 In late October, Norris met with the director of the Department of Environmental Quality, though he did not disclose it to fellow elected officials. “I really firmly believe it’s the obligation of elected officials who are looking out for the best interests of their costituents to ask hard questions, to go to the source, to find accurate information,” he says.
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Fellow government officials seem to think that Norris’ meeting fell outside the planned course of action agreed to at a recent meeting with the four boards that will decide the future of the area’s water supply.
Norris says the matter is a “manufactured controversy.”
On September 21, those four bodies,—the Charlottesville City Council, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) and the Albemarle County Service Authority (ACSA)—met to discuss modifications to the 2006 water plan set forth by City Council. Ultimately, the four boards hoped to agree again on a plan. Although resolution was not achieved, the bodies agreed to contact DEQ in the form of a letter. The letter would lay out the outstanding questions each board had.
Many people were surprised to learn on November 5, during a meeting between the Board of Supervisors and the ACSA, that Norris had met separately with DEQ in Richmond on October 22. They were surprised because they had not heard about the Richmond trip from Norris himself, and they were surprised by the individuals who traveled with him.
Charlottesville Tomorrow first broke the story of Norris’ DEQ meeting on November 6. Norris insisted that his meeting was not a lobbying effort. “This [meeting] had nothing to do with lobbying about one plan or another,” he tells C-VILLE. “What came out of that meeting was a very clear message, which is that anybody locally who uses DEQ as a boogeyman to try to scare people away from asking a hard question about this plan or working to improve the plan, anybody who points to DEQ and says ‘DEQ will never allow that’ is not representing the situation accurately. And that’s an important outcome of the discussion that I had and I’m very glad that I had a chance to hear that directly from DEQ.”
Although Norris did not disclose his meeting to either the RWSA or his fellow councilors prior to going to Richmond, he did send an e-mail after the November 5 meeting to councilors and supervisors about “the rumor going around that I have been inappropriately lobbying DEQ about out community water supply plan. This is categorically false,” he wrote. Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Brian Wheeler, who broke the story, was copied on the e-mail. But Tom Frederick, executive director of RWSA, knew about the DEQ trip before November 5.
“I received a call from the Department of Environmental Quality on October 26 that just simply stated that as a courtesy they wanted to let me know that Mr. Paylor had met with Mayor Norris,” he told C-VILLE.
In the Charlottesville Tomorrow piece, fellow councilor David Brown had harsh words for the mayor: “I am discouraged because [the water supply] is an issue council agreed to work hard together on.”
Norris stands by his assertion that he was not lobbying. He tells C-VILLE that most of the people who are opposed to the city’s efforts to improve the plan are those who are representing of what DEQ can or will allow.
“I don’t have a history with DEQ like they do, so I don’t know if they’re telling the truth or not. When I had the opportunity to meet with DEQ to find out for myself what DEQ is and what they’re all about, I jumped at the chance,” he says.
Norris was accompanied to Richmond by Richard Lloyd and Keith Rosenfeld. Both live in the county and have watched the water supply plan debate very closely for years. Although both are members of Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, a small but vocal advocacy group opposed to the 2006 water plan, they say the meeting was organized without the help or knowledge of the larger group.
“The Citizens for Sustainable Water had nothing to do with this,” says Lloyd. “We didn’t want to taint it by either side. We went down with clean hands.” Rosenfeld agrees.
“Our belief was purely that Dave Norris is the head of the city, the one person who has probably gotten one of the better commands of the facts of this in the entire process, and that he needed to go and hear directly from David Paylor personally and DEQ directly,” he says. “We just want to get the key players to go talk directly to the people involved in the DEQ and find out what the truth is and that is the only reason we went.”
He adds that neither the proposed pipeline nor the dam, two components of the 2006 plan, were discussed.
“They both entered the room with nothing in their hands. They sat down, they talked, took no notes, and they had a delightful conversation on both sides,” says Lloyd.
Norris says “the only regret I have was that my fellow councilors found out about this discussion from a phone call from a reporter.”
Not everyone was satisfied by the e-mail Norris sent on November 5.
“His email fell way short of the information that subsequently came out in the Daily Progress,” Supervisor Dennis Rooker says. “His e-mail almost made him sound like he went to breakfast and saw this guy and it comes out the next day that he was driven to the meeting by two people who have been lobbying to undermine the water plan for several years. I don’t think he was very forthcoming in that e-mail.”
Even the Daily Progress weighed in on the controversy with a harsh editorial published on November 10 that called out Norris for taking the meeting. “There was very little in that editorial that was correct,” says Norris. “What’s happening here is that they are trying to kill the messenger because they don’t like the message.”
Norris says that local groups like the Nature Conservancy, RWSA and ACSA have a close relationship with DEQ. “Those groups are also all firmly opposed to improvements in the 2006 plan that will give us long-term water security at lower cost and with less environmental impact,” Norris says in an e-mail. “In light of this fact, Richard and Keith invited me to accompany them to meet Mr. Paylor so I could hear for myself, from the director of the agency, what DEQ is all about. Just as I was happy to meet with some lower-level DEQ staff last summer with [former Supervisor] David Slutzky (a strong supporter of the 2006 plan), I was happy to go down this time with Richard and Keith.” The truth, says Norris, is that DEQ “wants to see the city and the county to come to a resolution amongst ourselves. They’d love nothing more than to see us work this out.”
Ultimately, will the water discussion be muddied by the Norris meeting controversy? Gary O’Connell, ACSA director and former city manager, doesn’t think so. (And neither do Frederick and Norris.)
“I am still optimistic [about a resolution], maybe this could be a New Year’s gift to the community,” O’Connell says.