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Water war settlement derailed in Raleigh

Senate Bill 69, originally filed to codify a broad agreement between the city of Hendersonville and Henderson County on annexation, sewer extension and zoning, was replaced with an unrelated bill on elections and other matters in Haywood County, Jackson County and the city of Jacksonville.

By Bill Moss, Published: July 9, 2025

Convened in separate special called meetings on June 16, the Henderson County Board of Commissioners and the Hendersonville City Council each voted unanimously to adopt an interlocal agreement and proposed legislation to settle their differences over city utility extensions. At last, it appeared, the end was in sight for the decades-long water war —  and in a way that could not be undone by future city councils and county commissions.

Not so fast.

Anyone browsing the bill-tracking service at the state Legislature would have been flabbergasted to read what happened the very next day to Senate Bill 69, “an act regarding the operation of public enterprises by the city of Hendersonville …”

SB69 is now an act spelling out how “vacancies on the Haywood County vacancies are filled …” And no matter how powerful the AI app one chooses to use, the word search will turn up no mention of Hendersonville or Henderson County.

Cause of the train wreck? Chiefly, an overreach by the county commissioners and city council members, who inserted into the proposed legislation a section exempting their jurisdictions from a zoning provision the General Assembly passed last December. But other parts of the city-county drafted proposal need work, too, a Henderson County legislator says.

“Senate Bill 69 was actually repurposed for another county and municipality,” state Rep. Jennifer Balkcom said in an interview on Monday. “It did not move forward with anything for Henderson County.”

It’s unclear whether the city-county agreement is dead for good in the current legislative session, or whether pieces — those that don’t offend General Assembly prerogative — could be salvaged.

County Commission Chair Bill Lapsley insists that it should go forward.

“Oh yes, I did hear that,” he responded when asked whether he had received word that legislative leaders balked at the effort to use a local bill as a means to exempt one county out of 100 and a single city out of 550 from the statewide land-use law that barred downzoning.

But he said his message to the county’s legislative delegation was this: “You asked us to reach a compromise and we did and here’s the language. You said you’d codify it (into state law) and we expect you to do that. We told Moffitt and Balkcom if Raleigh wasn’t gonna change (the downzoning law) statewide that we wanted to do it for our county.”

New path to peace?

The derailment in Raleigh may in the end have created an alternative path to a long-awaited peace agreement.

City Manager John Connet, who traveled to Raleigh the day after the council adopted the settlement documents, found out at the capital that the downzoning gambit was a problem.

“I think the language associated with the downzoning” caused some concerns “with the House leadership,” he said. Balkcom “was gonna pull that out.”

But that’s not all. Another part of the proposed six-page bill drafted by the city and county specifically allowed the city to continue to require annexation in exchange for city sewer service in the Mud Creek basin, which is 113 square miles.

“My concern is the section on the Mud Creek drainage basin,” Balkcom said. “That’s a wide area for them to be annexing into the city. That’s a concern for people out in Edneyville. … There’s a few things that need to be changed. I think that it needs to be relooked at so I slowed it down. I will take full responsibility — let’s slow it down and get it right for the people of Henderson County.”

Connet said he would have no problem if the Legislature chose to strip out the paragraph on downzoning. But in case the bill goes nowhere, he said he is working on a new agreement that would enact the main points of the bill without the need for a state law.

“A lot of stuff in the bill we can do locally now,” Connet said, including forming a joint-water sewer commission, extending sewer service without annexation and ceding land-use and zoning power to the county on land that the city does annex. Connet said he may be able to release details of the newly crafted compromise as early as this week.

“I drafted up some language to send to John (Mitchell, the county manager) and some other folks,” he said. “My council is kind of reviewing it.”