, and I
don't think there is anything we can do about it, and we are fearful
that, as newcomers move in, they are going to crowd out the old farms
and dairies that have been characteristic of that part of the county for
a long, long time. But I guess there's not
You sound pretty resigned to the eventuality that the Teers will sell and the dam will be built.
I think the community is resigned to that. There's probably a 99 percent chance that that's the way it will go. It's quite possible that the Teers may decide to fight the case and get it up to the State Supreme Court. We've had a couple of crusading-type lawyers with us from almost the very beginning. They're very sharp; they know the law; and they think that OWASA may be on the shaky legal grounds in one respect or two, and it may be enough to upset the whole thing at the State Supreme Court level. But it all hinges on whether or not the Teers want to persevere with that case. I don't know what's happening. I haven't talked with the Teers in about six months; I don't know what their thinking is right now.
It sounds as if controversy brought divergent elements of the community together and talking in a way they hadn't before. It also sounds like it hasn't continued.
Well, the fight sort of institutionalized our coming together
periodically. One way in which we came together was in the small group
that formed the executive committee. We met regularly, sometimes once a
week, as infrequently as once every 2 or 3 months, and that brought
maybe a dozen people together fairly frequently, and then we had some
community-wide events. In the fall we would have a Craft Fair. And that
required the coordination of crafts people and in organizing this a lot
of different people came together to do a number of things like cooking
barbeque, organizing the kitchen and getting drinks available, arranging
transportation and getting things for people to look at, tours of the
neighborhood and so on.
I think that some of these ties are still there. Friendships have been formed that would not have otherwise and that's gone on. We're going to have another Craft Fair this fall, and right now, we are planning to have Farm-City Day in the spring—partly because people see some value in doing this kind of thing, just getting together to do it, and partly because we have some old bills that need to be paid.
[Poor recording]
Yeah.
OK. I have about expended my alloted time with you for today. I would like to try to make another appointment if I can. I've got a whole page of notes...
I hope you find that it works.
Oh, yes. It will. Thank you.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
END OF INTERVIEW