RALEIGH – I’m a fan of the classic fantasy wargame Titan. A deft combination of simple-minded fun and dazzlingly complex strategy, it puts up to six players on a board of interlocking spaces upon which they can recruit and then fight with various creatures – starting with centaurs, ogres, and gargoyles and graduating up to the likes of giants, dragons, and unicorns.

It just so happened that I was on a break from playing an online game of Titan, with my hydras confronting my brother’s hydras in a pitched desert battle, when I ran across an item about a bill currently before the NC Senate Finance Committee that would authorize special tax districts to fight the scourge of hydrilla.

The result was a double take. Are there miniature hydras threatening North Carolina communities? No, nothing so picturesque. But hydrilla is a scourge. It is an invasive aquatic weed native to Asia that was apparently introduced to the United States aquarium trade in the 1960s. It made its way into the wild and is now found in several southern states as well as on the Pacific coast.

Hydrilla is a problem in part because it creates a dense mass of vegetation that interferes with boats, fish, drainage, irrigation, and water recreation. In North Carolina, a major hydrilla infestation has plagued Lake Gaston on the Virginia-North Carolina border for years now. According to a well-timed piece in the July issue of Environment & Climate News, the Lake Gaston Weed Control Council has been waging war on hydrilla since 1985, but the war hasn’t gone particularly well.

An eco-friendly solution to the problem was thought to be to introduce carp, which eat hydrilla, into the lake. But the carp weren’t selective about what they ate or restrained in their breeding habits, both behaviors causing other problems. Now, the council has retained a private firm to treat the hydrilla with an herbicide.

The bad news is that the usual suspects, plus fishermen, reacted negatively to the idea of herbicides on the lake. The good news is that this initial reaction has mostly faded thanks to a series of meetings and public-education efforts. It helped that the proposed herbicide program had a lot of similarities to a successful effort to combat a weed infestation in Michigan’s Houghton Lake years before.

The issue is now before the General Assembly because local officials want to establish a special district for levying a tax on property owners around the lake. That appears to be a better mechanism than paying for the treatment with generally applied taxes, since those using the lake are the primarily beneficiaries of cleaning it up (and presumably commercial properties on the lake will pass along a good portion of the extra cost to their customers).

Here’s hoping that the hydrilla, once laid low, won’t just sprout more dangerous heads like those pesky hydras do.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.