MONROE — Union County officially has a new plan to allocate water.

The county Board of Commissioners adopted the Short-Term Water Allocation Plan it hopes will divvy up water capacity “in a fair and equitable manner among competing interests,” and allow the Public Works Department to allocate water capacity to projects that are shovel-ready or have begun construction.

Work for the plan was first put in motion in February 2008 when the board acknowledged that peak demand at times exceeded available capacity. The board adopted a plan on Oct. 20, 2008, but economic conditions slowed projects that received water allocation and capacity was given out but not being used. This led the board on April 8 to call for a revision of the plan; that revision was adopted Monday by a 3-2 vote.

“I think this is the wrong approach,” Commissioner Parker Mills said. Mills and Commissioner Allan Baucom have long been against revising the plan.

Commissioner Lanny Openshaw said that it was incumbent upon the board to do something because the existing plan was not working. He pointed to 4,000 vacant residential lots that have water capacity allocated to them, but are not under construction because of lack of demand. He said the old plan “over-promised” capacity, which set in motion the need for an overhaul.

Openshaw added that Union County owes Monroe 2 million gallons of water per day starting April 30, 2014, and needs to prepare for that debt today.

Under current conditions and restrictions, water users of the Catawba River Treatment Plant, which covers the western part of the county, have an average daily water usage of about 10 million gallons per day, with some high days of usage in June and July at 16 million gallons per day. In 2007 under no restrictions, summer average daily usage was at about 16.1 million gallons per day, with the maximum daily use at 21.3 million gallons.

Union County has contracted to receive 18 million gallons of daily capacity from the Catawba plant.

In the 2007-2008 winter, the board was able to bring water usage down by restricting all lawn watering. For the new plan, commissioners said the baseline was to go to one-day-a-week watering, no less. Staff was ordered to make projections off that.

On Aug. 4, the state legislature made it possible for the board to take away water capacity from any project that had stalled and give that capacity to one that could build.

With these factors, Public Works staff projected that Union County has about 2.4 million gallons it can allocate to new projects as it sees fit and will begin to do so at noon on Monday.

One of the first projects in line will likely be the White Oak of Waxhaw nursing home, which is nearing a certificate-of-occupancy permit, but still has no water capacity. Half a dozen officials for the facility attended the meeting Monday night.

“We are more than pleased” that the new policy passed, said Tom Terrell, a spokesman for White Oak. If it receives water capacity, the nursing home is scheduled to open in early 2010.