Sewage plan heads to vote

New Hanover and Pender county commissioners are each expected to vote Monday to move forward on a joint sewage plant that will provide service to the U.S. 421 corridor.It's a mutually beneficial agreement for both counties, said New Hanover County Manager Bruce Shell.The plant will be built in Pender County, along with a water treatment plant that will provide water to both counties. New Hanover will supply the sewage treatment permit that allows up to 4 million gallons per day.The permit is expected to expire in November 2011, Shell said, and the state has indicated the county may not be able to renew it.While the plant will not need to be complete by that time, now is the time to move forward, Shell told the commissioners during a Thursday meeting."We're prepared to do what we need to do," he said. "Right now, we're simply trying to legally position ourselves to move forward."Supplying water and sewer infrastructure to the U.S. 421 corridor, which runs through both New Hanover and Pender counties, will likely lead to large-scale development of the area.Bill Caster, chairman of the New Hanover commissioners, said he expects commercial development will "ramp up" once those services are provided.In October, both boards voted to spend $112,500 each on an engineering analysis and environmental study for the sewage plant.Those studies will be completed by engineering firm McKim & Creed in about five months, Shell said.Early plans call for a plant with 1 million gallons of daily treatment capacity at an estimated cost of $23 million. The plant is expected to be complete in four or five years, Shell said.Both counties have been discussing ways to partner on the project for years.Former Pender County manager John Bauer and officials from both counties were negotiating a deal to build the plant more than a year ago, but those plans died down when Bauer was fired in September 2006.In March, the Pender commissioners decided to build a county water plant at the former BASF site off U.S. 421, and New Hanover and Pender officials have been huddling for months about building the joint sewage plant on the same land.The looming potential of handing over all county and city of Wilmington water and sewer assets to the fledgling Cape Fear Public Utility Authority should not affect the project, Deputy County Attorney Kemp Burpeau told the commissioners.The project will be added to the county's list of assets and liabilities and a provision will be added to the proposed interlocal agreement which states that the project is one of the county's priorities, Burpeau said.The commissioners will vote on the agreement during their Monday meeting, which is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at the New Hanover County Historic Courthouse on Third Street in Wilmington.