Southwest Licking water, sewer district planning for $70 million Etna wastewater plant

The Southwest Licking Community Water and Sewer District is continuing its growth with a $70 million wastewater treatment center — but the district doesn't yet have a plan to pay for it.

Construction on the Wagram Wastewater Treatment Center is scheduled to begin in October. The facility will be located on 23 acres at 13057 National Road, Etna Township, near Mink Street, said Nick Eippert, the district's in-house counsel. Shook Construction of Moraine, Ohio, has been selected for the project.

It will about two years to build the 2.5-million-gallons-per-day treatment center, and Eippert said the utility district expects the facility will be functional by spring 2026.

Trent Stepp, Etna Township's representative on the district's three-person board, said the plant has been in the works since the district bought the property in November 2019. The utility district studied the cost before Stepp joined the board in December 2020, and the project had an original budget of $25 million to $30 million.

"But none of those have held," Stepp said. "We have a different world today than we did in 2019."

Throughout the years of planning the facility, Stepp said the district scaled back the treatment center in an effort to keep the cost low. But now that it's receiving bids, the estimates are coming back higher than anticipated.

On top of supply chain issues and inflation, Eippert said the utility district is now competing with another development happening in Licking County: Intel Corp.'s $20 billion computer chip factory currently under construction south of Johnstown.

"We're competing for steel. We're competing for labor. We're competing for concrete," Eippert said.

Stepp said the district does not yet have a funding source for the project, but there are two options:

The first is to partner with Etna Township and Pataskala — the two entities that will be served by the treatment center — to use economic development mechanisms, such as joint economic development districts and tax increment financing, to earmark funds for the facility.

Joint economic development districts, or JEDDs, allow townships to partner with a municipality to collect income tax on commercial properties within a defined area. Tax increment financing, or TIF, allow property taxes generated by new development to pay for infrastructure improvements to the area.

The second option is to institute capital recovery fees, which would require developers paying upfront fees to buy into the capacity the new treatment center creates, Stepp said.

"That will be a very uncomfortable position because it will make the development costs much higher, and it will slow the development in the region," he said. For that reason, the district prefers to move forward with the first option, he said.

It might be difficult to get funds from the existing JEDDs and TIFs in the area, Stepp said, but new ones could be created that include undeveloped parcels the wastewater plant would serve.

The district has recent experience with that concept: Earlier this year, the utility district partnered with Union Township and Heath to create a JEDD along Ohio 37. As part of that, the district will provide water and sewer utilities to the area and will receive 20% of the JEDD's net revenue.

Stepp said the utility district wants to work together with the township and the city to find solutions that benefit each entity.

"We want to be cooperative. We don't want to be an entity that takes. We want to be an entity that shares," he said. "We want to share the burden. We want to share the responsibility. We want to share the cost."

With construction starting in just a few short months, Stepp said the district will take out a loan to pay for the project. The hope, he said, is that money from JEDDs or TIFs or from capital recovery fees would be used to make the loan payments.

Even though the district hasn't identified a funding source, Stepp said it's the district's intent that residents will not bear the cost of the treatment center.

"We're hoping beyond hope that we don't burden them with the cost of new capacity needs," he said. "They've got the capacity. They're more than happy to see the cornfields remain cornfields. They don't want to pay more so that they can see a new warehouse. They don't want to pay more so they can see a new housing development."

The new wastewater plant will serve the Etna and Pataskala areas: primarily, the Etna Corporate Park along U.S. 40 and everything west and south of the corporate park, Stepp said.

The district has one existing wastewater treatment plant on Gale Road in Harrison Township. With another treatment center, Eippert said it will relieve the bottleneck in Etna Township that is slowing down development.

The district has historically served Etna and Harrison townships and the former Lima Township, which merged with the then-village of Pataskala in 1997. The utility district has grown in recent years, and last year the Licking County Commissioners more than doubled its service area for the Ohio 161 corridor from 8,769 acres to 18,223 acres. The expanded area includes 11,702 acres in Jersey Township; 3,439 in St. Albans Township; and 3,041 acres in Monroe Township.

In addition to the Wagram Wastewater Treatment Center, the utility district is also planning for a 3 million gallon per day Raccoon Creek Wastewater Treatment Center on nearly 100 acres between General Griffin and Morse roads in St. Albans Township.

At the time of the St. Albans Township land purchase, Eippert said the property was large enough to hold both water and sewer treatment facilities. The National Road site of the new wastewater plant, however, is too small to accommodate anything besides the wastewater water treatment center, Eippert said.

mdevito@gannett.com

740-607-2175

Twitter: @MariaDeVito13

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Southwest Licking utility district plans for $70M wastewater plant