OUR VIEW: Town-county cooperation: Will it ever really occur?

» New agreement to work together on water-sewer issue is a good thing, but we’ve seen it all before.

After a series of disagreements, the Town Council and Culpeper County Board of Supervisors agreed to work out a deal to provide the town’s water and sewer service to some customers in the county just outside the town’s borders.

That was last week. And last year. And 2003. And 20 years ago.

Yawn.

Even when there appears to be a breakthrough, somehow both sides seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Things looked good last July, when both governments reached a memorandum of understanding to create a joint water-sewer authority.

But it went no further than that. In fact, the memorandum was followed by bickering over the rate the town charged the county for up to 3,120 connections to the town system.

That was followed by county-filed lawsuit over the terms of a 2003 agreement. An amendment to that agreement was reached last week and resulted in the dropping of the lawsuit.

For now.

Pardon us for our pessimism, but we’ve seen this before and so have Culpeper residents.

We don’t like to go around reporting off-the-record comments, but we’ve heard enough of them to get a pretty firm grasp on the zeitgeist in the community.

Government officials, business people and regular Joes alike are pushing for an end to all this bickering.

Surely, there’s an agreement to be reached under which county customers can get service at a fair rate, the town can get an appropriate expansion of its borders and both sides can walk away happy.

We just aren’t sure it’s going to happen any time soon.

We hope our elected officials will do the right thing by getting together and proving us wrong.