Lexington takes over troubled wastewater plant on Lake Murray
A long-running dispute over a wastewater plant on Lake Murray reached its end Wednesday when the town of Lexington acquired the plant from Blue Granite Water Co.
The plant had been at the heart of a legal dispute between the private utility and the town over a long-term plan to connect the plant at Spence’s Point to the town’s sewer system. The change in ownership will put an end to one of the last sites that discharge wastewater into the Saluda River watershed.
The town and Blue Granite reached an agreement to transfer ownership of the aging plant to the town. Lexington Mayor Steve MacDougall said the town had agreed to pay the utility $3.7 million to complete the takeover, based on a similar amount the town paid for another Blue Granite plant near Interstate 20.
MacDougall estimates Lexington will have a connection to the plant, and the approximately 1,100 people in the area it serves, feeding into its own sewer system within two years.
“We’re still investigating what we bought,” MacDougall said. “(But) it means they will have a successful operation to deliver quality services to our customers. But most importantly it will send that waste to our state-of-the-art treatment facility.”
The Watergate plant currently discharges into Fourteen Mile Creek off Old Chapin Road just outside the Lexington town limits. Once the plant is connected to the town’s system, it will eliminate the last plant operated by Blue Granite that discharges in the area.
The plant has long been a source of controversy. When Blue Granite asked state regulators for a rate increase earlier this year, one Spence’s Point resident testified that a leak sent sewage pouring through her lakeside neighborhood and into Lake Murray, narrowly avoiding her swimming pool.
Last year, the utility sued the town to force it to connect the Watergate plant to Lexington’s system in line with a decades-old local water quality management plan.
“We believe this transfer will ensure long-term protection of the environment and natural waterways,” Blue Granite President Don Denton said in a statement about the transfer.
Bill Stangler with the Congaree Riverkeeper organization says the change is the latest step in the municipal takeover of small wastewater systems that was called for in the federal Clean Water Act all the way back in 1972.
“The Central Midlands Council of Governments came up with a plan for the smaller wastewater systems to be tied into the regional systems in the 1990s, to eliminate all the discharges from them,” Stangler said. “It’s just taken them several decades to do it.”
There are still three other plants in the Midlands that discharge into the river basin, including one on Stoop Creek in the St. Andrews-Irmo, where a sewage spill into the Saluda River over the summer led public health officials to warn against swimming in the area.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 1:59 PM.
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