Brunswick Regional Water and Sewer H2GO, popularly known as H2GO, is a water and sewer utility in Brunswick County that serves the northeast portion of the County including Leland, Belville, parts of Navassa, and some customers located outside of these municipal boundaries. Since 2011, the utility has worked towards building its own Reverse Osmosis plant. Constructing a $30-plus million plant is controversial and has its opponents. Three of the candidates oppose the plant.
Candidate Bill Beer of Leland spent nearly 39 years with Betz Labs and GE Water in water treatment.
“I oppose the project. And the reason for that is, it’s simply not needed. We have a utility, in Brunswick County Public Utilities. We already have one. We don’t need an RO plant.”
Don Yousey, a U.S. Air Force veteran, served as Health Director for Brunswick County for 14 years.
“The problem I have with the RO isn’t so much the contamination, it’s that they started with $29 million, now we’re talking $35 million, spread out over a 10,000 customer base. It’s a lot like health insurance. If you buy health insurance and you’re only insuring 100 or 200 or even 1,000 people it’s very expensive. But if you can get 100,000 or 200,000 in a pool, the insurance gets cheaper and I think if you are going to do RO, it ought to be done regionally and not by such a small group of people.”
Brayton Willis has worked as a wastewater design/construction engineer for private engineering firms.
“It’s going to be far more affordable to spread the cost of whatever treatment – regardless if its RO or granulated activated carbon – it’ll be far, far less expensive for our customers to do that on a regional basis because you got more people. You can spread the cost around.”
Election Day is November 7. Early voting is underway.
