A first for PTC, an OK would fuel growth machine in neighboring town; Senoia to get lower rate than PTC users.

The Peachtree City Council will decide Thursday whether or not to allow the town of Senoia, across the county line in Coweta County, to pump up to 500,000 gallons a day of raw sewage to a Peachtree City sewer plant for treatment.

Critics of the deal have alleged it would allow growth in Senoia to accelerate dramatically. The deal would double the east Coweta town’s sewer capacity to one million gallons a day; Peachtree City currently can treat up to six million gallons a day.

But even if the deal is somehow scuttled, the town has other plans to get more sewerage capacity, including expansion of its own sewer plant.

WASA officials have said the deal would allow the authority to avoid a rate increase for its residential customers due to the loss of about $400,000 a year in fees from the now-shuttered Photocircuits manufacturing plant.

Although the city’s Water and Sewer Authority is a separate entity from the city itself, the contract between the two agencies establishes that the City Council has the final say on any proposal to extend sewer service outside the city limits.

The current proposal WASA has offered to Senoia involves a $500,000 payment up front and another $2.5 million in financed payments as a tap-in fee. Also, Senoia would pay $3.50 for each 1,000 gallons of sewage treated per day. Senoia would bill its residents and send one check to WASA.

Peachtree City residential customers pay $4.38 to treat every 1,000 gallons of sewage, but Senoia would be charged $3.50 per 1,000 gallons since Senoia will be responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure, including the sewer pipes leading to the plant and any necessary lift stations, WASA officials have said.

After taking out the 500,000 gallons a day Senoia would be allowed, WASA would still have 440,000 gallons a day of contingency flow left for the city; there also would be extra capacity left for the projected build-out of Peachtree City including a potential 900-acre annexation in the West Village area and additional businesses in the city’s industrial park, WASA General Manager Larry Turner has said.

There are no current plans to expand WASA’s sewer capacity beyond its current discharge permit for 6 million gallons a day, Turner said at a recent meeting. But regional water officials have indicated that WASA could add another 2 million gallons a day in capacity between 2011 and 2020.

Those figures, from the North Georgia Metropolitan Water Planning District, include sewering unincorporated Fayette County and part of eastern Coweta County, Turner said. Such retrofitting would likely be an expensive endeavor, however, which would likely keep such a concept from ever occurring.

Even if the Senoia deal is approved, Senoia wouldn’t immediately be sending wastewater to WASA because Senoia will have to build the infrastructure, Turner has said. WASA expects it wouldn’t receive any flow from Senoia until 2009.

Three different population projections provided by Senoia show the town potentially growing dramatically by the year 2026, having as many as between 8,000 and nearly 11,000 people.

But if present development rates continue, the city will exceed its current sewage treatment capacity by 2010, Mayor Robert Belisle wrote in a letter to Peachtree City City Manager Bernie McMullen.

The Fayette County Board of Commissioners has previously opposed the extension of sewer service from Peachtree City into the county. But the commission recently approved one such request in part because the development was within 500 feet of a sewer line, which triggers a state law that requires such developments to be linked to the sanitary sewer system.

Without sewer service available, developers are restricted to minimum lot sizes of one acre because of the space necessary to install a drain field for a septic tank. By turning down such requests, the commission informally has used that state requirement as a tool to control growth in the unincorporated county.

Because the Senoia-WASA proposal does not extend into the unincorporated county, the county commission will not come into play in the final decision for the proposal that the Peachtree City Council will consider Thursday night. Senoia’s city limit line abuts Peachtree City’s southwest city limit just northwest of Rockaway Road.