Plans to build a water treatment plant at Piney Run Reservoir may have been scrapped by Carroll's new board of commissioners, but South Carroll residents who opposed the project are not done fighting.

The residents are pressing on in their legal battle to stop county government from charging water customers fees that would be used to pay for future water projects.

A lawyer for the county wondered last week why those who successfully derailed the planned Piney Run plant would not "declare victory and go home." But Jeannie Nichols, a Sykesville councilwoman and a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the county, said the law that allows the fees to be levied should be changed.

"The thing that made people mad was the county was taking our money and spending it on something that nobody wanted," she said. "There's no reason to drop the suit until the county says that they'll do something about this fee."

The fees the residents have paid apparently will not be refunded, even though the $16 million Piney Run treatment is essentially dead. The quarterly cost to a typical homeowner might not seem burdensome -- "It's $35, $40, $50, not a big deal," said Jerry Ryan, a Westminster developer who has helped fund the lawsuit -- the plaintiffs maintain that the law is illegal.

Lawyers for the two sides appeared briefly in Carroll County Circuit Court for a status conference on the case Friday. Both sides said they would ask a judge to decide the case without a trial, since it is the law, and not the facts surrounding the issue, that is in dispute.

No date has been set to hear arguments in the case. A settlement conference has been scheduled for May.

In September, Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. denied the county's motion to dismiss the case.

Piney Run plan

The proposal to tap Piney Run Reservoir, a 2 billion-gallon lake in Sykesville and a favorite recreation spot, was unpopular from the time then-commissioners Donald I. Dell and Robin Bartlett Frazier voted to build it more than two years ago.

The state refused to issue a building permit for the plant and urged the county to pursue other options, contending that it would promote sprawl. Many South Carroll residents agreed -- and were particularly unhappy that more than half of the fees for "maintenance" were going toward the project.

"If you are developing for a population that is coming you shouldn't be asking the current population to pay for it," said Nichols, a Democrat who ran for county commissioner this year.

From July last year through October, the county billed customers of South Carroll's public water system for more than $1.1 million in maintenance fees and more than $1.9 million in connection charges, with part of the money to be used for the design and construction of the proposed Piney Run plant, according to papers filed last month in the case. In all, $4 million from fees was to be used for the plant.

Dell and Frazier were defeated in their bids for re-election last month, and both said that their support for the Piney Run project played a role in their losses. Dean L. Minnich and Perry L. Jones Jr., Republicans who won election to the board of commissioners this year, opposed the project.

The new board -- which includes Julia Walsh Gouge, the only incumbent re-elected and an opponent of the Piney Run proposal from the start -- scrapped the project on its second day in office. The project was deleted from the county's water and sewer master plan in favor of developing wells and expanding the Freedom water treatment plant at the Liberty Reservoir.

Attorneys' views

Daniel Karp, a Baltimore attorney representing the county, described the case as "essentially a political dispute," since the project is dead and, he said, any fees collected cannot be refunded under Maryland law.

The Court of Appeals ruled in 1986 that no taxes or other government charges may be recovered, unless a specific mechanism to do so is created by the legislative body, Karp said.

Ralph S. Tyler, a lawyer representing the residents, said the ordinance should be struck down because it exceeds the county's authority to tax. In previous written arguments against the county's motion to dismiss the case, Tyler said the fee amounts to a tax -- and the only statute authorizing the commissioners to tax for water and sewer expenses specifies that the money should go toward existing systems.

The ordinance also permits the commissioners to set the amount of the tax as they see "reasonable," which exceeds their authority, he said.