Plans to extend Tallahassee's sewer system to south Capital Circle in the works
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City officials are planning to extend sewer access to several hundred homes and businesses on Tallahassee’s southside in a fledgling partnership with Leon County.
The city funded project, which could cost as much as $10 million to complete, would fulfill a long-time wish of County Commission Chairman Bill Proctor to extend sanitary sewer services to residents and businesses inside the Urban Services Area who use septic systems.
The Urban Services Area is the zone in which public services like sewer, utilities and transit are offered.
Proctor was joined by Mayor John Dailey, who will ask his city colleagues to support the project at Wednesday’s City Commission meeting. From there, the scope of the project will be determined and be followed by more extensive planning and design phases.
City and county administrators, as well as city commissioners Curtis Richardson and Dianne Williams-Cox, also attended.
The news comes as Dailey is locked in a tight race for re-election with Kristin Dozier, who serves on the county commission with Proctor. Proctor, who sailed to re-election in the primary, has not made an endorsement in the mayoral race but is likely to in the near future.
'We're opening up a new vista, a new opportunity'
Dailey said bolstering infrastructure could prove a boon in the south Capital Circle corridor and prove beneficial for the ecologically sensitive area.
The region sits on the edge of the Wakulla Springs Basin and is just miles from Lake Munson, where pollution has spawned harmful algae blooms in recent months.
“Proper infrastructure is the foundation for good, sustainable growth,” Dailey said following a press conference outside of Tillman Funeral Home. “It’s good for business. It’s good for residents. It’s good for the environment.”
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In recent years, most of the work extending the Urban Services Area has been focused in north Leon County.
He said it was only natural that utility services be extended to all buildings inside the area, a move which he sees as a chance to bring about quality of life improvements in southern Leon County.
“With the Urban Services Area already being where it is, we’ve simply got to fulfill the commitments of which it purports to bring to citizens,” he said. “We’re opening up a new vista; a new opportunity. To the extent it will give birth to a new avalanche of commercial and residential activity, I’ll put my name on it.”
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There are roughly 200 structures inside “The Triangle,” a checkerboard of homes and businesses between Woodville and Crawfordville highways straddled to the south by Capital Circle, that are not on the central sewer system. Some of the buildings are inside the city limits, others are in unincorporated Leon County.
The city intends to spearhead extending its sewer lines to those structures while the county’s role is to secure state and federal funding to help with hookup and septic abandonment costs.
Dailey said the timing of the proposal, which will require commissioners to ask for an agenda item to come back at a later meeting to be voted on, coincides with the fresh fiscal year, which started last week and includes money for priority projects. It also is a priority of the city’s Southside Action Plan.
The money will be budgeted out in the city’s capital budget over the next five years if approved.
The average cost to switch from septic to sewer runs a homeowner about $10,000.
Over the last five years, the county has completed or started $60 million worth of conversions. One of the county’s main goals in its last five-year plan was to upgrade or eliminate 500 septic tanks. At the end of 2021, more than 610 units had been completed or were in progress.
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Through grant funding, the county has kept costs to the consumer at next to nothing, said County Administrator Vince Long.
Getting the ball rolling on securing that funding for the project, Proctor just last week visited with the county’s lobbying team in Washington to address seeking federal dollars to cover costs associated with actually connecting to the future sewer extension.
“The city sees an opportunity, and certainly the county does as well, to continue to leverage those dollars to benefit the community and continue to tackle as many of these septic tanks and get them connected to sewer as possible,” Long said.
“When folks really know the benefit of it and the cost savings and the opportunity of it, when you come in and do these things, it’s a one-time opportunity when you have those grant dollars. The deal sort of speaks for itself.”
Contact Karl Etters at ketters@tallahassee.com or @KarlEtters on Twitter.
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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Tallahassee officials planning to extend sewer system to south Capital Circle
