The real usage is 150,000-160,000 gpd. None of the politicians seems to accept that the populations of Northampton County, Cape Charles, and Cheriton have all been shrinking for the past 50-80 years. Guess what — that means we don’t need to build the plant for 3 times the current population (160,000 gallons vs. 500,000 gallons/day). Does it take a rocket scientist to see that if you build a plant several times larger than needed, it will cost more to run?

Now that Panek has convinced Cape Charles to build this plant larger than necessary because of “free grant funds falling from the sky,” they have suddenly discovered it costs more than they thought to run it, so they want to inflict the cost of their poorly thought-out plans on the rest of the county. Personally, I’m not in favor of paying for their poor planning.

Don’t trust their “interpretation” of the survey results, either — they claim 5 positive responses out of 64 surveys sent out is a majority of people in favor or their proposal. Seems like some remedial math is in order.

There also seems a clear conflict of interest with Panek serving as both the head of the PSA and the assistant town planner for Cape Charles — of course he wants the county to bail him out of his boondoggle!