Water always find a way through or around any obstacle.
Unlike people, who can hinder or outright impede the best plans of engineers and public officials.
Which is not to say that engineers and public officials cannot get in their own way, or each others, too.
Few infrastructure projects in our community ever go quite as planned and quite often end up costing more time and money than they should.
And that’s if they ever get beyond the fractious mudslinging phase and into the dirt moving stage, at all.
This week the nearly six-month long dispute over a raw water pipeline through Morgantown’s White Park finally ended.
The pipeline connects a new reservoir under construction to the Morgantown Utility Board’s water treatment plant along the Monongahela River.
In retrospect, this project initially took a wrong turn in April as a result of MUB’s lack of due diligence, but just kept going as a result of the city’s leadership.
For a moment in October, following an agreement between MUB and the city on the water line’s route, it looked as if this project would get back on track.
But once MUB and the city got down to the details of a licensing agreement, someone’s idea of the perfect agreement got in the way of the common good.
Once MUB made it clear it would not accept several provisions of that “perfection” and brought those details — which it characterized as nonstarters — before the public, the city came to its senses.
We understand City Council and the city’s administration exploring all its options on such issues, but sometimes we get the impression it’s too often only tilting at windmills.
In most cases, trying to resolve issues that may not be imaginary, but are not as important, or impossible to overcome in the big picture.
Much like some of its other initiatives in the recent past — election changes, closing bars early, annexation, applying Home Rule to regulate local roads, the Haymaker Forest, etc. — our city government often gets ahead of itself.
Thankfully, it later thinks better of these ideas (with a little pressure from its constituents and stakeholders), which apparently happened in this tiff with MUB, too.
You can almost appreciate City Council’s and the city administration’s willingness to take chances to make changes and bring new ideas to the table.
But its approach often lacks any real consensus outside council’s chambers, and is sometimes unrealistic and raises more questions than answers.
One of America’s great modern poets once said, “Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”
Still, our city’s leaders’ nature need not always be seeking the lowest point before doing the right thing.
