"Water is the new oil"
By Colleen Cronin /
ecoRI News staff
The Ashaway Road property in Hopkinton that is part of a battle over land and water rights. (Colleen Cronin/ecoRI News)
A proposed amendment
that would have allowed residentially zoned properties to host commercial water
wells failed at a recent Town Council meeting.
All five members of the council voted
this week against the zoning change, sought by Thomas Byrnes, the owner of land
on Ashaway Road who has been seeking to sell water from the well on his property.
Byrnes was requesting that the town
change its land-use table to allow a “commercial water distribution center,”
which would help clear the way for a commercial well on his property.
The issue highlighted the clash between
individual property owners’ rights and the fact that water in Rhode Island is
becoming a scarce resource.
“This is the kind of business,
literally, and I don’t mean any pun with this, that would drain us dry,” Town
Council member Michael Geary said. “Water is one of those things that slowly,
for anybody watching, is slowly becoming a crisis.”
Council President Stephen Moffitt emphasized
that the council’s vote was not against a specific project, but the addition of
a whole land-use category.
“I just don’t see this can of worms is
beneficial to us,” he said.
Leah Boisclair, an attorney representing
Byrnes, said he may decide to continue the fight, which has led to contentious
public meetings, one gas station confrontation, and a cease-and-desist letter
from the town.
A well 900 feet deep and 13 years in the making
In 2009, Byrnes hired Northeast Water
Solutions to install an exploratory well and do a pump test in the hopes the
town would use it as a public water source, but it was never approved.
Prior to September 2020, when the town
stopped Byrnes from selling water, he allowed Benn Water & Heavy Transport
to haul water out of the well on Ashaway Road to fill pools, temporary water
tanks, and other uses.
David Benn, one of the owners of the
Ashaway-based company, said it was easier to haul water from the Byrnes
property for customers nearby, as the next closest well is about 24 miles away,
which is a costly trip for a heavy diesel truck.
The Ashaway Road well had already become
a topic of town discussion, and Benn said he started to hear “wild claims”
through the rumor mill: His trucks were hauling 50 loads of water a day —
something he said is not needed for his clients’ demands — or someone from the
company was camping out in the woods by the well 24 hours a day to monitor it.
Once when he was at a gas station in
town, Benn said he was approached by a man asking him about the issue and
berating him for taking water from Byrnes’ well.
Benn, who said “My family lives right up
the road, like we’ve been in this town for five generations, if not more,”
tried to explain the same thing to the man, offering his phone number for
further discussion. “We definitely do not want to be causing a hardship for
anybody,” he said he told the man, whose name he did not know.
Benn said he didn’t know the property
wasn’t zoned for commercial use while he was hauling water from the site.
Byrnes had showed him the approved well permit from
the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), Benn said, and
he felt comfortable going off that documentation, he added.
Benn said he wasn’t sure when his
company first began hauling water from the Ashaway Road property, but when he
found out about the zoning issue, he immediately stopped.
A cease-and-desist letter sent to Byrnes
from the town dated Sept. 30, 2020, cites a different zoning letter from 2013
that says the property is to be used for agricultural purposes only and that
commercial water hauling was not allowed.
Benn said he hasn’t hauled water from
the well since.
Not ‘at the expense of us’
Since the request for the zoning
ordinance amendment was submitted, there have been some heated meetings about
the proposed change.
The criticism has largely stemmed from
concerns that the deep well, which is 900 feet and goes straight to bedrock,
could impact other wells in the area.
“I believe this commercial water
distribution center is not in the best interest of our town,” said Joe Moreau,
a Hopkinton resident, at the council’s Oct. 17 meeting. “[Benn and Byrnes are]
in business to make money, but not at the expense of us. And that’s what’s
happening.”
Some residents said they thought Benn
hauled water out of the well this summer, after the town had already told
Byrnes to stop. Benn said trucks there in July had been taking or adding water
to holding tanks that Byrnes had installed on the property, not drawing water
from the well.
Timothy Gould, another Hopkinton
resident, submitted a petition against the well and the zoning change with 80
signatures from neighbors at a town meeting earlier this month.
Thomas Boving, a professor of civil and
environmental engineering and geosciences at the University of Rhode Island,
told ecoRI News that residents do have a right to be concerned because a well
used for commercial purposes could end up impacting surrounding water sources.
Boving likened the situation to the way
a bathtub operates: if the water coming in through the “faucet” (rainwater or
river water) is the same amount as the water flowing out of the “drain” (from
household use, or irrigation, or other uses), the level of water in the tub
doesn’t change. But if more water is drained than flows in, the level in the
“tub” will drop.
The only way to know if enough water is
coming into the system to allow water to be drawn for hauling would be to do an
extensive pump report, Boving said. But reports can vary in their process and
rigor, he explained, and one done in 2009 cannot account for changes or
increases in demand on the aquifer that occurred since.
Robert Ferrari, president of Northeast
Water Solutions, said the report completed in March 2009 showed the well could
produce a steady supply of water.
The 2009 report noted that more than 29
gallons of water per minute could be drawn without “severe drawdown of the well.”
It took about 2½ days to replenish the water resource to pre-pump levels after
water was drawn continuously from the well for 10 days as a part of the pump
test, according to the report.
Ferrari said no one will know if high
levels of withdrawal will impact other wells until an updated report is
completed. Since 2009, the topography of the area could have changed; for
instance, he said, more paving for example might impact the area’s ability to
reabsorb water.
Ferrari also said that in 2010, the state added strict pump test requirements for wells that can draw 10,000 gallows of water a day or more to show the well’s impact on the surrounding environment.
Because Byrnes’ well was approved by DEM
in 2009, to be approved under the 2010 law, another test that meets the new
requirements would have to be completed. To become a public well, it would also
need to be tested for certain bacteria and approved by the state Department of
Health, Ferrari said.
“If getting a new well report and a new
test is something that the Town Council would feel comfortable with, we’re more
than happy to do it,” Boisclair said. “We have no objection to that.”
The original cease-and-desist letter
from the town invited Byrnes to appeal the decision, an option that could still
be available. Boisclair said Byrnes could also find out how much of the land is
undevelopable, which is likely a large portion because of wetlands on the
property, and then get a use variance that shows the water and well are the
only viable use for the property.
Boisclair said Byrnes hasn’t made a
decision on his next steps.
Boving noted more cases like this may
pop up as the strain on water supplies grows.
“Water is the new oil … the new ‘black
gold,’” he said. “These are the issues that, so far, we didn’t have to deal
with because water was just there in Rhode Island and New England. But the
situation is changing.”
Colleen Cronin is a Report
for America corps member who writes about environmental issues in rural Rhode
Island for ecoRI News.
