RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A federal judge is deciding whether he heard enough Wednesday to rule in a lawsuit pitting North Carolina officials and Alcoa Inc. over the right to control the water and electricity coming from the state’s second-largest river system.
The case’s outcome “represents the drinking water supply of millions of North Carolinians,” Duke University law professor Ryke Longest told U.S. District Judge Terrance Boyle.
The judge called the lawsuit “a case of significant import.” Boyle didn’t announce when he’d issue a ruling on whether the case goes ahead to a trial over who owns 40 miles of the Yadkin River bottom on which Alcoa and its predecessor built four hydropower dams beginning a century ago.
North Carolina’s lawyers asked Boyle to rule that it has owned the riverbed since it became a state after the American Revolution and that the public now has a stake in Alcoa’s dams. The Yadkin flows for about 200 miles from the Appalachian foothills south through central North Carolina and becomes the Pee Dee River before entering South Carolina on its route to the Atlantic Ocean.
Alcoa has never shown any title, grant or easement for the riverbed and previously operated with the state’s permission because the dams once powered an aluminum smelter that employed thousands before closing in 2007, state lawyers said.
Since then, the company has sold the electricity to commercial customers. The dams generated power sales of about $30 million over the year ending in September 2013, the most recent period reported to regulators.
“The state had an obligation to bring this lawsuit” because the state constitution bans special treatment to anyone without any benefits to the public, said Lewis Lamar, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office.
Alcoa’s lawyers countered that the company bought land on both sides of the river from private property owners and that carried with it ownership of the riverbed between those tracts.
“Alcoa owns this land as lawfully as any property in North Carolina,” said Mike McKool, an attorney for the company. “This was a matter of Alcoa buying land from private parties that the state had long ago sold off.”
If North Carolina ever had any ownership of the riverbed, it was lost because state officials failed to claim it until Gov. Pat McCrory backed the lawsuit last year, Alcoa’s lawyers said.
McCrory joined his Democratic predecessor, Beverly Perdue, in opposing a new federal license letting Alcoa run the dams for another 50 years. Both governors have said inexpensive energy from the dams could generate thousands of jobs and that the river’s water is important to supply North Carolina’s 9.5 million residents.
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Emery Dalesio can be reached at https://twitter.com/emerydalesio.
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