By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc.com

The Sanford City Council’s decision to take a second, much bigger step in the planned expansion of its water and wastewater treatment services to surrounding municipalities represents an important escalation in its efforts to become a major player in economic development in central North Carolina by making a name for itself as the major hub for the most valuable of all resources: water.

In early November, the city approved in separate unanimous votes two closely related documents known as “interlocal agreements” that will merge its water and sewer services with those of both Siler City and most of Chatham County on July 1, 2025. The process will work in much the same way that a nearly identical agreement between Sanford and the Town of Pittsboro went into effect on July 1 of this year.

When these new agreements with Siler City and Chatham County take effect next summer, the boost in size of the rebranded Sanford system known as “TriRiver Water” will be akin to what the United States experienced in 1803 after Jefferson persuaded the French to part with the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the new nation in just the stroke of a pen.

These new bilateral agreements consist of separate contracts between the City of Sanford with Chatham County, where the service area will consist of most of the western half of the county, along with its southeast corner. The Siler City connection will take on great importance as the town prepares for the construction and the beginning of operations for the computer chip manufacturer Wolfspeed, on track to go online within the next two years.

He who controls the pipeline…

Sanford’s greatest natural asset is the access it enjoys to seemingly boundless supplies of some of the state’s purest water, a resource that uniquely positions the city to become a major player in future economic development projects. The city has ample supply of this most critical resource, recently constructed infrastructure to move all that water and waste around, and perhaps the most important ingredient to help create success – arguably the best and most experienced team of engineers and staff in the state who understand the ways all these things will work together in years to come to ensure that Sanford and Lee County will continue to grow for the next half century.

Siler City approved its agreement with Sanford on October 7 and Chatham County did the same on November 4. The Sanford City Council ratified both agreements on November 5 during an Election Day meeting. Both are set to take effect next summer on July 1, 2025.

Sanford will take on the ownership and operation of each of these systems in the next few years. That means water and sewer customers will have TriRiver Water providing its water and sewer services. It means that responsibility for fixing broken water pipes will belong to TriRiver. It also means that the revenue that has been going into Pittsboro, Chatham County, and Siler City for their own separate water systems will now flow directly to the City of Sanford through TriRiver.

Employees now working in those three systems will be transferred to TriRiver with no loss of compensation or benefits, according to Assistant City Manager Vic Czar.

Achieving parity

A merger of this size doesn’t happen overnight. Engineers say their real overarching goal is to have each location’s quality of service to be about the same at any point in the system, a concept called parity. Czar believes that achieving parity within the four-municipality system is very possible, but his “engineering brain” knows it may take 20 to 30 years to get there.

Then, there is the issue of rate parity. Taking on another municipality’s system also means the city will assume the other municipalities’ debt, and that’s something that adds a lot of cost and sometimes can sink a well-intentioned agreement between two smaller players. Czar explained that successful mergers use an economies of scale approach, or cost advantages that companies can experience when the costs of production rise at a rate faster than its costs.

Sanford’s per customer rates for water and sewer services are significantly lower than any of the other three operations, but Czar told the city council at its meeting on November 5 that the goal for TriRiver is not to achieve parity, or equality, by raising rates for Sanford customers, but instead to accomplish it by lowering the rates of the other three.

But the successful implementation of these agreements means more than a few signatures on several sheets of paper. In many cases, there are issues that have to be cleared up by one or more parties before it can take effect and that is true with the interlocal agreement involving Siler City.

The town is presently under a Special Order by Consent with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality after years of failing to get contaminants in its wastewater system under control. Multiple violations of the Clean Water Act led to a moratorium on the issuance of any new sewer connections, effectively freezing the town’s ability to approve any new residential or commercial construction.

Like most cities, the water delivery and treatment systems within Pittsboro were not designed, nor intended to accommodate the levels of growth being experienced in northeastern Chatham County today. Most of the town’s water mains were built before the arrival of the Great Depression in 1929. And this inevitable growth is continuing to stretch the town’s ability to handle it, with shortages in water and wastewater capacities, issues with wastewater treatment, and even problems with water quality.

Over the last 20 years, Pittsboro has been forced to impose a temporary moratorium, or extend an existing moratorium, 15 times because of the limitations of its water treatment system. These actions have impacted construction of new residential developments, as well as commercial or industrial buildings.

But what Pittsboro lacks, Sanford has in great abundance: ready access to an abundant supply of clean water. Sanford draws its water from the Cape Fear River and discharges it into the Deep River (a Cape Fear tributary), but its wastewater scrubbing capabilities are so thorough that the water discharged into the river is tested to be cleaner than water drawn from the river downstream for drinking.

Sanford’s wastewater treatment capacity is presently 12 million gallons per day – enough for the city, but nowhere near enough for a city that wants to become a regional player in major economic development projects.

Meanwhile, Pittsboro recognized in 2009 that it needed a partner organization to help solve the limitations that its water systems were placing on its potential for growth and within two years, it began exploring a connection between its own wastewater treatment plant and the city of Sanford to increase its capacity.

Others nearby, facing the same circumstances as Pittsboro, began reaching out to Sanford as a potential partner and in 2021, an interlocal agreement was reached between the city and Pittsboro, Chatham County, Holly Springs, and Fuquay-Varina to study, design, and complete construction of an 18-million gallon per day wastewater treatment facility upgrade in Sanford to meet the needs of all five partners.

The vast majority of the costs for tying the systems together and expanding their capacities to provide adequate supplies of drinking and wastewater for the next 50 years are not to be paid from funds generated by local governments. Most of the dollars necessary to pull this engineering rabbit from a hat will come in the form of dollars already committed to it by the State of North Carolina and the federal government.

Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon paused the November 5 meeting to pay tribute to the many council members, staff, and economic development professionals who worked for more than a decade to hammer out an accord that will lay the foundation for a new kind of economic partnership, one focused on the sharing of natural resources in the advancement of a region, instead of just a city or even a county. A lot of that groundwork was laid during the very earliest days of former Mayor Chet Mann’s administration that began in 2013.

“What we’ve been able to do here is to break new ground by trying something that really hasn’t been done before,” Salmon said. “This kind of governing is hard, and it takes time, but many people saw the value of what could be gained by rolling up our sleeves and working side by side. Now, all that hard work is about to pay off.”

Mayor Pro Tempore Mark Akinosho sees the collaboration between communities as being the real winner for Sanford, saying “it allows Sanford to use its most abundant natural resource as leverage in becoming a regional leader in the central part of North Carolina.”

The next few months will see many of those final ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed by assisting Siler City with the closeout of some lingering paperwork. And come next spring, all that work will have been accomplished and the final documents will be ready to sign in hopes of getting a clean start to the mergers on July 1, 2025.