This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Clint Atkins, Research Intern for the John Locke Foundation.

It’s the time of year when it is harder to quench your thirst and you cannot stop the sweat running down your back. It’s the time of year when you cannot help but lament your own helplessness to change the climate around you. It’s the time of year when you feel the insatiable need to “get to the coast and away from the big city for a while.”

I’m not talking about the recent run of 100-degree days. I mean, of course, that it’s the time of year for tightening water restrictions.

The recent sweltering temperatures have led both the media and lawmakers to get back into the mindset of water restrictions. Last week, at the beginning of the latest heat wave, Raleigh water consumption increased from 51 million gallons Tuesday to 58.2 million gallons Wednesday. This seems like a large jump, but that is still less water than was being used at this time last year, when most of the state was only “abnormally dry” and not on the cusp of 100 degrees.

Just yesterday, the legislature held a working group meeting to discuss what measures need to be taken if there is another drought on the horizon. The local newspapers and media outlets are doing more than just whispering about the possibility of another historic drought and the effect it would have on the public.

These fears of running out of potable water are understandable and deserve public consideration. These fears do not justify a series of restrictions based on the idea that the public is “shortsighted.”

Government agencies jumped last year at the idea of adding restrictions. These restrictions came in full force, affecting everything from lawn watering, to car washing, to water use in commercial buildings and restaurants. Support for government restrictions went so far that certain officials began to advocate regulating private well water use. (At the same time, public sentiment about the wisdom of government regulation began to shift).

The restrictions could have gone further and increased without end. Who is to say that the City of Raleigh should not have the right, nay the duty, to come into my house with a search warrant and ensure that I am not using too much water?

Government officials pursuing these restrictions never trusted that perhaps people could make decisions that would serve their best interest, nor that the public did care about its own well-being. But we did listen, consumption did go down, and people adjusted.

There was shortsightedness, but it was not on the part of the citizens of North Carolina. Rather, it was the state and local governments that believed the wisest, safest, quickest, and cheapest cure for the drought involved water restrictions. In the midst of this mania, where were the voices for expanding our water resources?

There are significant barriers, at both the state and federal levels, to building and expanding the size of existing reservoirs. Why was there not more outrage against these barriers or advocacy to remove them?

Many people advocated systems that would help alleviate the impact of the drought through water pricing. Public officials often snubbed these ideas as ridiculous, unfair, and unjust. Many commentators on the subject claimed water pricing would exacerbate a water crisis in its later stages. By the time they were discussing water pricing in earnest, it was too late to implement a new policy, and the drought was receding.

I guess it is poetic justice that in the end certain municipalities had to raise water rates to make up for the lost revenue caused by the their restrictions and decreased consumption. If only they would have had the foresight to think beyond the constraints of “98 days of water left.”

If North Carolina suffers another drought this year, will we see the same terrible response we did last year? Who knows? At this point next year, we could conceivably be at even higher stages of water restrictions, with assurances from our civic officials that this is the only way to go, and that they know best?

Unfortunately, until there is an ample movement in state and local governments of North Carolina to trust citizens and to provide for their long-term water supply needs, I fear that this year could be a sequel to the last. The state needs to come up with long-term policies that both protect the water resources we have and ensure the expansion of future supplies for our state’s rapidly growing population. People are going to continue to move here, and I assure you that there will be a summer in 2009, 2010, and in the future.

So as summer approaches and the temperature rises, it would be nice to learn from our past mistakes and not endorse the idea that the only way to solve the possibility of a drought is through government intervention and increased water restrictions. It is that intervention that got us into trouble last year and may have sown the seeds for discord this year. Let’s hope that in this heat, cooler heads prevail, lest a drive to the coast is the only way to get away from the madness and the only way to see any water that is not unduly restricted.