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Tag: Regional Water Authority

  • Water authority becoming reality

    WINNSBORO – It’s been years since Fairfield county and municipal leaders first floated a concept of a regional water and sewer authority.

    Now that its composition has been finalized, the group plans to chart new waters as it attempts to define and fulfill its mission of enhancing economic development in Fairfield County.

    “Industry absolutely has to have basic infrastructure,” County Administrator Jason Taylor said. “The Town of Winnsboro and other entities need to come together because none of us can do it alone.”

    On Tuesday, County Council unanimously approved a resolution approving the final composition of the water authority.

    Winnsboro Town Council approved a similarly worded resolution last week.

    The resolutions passed by the Fairfield and Winnsboro councils shave the authority board from seven to five members, drawing two Fairfield County representatives – Council Chairman Neil Robinson and Taylor. Winnsboro Town Manager Don Wood and Gaddy.

    Kyle Crager, the authority’s fifth member, was jointly appointed by the county and town.

    Ensuring Fairfield County has sufficient infrastructure is particularly important as it relates to the mega site off I-77, where sufficient sewer capacity doesn’t exist.

    Taylor said new sewer lines potentially cost tens of millions of dollars more than water lines. The state recently awarded a $2 million grant for infrastructure design and prep work and though helpful, it’s only a fraction of what’s needed.

    “The Town [of Winnsboro] has done a wonderful job in getting water infrastructure in place so we have sufficient water capacity. However sewer is much more expensive.” Taylor said.

    As the authority board mulls ways to generate funds, other ideas were put forward at Monday night’s council meeting.

    Ridgeway resident Randy Bright repeated his call for a penny sales tax to fund water and sewer upgrades.

    “Infrastructure is an imperative,” Bright said. “If we had started this five years ago, we would already have $10 million that we could put forward to water and sewer to bring families, homes, industry new jobs and grow the economy.”

    Councilman Jimmy Ray Douglas proposed taxing agricultural real properties that receive a tax break from the state.

    Douglas proposed adding a $1 per acre tax on qualifying properties, which he said would generate $450,000 a year that could be applied to water and sewer expenses.

    “I have ag land that I own and I’m paying next to nothing,” he said. “Everyone else who has less than five acres is paying a lot more taxes. I feel like every [agriculturally exempt] acre in Fairfield County needs to have an extra dollar in taxes on it.”

    In South Carolina, agricultural real property is taxed at 4 percent of its fair market value. Non-agricultural property is taxed at 6 percent.

    For the owner of property valued at $100,000, a Fairfield County landowner receiving the tax break pays $814 less than owners not receiving it.

    Critics, however, say the exemptions unfairly benefit developers who claim the exemption on undeveloped property, most harvesting trees to technically qualify for the exemption.

    The 2 percent tax break isn’t permanent. Once the land use changes, the rate rolls back to 6 percent and landowners are responsible for paying the difference, according to state law.

  • Everything on the Table for Water Authority

    WINNSBORO – Representatives of Mid-County Water and the four local governments (Fairfield County Council and the towns of Winnsboro, Ridgeway and Blythewood) exploring the possibility of forming a regional water authority met Wednesday afternoon at Midlands Technical College in Winnsboro to discuss the framework of the project. While much of the discussion, chaired by Winnsboro Mayor Roger Gaddy, revolved around meeting procedures and proposed bylaws, the topic with the most bearing on the future of the authority was ownership of the water system itself.

    “What is going to be the system that the regional water authority wants to own?” Margaret Pope, an attorney with the Pope Zeigler law firm advising the committee, asked. “I believe the Town of Winnsboro has the only water treatment plant of all the members here.”

    Gaddy told the committee that, as far as the Town of Winnsboro was concerned, all options for the water plant were on the table.

    “From the Town of Winnsboro’s standpoint, nothing is set in stone,” Gaddy said. “Winnsboro has been supplying the water, but it’s getting to the point where it’s become so expensive, and with future costs we know that’s something Winnsboro is not going to be able to absorb by itself.”

    Gaddy said Winnsboro has a preliminary agreement with South Carolina Electric and Gas (SCE&G) to draw up to 1 million gallons of water a day from Lake Monticello, but getting that water into Winnsboro will be expensive. That kind of expense, he said, is exactly the kind of thing a regional water authority could help cover.

    “You’ve still got to run the water to the reservoir,” Gaddy said. “That’s going to cost probably $8 – $12 million. If you’re going to try to get some funding for it from the federal government or other special funding, they look more favorably on a water authority that represents Mid-County, Blythewood, Ridgeway and Winnsboro. That’s going to carry a lot more clout.

    “We don’t necessarily have any proprietary feeling that we’ve got to own the water plant or we’ve got to be the wholesale provider,” Gaddy continued. “My feeling is that if the group doesn’t want that, that’s fine. If they want us to be the wholesale provider, that’s fine too. I don’t want anybody walking into this meeting thinking the Town of Winnsboro has got a pre-set agenda of how we expect this thing to look and what we want out of it.”

    Gaddy said the water plant is in need of upgrades, which represent an additional expense, and the Town is also saddled with the upkeep of the entire system that feeds Blythewood, Ridgeway and Mid-County.

    “Even though we’ve spent millions of dollars on water, there’s about a 1 percent profit margin,” Gaddy said. “We’re not making a killing off water.”

    David Ferguson, Chairman of Fairfield County Council, said the County was not necessarily interested in becoming a water provider, but wants to ensure water is available for County economic development projects now and in the future.

    “With the investments we’ve made (in the new industrial park) on Peach Road, we need to be proactive,” Ferguson said. “That’s what the County’s looking at. The distribution and that kind of stuff, we’re really not interested in it. We have property on Highway 200 and I-77, we have that industrial park (on Peach Road), and as soon as we get that one up and where it needs to be that will not be the only park in the county. We’ve got to know we’ve got the resources at Highway 200 and 77 to do the same thing we’ve planned to do on Peach Road.

    “I don’t think we did a real good job of getting to this place,” Ferguson said, “but we need to do a good job moving forward.”

    Mid-County Water has yet to convert their governing body to a public entity, a transition necessary before officially joining any water authority. The other governing bodies represented on the steering committee have yet to pass resolutions necessary for joining. The Town of Ridgeway has held public hearings on the matter, but has thus far not held a vote.

    The committee also discussed how the existence of the authority might affect future water rates for consumers.

    “That depends on what the water authority wants to buy,” Gaddy said, referring to Winnsboro’s treatment plant. “If they want to buy everything, the rates will go up quite a bit. They will go up no matter what. It’s just a matter of degree.”

  • County Hosts Second Meeting on Water Alliance

    With a little more than two weeks remaining on a deadline to either pony up to join a regional water authority or risk being left in the lurch on future water sales, Fairfield County Council hosted a work session Sept. 5 to gather information from Margaret Pope. Pope is an attorney with the Pope Zeigler law firm, which, along with the Santee Cooper energy company, is assisting the Town of Winnsboro in forming the authority.

    Pope addressed a similar meeting July 9 hosted by the Town of Winnsboro, but scheduling conflicts prevented County Council from attending as a whole. Two County Council members – David Brown and Carolyn Robinson – did attend the July 9 meeting in an unofficial capacity.

    Since the July 9 meeting, the Town has received positive responses from the Town of Ridgeway and Mid-County Water to joining the Town of Winnsboro in the Regional Water Supply Authority for Fairfield County. The Town of Blythewood, according to Winnsboro Mayor Roger Gaddy, has also come on board, even going so far as to send in their $5,000 fee, which buys them a seat on the charter committee. The Jenkinsville Water Company, meanwhile, has indicated no interest in participating, while the Mitford Water Company is locked into a 40-year contract with Chester County for the purchase of their water supply.

    A lack of total unity on the water front is something County Council Chairman David Ferguson said could be problematic.

    “According to our representatives in Washington, until we get one entity that supplies water for this county the grants would not be forthcoming,” Ferguson said at the Sept. 5 meeting. And grants and low interest rates are essential, Ferguson said, for growing and maintaining any water system.

    “Unless we could get specifically low rates, we would be hard pressed to run lines to the entire county,” Ferguson said. “We would have to know we could get those lower costing loans.”

    The chances of gaining access to those grants and low-interest loans, Pope said, would be greatly increased through a central water authority.

    “I promise you, your chances of doing so are greater together than alone,” Pope said.

    The Town of Ridgeway, although represented at the July 9 meeting, did not attend the Sept. 5 meeting. Ridgeway Mayor Charlene Herring, reached by phone last week, said a last minute scheduling conflict prevented her from attending and added that Ridgeway Town Council was to vote on the issue at their Sept. 13 meeting. Herring echoed Pope’s assessment of the need for a central entity in order to secure funding.

    “We are very interested (in joining),” Herring said. “We do need this water authority, so we can have more power to get grants and loans.”

    But in order for Ridgeway to pay its way into the water authority, Herring said the Town would have to dig into its savings.

    Under the proposed plan, members will be expected to contribute $5,000 to a Charter Committee bank account to raise capital for incorporating costs. If at least $15,000 hasn’t been raised by the Sept. 30 deadline, the entire project goes up in smoke.

    “If we haven’t raised that money by the September deadline, then the Town will probably have to look at phasing distributors off the system,” John Fantry, special counsel to the Town of Winnsboro, said last month. “It is a ‘pay to play’ system. If Winnsboro is the only one putting up any money to do this, if other people aren’t committed, then we’re going to have to take care of ourselves, and that means cutting people off of wholesale water.”

    Mid-County Water, while they have expressed an interest in joining the authority, is currently unable to do so under their current structure, Pope explained.

    “You must be a political subdivision in order to join a water authority,” Pope said, “so Mid-County would have to convert to a Special Purpose District.”

    And that is not as difficult as it sounds, Pope said.

    Once everyone has paid into the authority, Ferguson wanted to know how the benefits would be meted out and how capital costs would be divided among the membership.

    Pope said part of forming the authority would include each entity outlining how much water they would require. The contract would include how much water the plant could pull and how much water the plant could deliver in a 24-hour period.

    “If you owned a third of the capacity, then you paid for one-third of the cost,” Pope said. “Whether you used it or not. It is a great way for everybody to take a good look at themselves in the mirror and say ‘How much capacity do I really want?’ because it’s ‘how much do I really want to pay for’.”

    Operational costs, Pope said, are usually divided according to how much water any one entity is pulling out of the system, compared to how much total water is being pulled from the system by all entities combined.

    “If you buy a lot, but initially you don’t pull a lot, your operational costs may be smaller and your capital costs may be larger,” Pope said.

    The most difficult part of the process, Pope said, was hammering out the contract between the participants. And the contract, she added, is where all the assurances are as to how much water members can look forward to. For example, Pope said that in Anderson County – a water authority she also helped guide into existence – a member has a right to a certain percentage of water. The member can sell that water to other members freely, but to sell it to someone outside of the authority it must first offer that water to the other individual members.

    Water authorities are on the rise in South Carolina, Pope said, with at least 100 of them across the state, and the bylaws governing them can be as restrictive or as broad as the membership desires.

    “A water authority is a great way to share costs,” Pope said, “and a great way to have an investment in something that is going to benefit many people beyond just one entity.”