Winston-Salem Journal Editorial

During the summer of 2002, while North Carolina suffered through a serious drought, then-Gov. Mike Easley pleaded with residents to conserve water.

Turn off the faucet while you shave and brush your teeth, the governor suggested. His aides set up public-relations events where he walked through parched farm fields and lamented the withered crops.

At the same time, the governor’s favorite golf club, an exclusive retreat for a very small number of the state’s most influential people, was manipulating the political system to get six million gallons of water to spread on its greens. Had it not been used on the golf course, the water would have flowed into Jordan Lake, a reservoir for the Triangle.

No one has demonstrated yet that Easley had a personal hand in Old Chatham Golf Club’s securing the approval for use of the water. But evidence uncovered by McClatchy Newspapers indicates that an unidentified someone in the governor’s office contacted the N.C. Division of Water Resources to intercede in favor of the transfer.

The club’s special treatment was not illegal. Chatham County commissioners had allocated the water to the club. But the state’s consent was necessary and, at such a time, the public would have expected officials to be more sensitive to fairness concerns. At the very least, the public would have expected the state, if it could not legally block the water’s sale to Old Chatham, to at least raise a protest about it and ask local commissioners to reconsider.

In retrospect, the approval carries a bad odor considering that we now know the golf club, in 2001, had waived Easley’s responsibility for paying dues. That saved him nearly $50,000 while he was in office.

North Carolinians might have also expected more responsible behavior from the directors of the golf club, who should have never asked for special treatment. And commissioners who approved the $10,000 sale of the water from the county’s allocation don’t look too wise, either. All around, it was an affair that smacked of self-interest and disregard for the public good.

Fortunately, a repeat of the Old Chatham episode is less likely. During the more recent 2007 drought, the General Assembly began to provide the state with more authority to regulate and control water. Ironically, legislators did so at Easley’s prodding.

At the time, it may have been illegal for the state to block Chatham County’s sale of the water. Now, it clearly is within state power to do so. And there is a regulatory process in place, one that, we would hope, will be more difficult to manipulate.