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Sanford has been planning for expansion of its water and sewer services for just this moment. Sanford’s share of the entire project could come to be just $1.5 million, itself another huge win for the city. The state will pick up the tab for almost all of it – $132 million, leaving the remaining $3 million to be split between Sanford and Pittsboro. But the news just keeps getting better, Mann said. The mayor said just the water and sewer infrastructure needed to connect the new plant site to the city’s system and then over to Pittsboro could exceed $135 million. But it’s one of the implements we are now keeping in our toolkit as future projects come along,” Mann continued.

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“Another company told us that Sanford was only city that had cracked the code on how to do this, on how to get the water up to a site like this and back, but other factors led them to choose somewhere else. It was this kind of thinking that previously brought Sanford to the verge of winning another economic development project that ultimately it didn’t get. It was Public Works Director Victor Czar who came up with the engineering needed to connect the existing loops and lines, and then extend them to Triangle Innovation Point and on into Pittsboro. And by going into the general fund, it can be used to address our housing shortage, build and expand our parks and trail systems, we can continue revitalizing our downtown and lifting up neighborhoods, and a whole host of things that will come along to make Sanford a place that people want to call home.” But by the time that spigot finally gets turned off, Sanford will have millions of additional dollars coming in.

“By the time that money stops flowing, I’ll be gone from the scene. “That’s one of the many nuggets of gold in this story for Sanford,” Mann told The Rant. That means it can be used to provide a supplementary level of funding for the next 50 years that the city would otherwise not have had. In a genuine coup for the city, the arrangement negotiated with Chatham County allows for that same money to flow into the city’s general fund. Even better, Sanford will continue to receive those funds for the next 50 years after the line goes into service, meaning millions of dollars that will flow annually into the city’s coffers every year for the next half-century. In addition to the sale of water and sewer services and in exchange for their provision, Sanford will receive 20 percent of all property taxes that Chatham County collects from every home, business, or industry that connects to the water line. The deal negotiated on behalf of the city by Mann and City Manager Hal Hegwer does more than provide Chatham County with the water they need. Mann said, “It was a huge leap of faith by the city council, but boy did it ever pay off.” Building on Mann’s Open for Business platform put forth when he was first elected in 2013, the city leveraged grants from the state, the GoldenLeaf Foundation and a budget allocation of $3.9 million in 2018 to build water and sewer lines from Sanford to Pittsboro, as well as a second loop to provide services to the Raleigh Executive Jetport in Lee County and the Moncure area. The northeastern end of Lee County, and just across the Deep River into Chatham County, had long been a desert for water and sewer services, and no water means no development. Four years ago, Mayor Chet Mann and the Sanford City Council made a critical decision to build a water line that will help bring service to the site as construction takes place over the next three years, a call that later became one of the determining factors in VinFast’s decision to come to central North Carolina. Water is a critical component for any developing industry, particularly those focused on heavy manufacturing like VinFast, and Sanford has it in abundance. So, they reached out to their neighbors in Sanford for help. Chatham officials recognized that a neighboring city had the water capacity needed. Were it not for the vision city leaders showed as far back as four years ago, today’s announcement of Vietnamese electric automaker investing $4 billion and adding 7,500 jobs to the region wouldn’t have happened.Ĭhatham County had lots of available land, but what it didn’t have was easy access to the one natural resource that makes economic development projects sink or swim in the third decade of the 21st Century - water. By Richard Sullins | part Sanford played in helping close the deal on one of the state’s largest-ever economic development projects could be considered as a back story, but it’s one that deserves to be told.

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