Bucks County Herald – August 26, 2010

Pump NWRA

Dear Friends,

I’m looking at a map of Bucks County which Franklin Wood had the Planning Commission staff prepare for me in 1970. Forty years ago, the Executive Director of the Bucks Planning Commission was one of the best-known county planners in the nation.

Joseph Canby, Walter Farley, and I were the Bucks County Commissioners at the time. Good fortune had plucked me out of obscurity. The Court of Common Pleas had unexpectedly selected me to serve the unexpired term of John Justice Bodley who’d left the board of commissioners to become a judge. I was only 35.

It was a heady time. Canby and I were Republicans; Farley a Democrat. It was a very civil decade. Split votes seldom happened among us three of us.

In 1970, Bucks County was one of the highest regarded counties in the nation. A few years earlier, the Bucks County Community College was founded, one of the first in the nation. The parks and recreation projects were preserving open space; the Neshaminy Home for the indigent had been transformed; the Bucks County Prison work-release program was a model; and the Neshaminy Water Resources Authority (NWRA) had just begun its extraordinary mission.

I thought about the NWRA as I read Amanda Cregan’s article in the Intelligencer (Aug. 15). She was reporting that citizens were beginning to oppose natural gas drilling as they had opposed the Point Pleasant Pump 30 years ago.

“During the anti-Pump movement in the early 1980’s, activists fought against a project to build a $35 million pumping station in Upper Bucks [Point Pleasant], designed to pump millions of gallons of water daily from the Delaware River, diverting the water to Montgomery County [via branches of the Perkiomen Creek] as a back-up coolant for the Limerick nuclear power plant that was being built at the time,” Cregan wrote.

Opponents of the pump organized into Del-AWARE in 1980. They believed that nuclear energy was harmful and dangerous…remember, the Three Mile Island disaster had just occurred in 1979.

Opponents believed that if Del-AWARE could stymie the Point Pleasant pump, the nuclear plant at Limerick on the Schuylkill would be abandoned. Del-AWARE preached that pumping water from the Delaware and transferring it to the Schuylkill would destroy the ecostructure and hurt the Delaware River.

Back in the late 1960’s the Bucks County Commissioners formed the NWRA and named John Carson as the Executive Director. We had just laid out an ambitious plan to address three problems. (1) The Neshaminy Creek and its tributaries overflowed its banks every year costing lives and millions of dollars in property damage; (2) We wanted to add to the county parkland; and (3) the middle of Bucks and Montgomery Counties needed additional water supply.

We reasoned that installing earthen dams would create a water supply that we could sell to municipalities and the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO). We’d use that income to pay for parkland acquisition and repay the bonds. My 1970 Bucks County map shows 10 dams; only eight were built. Two of the lakes, Lake Galena at Peace Valley Park, near Doylestown, and Lake Luxembourg at Core Creek Park, near Newtown, are each more than one mile long.

Incidentally, the NWRA was a financing authority, not an operating authority. Thanks to the sins of the Bucks County Water and Sewer and Redevelopment Authorities, we chose not to create a financing and operating authority because of the lessons previous boards of commissioners learned the hard way.

Forty years after we’d created the NWRA and 20 years of litigation, the pump was built and the sale of water accomplished exactly what our plan was designed to do. Alas, ten years after we created the NWRA, the Three Mile Island disaster struck. Del-AWARE was formed and the pump ground to a halt. Unfortunately, succeeding boards of commissioners had not moved the project along expeditiously.

The appeals proceeded in and out of county, state, and federal courts. Finally the project landed back in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas. Only Judge Isaac Garb had the bravery to hear the case. I have tremendous respect for him. Judge Garb was facing a judicial retention vote and still was willing to preside.

His decision was in favor of the Bucks project. But in the process, Del-AWARE and Bucks County tax payers paid millions in litigation costs.

And, you historians know what happened.

“In the end, the pump was built,” Cregan reported. “It’s now housed in a historical-style stone barn, near Route 611. The river still flows and fish still thrive.

“Today, in the midst of a second severe recession and even higher unemployment numbers, some residents and environmentalists fear that the same scenario is replaying itself with fracking [gas drilling],” she wrote.

One thing remains clear to me. If Bucks Countians get up a head of steam, all Hell breaks loose. It doesn’t take much to motivate the citizenry if it believes that the government is wrong headed.

Thirty years ago, hard working, civic minded people formed Del-AWARE to save the sky from falling. It didn’t.

Sincerely,

Charles Meredith

PS. Bravo Patrick Murphy! My hometown was delighted to learn that the congressman was successful in securing $450,000 for a Quakertown Revitalization project. Partners include the Quakertown Council, Upper Bucks Chamber of Commerce, the Delta Development Group and Quakertown Alive!

“This grant will help to enhance and extend the current one million dollar Streetscapes grant project for the triangle park and Broad Street,” Naomi Naylor of Quakertown Alive! said.

‘We’ve got Democrats, Republicans, public and private sector working together to bring out the best Quakertown has to offer,” Murphy added. Huzzaahh!