It is a bit tardy – by 18 years – but the City of Raleigh, after a reconciliation of costs and an audit – has determined that the Town of Wake Forest overpaid the city by $1,239,352 when Raleigh took ownership of the town’s water and sewer systems in the spring of 2005.
This was the big surprise last Thursday, July 6, 2023 when the Wake Forest Town Board held its work session that had been postponed because of the Fourth of July.
The overpayment was part of the information in the third amendment to the Wake Forest/Raleigh utility merger agreement that was on the agenda, and it included how the two parties have agreed to handle the overpayment. The town will apply the money toward the purchase of additional water capacity allocations, giving the town the maximum of 5.32 million gallons daily of water and 3.4 million gallons daily for wastewater treatment.
This third amendment also reflects the town’s long-range planning by extending its future annexation areas to be part of its extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) to the east and south. It also reflects its boundary agreement with Rolesville. Some parts of the future ETJ are in a water supply watershed where building is limited to three houses per acre, but Raleigh could provide water to the ETJ after two projects are complete.
The first is Raleigh’s purchase of a 1.55-acre empty lot owned by the town at 234 South College Street where Raleigh plans to build an elevated water storage tank and a booster pump station to improve water pressure in a nearby zone. Raleigh will pay Wake Forest $365,000 for the land. (For Wake Forest oldtimers, that land is between what was Ruth Snyder’s house and what was Ruamie Squires house, the only house of that short stretch of street that is privately owned. All the rest are owned by the town or Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. )
The second is a number of upgrades to the Smith Creek Resource Recovery Facility, a wastewater treatment plant on the Neuse River, a former Wake Forest facility.
Surprise or not, it was not discussed. That will happen during the town board’s business meeting on July 18, 2023.
For new residents in town, a bit of history may help. Town officials by the 1990s were keenly aware that any growth in town would mean increasing stress on the town’s water and sewer systems. The town drew its water from the impoundment on Smith Creek built in the 1960s on land donated by Mary Bolus, owner with her husband of an apparel store in town. The couple built the stone house on South Main Street with its tile roof and were instrumental in building the stone church nearby, St. Catherine of Siena. The water was processed and fed into the system at the G.G. Hill Water Treatment Plant on Wait Avenue, and the wastewater flowed to the Smith Creek treatment plant and into the Neuse River.
From 2000 on, the discussions became serious and heated. The town was beginning its serious growth that continues today – 14,288 in 2000, 30,818 in 2010, 54,274 in January 2023 – and the town had to find more water somewhere. Neuse River at the old Burlington Mills plant? Kerr Lake via a looong pipe? Could the present water plant be expanded and the current dam heightened to provide more water? The town hired engineers to look at all the possibilities.
Meanwhile Raleigh with the full Falls Lake on its doorstep was expanding out into eastern Wake County. Rolesville was happy to enter the Raleigh tent as were Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon.
Wake Foresters were proud of their systems and said so loudly and at length at public hearings.
Finally, though, as the Gazette said at the time, “In the end, it all came down to the old do-re-mi. The Wake Forest commissioners and mayor said maintaining the town’s independent water and sewer systems would place too heavy a financial burden on the systems’ customers. They voted unanimously for a contract under which Raleigh will own and operate the systems.”
That was in November 2004. The contract was not signed until the spring of 2005, and Wake Forest agreed to pay Raleigh almost $19 million for the whole package — $15 million for upgrades and new equipment, $4 million for increased capacity of both water and sewer.
Wake Forest water and sewer customers continued to pay the town rates, and the difference between them and the lower Raleigh rates provided the money to pay off the $19 million debt in about seven years.
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July 26, 2024
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