By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

At a specially called meeting on Tuesday the Sanford City Council authorized the sale of $81 million in bonds to help finance the expansion of the city’s water system with those of Pittsboro, Holly Springs, and Fuquay Varina.

The city has previously determined that bringing the three nearby towns into the expansion of its Water Filtration Facility is the best way to grow Sanford’s capacity to treat wastewater as cheaply as possible. The project will expand the capacity of Sanford’s facility from treating 12 million gallons per day to 30 million gallons per day. Assistant City Manager Vic Czar is confident the expansion will create the kind of capacity needed to keep Sanford growing in the near future.

These Enterprise System Revenue Bonds will be used to finance the costs of extensions, additions, and capital improvements or replacement of equipment within the city’s Enterprise System (defined as the water treatment system) and the city’s proportionate share of the new system’s design and construction.

Under terms of the order adopted on Tuesday, the city and the Local Government Commission of North Carolina will arrange for the sale of the bonds to Wells Fargo Bank as underwriter for the Series 2024 Bonds under the terms of a Bond Purchase Agreement that is to be negotiated no later than July 10.

The Enterprise System Revenue Bonds are considered to be special obligations of the city that are secured by and paid from the revenues and income created by the operations of its water treatment facilities. They have no connection with the more commonly used General Revenue Bonds, which are supported by taxpayer-generated revenue. The special purpose water treatment bonds are supported and guaranteed by the operations of its Water Filtration Facility and transmission networks.

The sales of public bonds typically take only a few weeks to finalize and the city could conceivably have the money it needs well before the end of the summer.

Action follows years of putting the puzzle together

The North Carolina General Assembly has spent much of the past five years developing a strategy that encourages water conservation as the state’s population – now at 10.4 million – continues to balloon. The lynchpin in that strategy is the development of regional water systems, where economies of scale can produce significant savings in the volumes of water conserved and the costs of treating it.

The regional water system Sanford is spearheading is an example of that kind of thinking. Brick City’s greatest natural resource is water, and discussions on how best to leverage that asset in a way that economically benefits the city and supports our neighbors go back at least a decade to the time when former Mayor Chet Mann took office.

Few people understand how to make water systems work the way Czar does, and Sanford’s leadership over the years has worked hard to keep him and the knowledge he possesses here. The design of what is being assembled today largely had its origins in Czar’s mind, and it took years of planning what might be possible before city leaders could approach nearby communities with a plan to share Sanford’s water abundance in ways that could assist in their own growth.

It’s hardly been a year since the city signed an interlocal agreement with the towns of Pittsboro, Holly Springs, and Fuquay Varina to create a regional water system with enough capacity to keep them growing over the next several decades. Another action taken this spring transfers ownership and operational responsibilities for Pittsboro’s water systems over to Sanford effective July 1. The city has spun off a separate provider for its regional water system to be called TriRiver.

It was the city’s ability to get water to the Triangle Innovation Point megasite that closed the deal two years ago when Vietnamese electric car maker VinFast agreed to build its first North American manufacturing plant in eastern Chatham County. Sanford already had water lines that ran as far as the Raleigh Executive Jetport and with grants made by the state, the costs to the city for extending those lines to the VinFast site was barely $5 million.

What Sanford has done, and continues to do, with its natural resources and systems of distributing and treating them continues to be studied across the country. For Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon, the past few years have also become a model for how government is supposed to work in serving the people.

When the water system merger with Pittsboro was signed last August, Salmon said “this whole process has been a really amazing piece of governing. It has been a very complicated process to wrap our heads around at times, but the council has shown us how to dive deeply into it. This kind of governing is hard but now all that hard work is paying off. This is breaking new ground.”