BY STEPHEN H. COWLES/CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Playback58@gmail.com

ISLE OF WIGHT—Isle of Wight County supervisors on Thursday unanimously approved billing water customers based on usage.

Residents were billed $60 for two months and got 6,000 gallons of water, said General Services Director Eddie Wrightson. Included in that bill was a fee for meter reading and maintenance.

“Now you’ll pay for whatever amount for water you use,” Wrightson said. “If you use 5,000 gallons, you’ll pay less than someone who uses 6,000 gallons.”

The change takes effect July 16. Customers won’t see the change until September.

Windsor District Supervisor Delores “Dee Dee” Darden said she sees this as a pay-as-you-go system.

In other matters, supervisors agreed to take $293,025 from the unassigned fund balance of the general fund for the Franklin Revenue Sharing Agreement.

“There is an area of the county near International Paper wherein the tax revenues are shared with the City of Franklin,” said County Public Information Officer Don Robertson. “This is the result of a settlement to prevent Franklin from annexing the IP property.”

The agreement between the city and county dates to 1986 and ensures that Franklin gets a percent of tax revenues from 6.37 square miles in the southern portion of the county.

When IP was fully functional, average payments had been as high as $1.2 million in some years.