Regionalizing water powers Central NC’s economic boom

Welcome back this Saturday. For those who celebrate it, we hope you enjoyed your Hanukkah, which ended yesterday.
 
North Carolina has been on an economic development hot streak in recent years, and that’s especially true in the Carolina Core, home to Wolfspeed, Toyota, VinFast, and other region-altering projects.
 
One feature of the area has proven essential to its growth. In fact, if media attention were correlated with a story’s actual importance, this feature would lead every piece. It’s not workforce, home prices, transportation network, or even taxes.
 
It’s water.
 
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In 1964, Sanford Mayor Tommy Mann faced a choice that would reverberate for the next six decades.
 
The city needed to construct a water plant to facilitate future growth. For untold reasons – some related, perhaps, to personal, not municipal, interests – an entrenched constituency pushed to locate that water plant on the Deep River.
 
Mayor Mann knew better than to gauge the river’s depth by its name. As a kid in the 1930s, he traversed the Deep River on foot during a drought. He knew it may prove an insufficient site because of that risk.
 
So Mayor Mann fought to build the water plant on the Cape Fear River instead. He won the contested city council vote, 4-3.
 
The city didn’t just build water infrastructure to accommodate medium-term growth projections. Sanford, the seat of a county with less than 30,000 residents at the time, created infrastructure to treat 12 million gallons of water per day – many times more than needed.
 
Fifty years later, former Sanford Mayor Chet Mann – Tommy’s grandson – sowed the rewards of his grandfather’s vision.
 
“[We] thank them every day,” Sanford Growth Alliance CEO Jimmy Randolph told Business NC. “The water and wastewater resources that’s available in Sanford right now have actually been a critical part of the equation for some of the largest economic development projects ever to choose to locate in North Carolina.”
 
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Sanford, because of its rights to the Cape Fear River, has become the region’s anchor for water and sewer infrastructure.
 
Neighboring Chatham County, for example, did not have the necessary water capacity to accommodate automaker VinFast until just a few years ago. The county looked to Sanford and Mayor Mann for help, and they got it.
 
With support from the General Assembly and millions in grant funding from the Goldean LEAF Foundation, “Mayor Chet Mann and the Sanford City Council made a critical decision to build a water line that will help bring service to the [megasite]…a call that later became one of the determining factors in VinFast’s decision to come to central North Carolina.”
 
A similar dynamic is playing out between Sanford and Siler City, in Chatham County, to accommodate Wolfspeed’s new facility and other expected growth.
 
In recent years, Siler City officials have had to suspend new construction because they cannot add any more volume to their water infrastructure, especially given Wolfspeed will soon account for a lot of capacity.
 
Last month, media reports indicated Siler City was in talks with Sanford to join its water and sewer system.
 
Sanford already has such an agreement with Fuquary-Varina, Holly Springs, and Pittsboro. The partners will each kick in proportional shares to expand Sanford’s water treatment capacity from 12 million gallons per day to 30 million gpd, with Sanford maintaining operational control of the system.
 
The arrangement makes abundant sense. On their own, each municipality would pay far higher marginal costs for water and sewer capacity to service their smaller populations because processing facilities are extraordinarily expensive to build and maintain.
 
Regionalizing the service realizes efficiencies of scale and reduces the financial burden (and risk) for all of the participants.
 
Recognizing the benefits of a regional system, the legislature has opened up state coffers to encourage the dynamic. The recent budget allocated $75 million to help Siler City with its water capacity problem – contingent on Siler City contracting with Sanford to help manage the project.
 
The recent partnerships Sanford as inked will bring its plant’s capacity to 30 million gpd, but Sanford has permits for up to 41 million gpd. If Sanford had constructed its plant on the Deep River instead of the Cape Fear in the 1960s, it would have been capped at just 12 million gpd.
 
One man’s determination to battle over what he rightly considered a region-defining call – and his grandson’s work to see that vision become reality decades later – is responsible for the Carolina Core’s ability to grow. It’s a story of vision, leadership, and determination, and it’s one that ought to be featured more often.