Please the Residents in the Pen Mar area need your HELP... 90% of the resident do not want to be forced to hook up to EXPENSIVE COUNTY WATER, BUT guess what. the County is stating that the residents have no choice...AND that the residents have to pay for it too!!! Email in, call in, write in... Please HELP

Nothing personal s3 georgia but why should Pen Mar be any different than the rest of the county? Also are the wells in the area contaminated?

Similar thing happened in WV recently. My co-worker had to hook up to the supply, and it cost a pretty penny, from what I remember him saying, having to trench out to the main line and all that.

I have mixed feelings about it. I think it is healthier to have city water...flouride, less chance of contamination from storms and farms.

But should people be forced to pay to hook up to it when they don't want it? If it was me, NO WAY! I don't have a bunch of expendable income lying around to spend on something someone else is forcing me to spend it on. If the county would take care of all of it, since it is their project, I'd say go for it.

I would think having city water would help property values at least, but that might not be much incentive for folks who have lived there a long time and plan to stay the rest of their years.

I'd be willing to bet it would be cheaper to hook up to city water than to have a new well drilled. If we have droughts again a lot of people may just be doing that.

From what I've seen, the argument for mandatory connection to public water is that the users of private wells are dependent on a groundwater "commons" (i.e., it's owned by everyone and no one) that is relatively unprotected--it can be overutilized (especially in times of drought) and contaminated, leaving well-users without a dependable source of potable water.

But I'm not sure that's true--and people don't seem interested in learning if that's really true. A few years ago, there was talk of having the USGS come in and do a groundwater "budget" to determine how much groundwater is available in WashCo and, from that, consider some policies to protect against overutilization (i.e., create some sort of permit/water rights regime). But, with the exception of Bill Wivell, none of the commissioners at that time (this was prior to the 2002 election) wanted to fund the research (which was fairly cheap, but I can't remember the figure). Besides, it's not like public water is impervious to drought--as evidenced by Frederick City's experience during the 2000-2001 drought.

The contamination problem is a little more worrisome because of the area's karst geology and the prominence of farms that spread manure. WashCo does have fecal chloroform local contamination problems that I suspect are largely the result of field runoff. Good well sighting can reduce that risk, I think, but older wells, poor sighting, and unforseen circumstances will likely ensure that there will, from time to time, be incidents where some landowner temporarily ends up with (literally) crap in his well.

I don't know if either of these risks are present at PenMar, and if the size of the risk justifies the public and private costs of public water. I suspect it would be a lot more efficient to simply monitor the area for signs of contamination and to require residents to use bottled water temporarily if a contamination does occur.

An interesting question: Does the county want public water in that area in order to make it a high-density growth zone? I seem to remember that the proposed rezoning would put a high-density area up there, but I think it's confined to the fort. But maybe there's thought of expanding it? That would justify the expense of installing public water; you can't have high-density development that's dependent on private wells.