Here’s how it seems to have happened in the swashbuckling old days: A developer came along, decided he needed wastewater treatment, and he built a plant hisself, by God!
That was the case with the northernmost stretch of Route 29. In 1990, Wendell Wood, then acting on the part of two companies, Woodbriar Associates (responsible for the Briarwood subdivision) and Gold Leaf Land Trust, dramatically expanded the Camelot wastewater treatment plant, located just north of the North Fork of the Rivanna River, to serve GE Fanuc, UVA’s North Fork Research Park and his own residential projects. But it only took two years for the Albemarle County Service Authority (ACSA) to decide that leaving a treatment plant in private hands was a bad idea.
 The Camelot wastewater plant will be decommissioned when the North Fork Pump Station is built. |
“The service authority decided, ‘No, we shouldn’t have this going on within the service area, we should be in charge of wastewater collection,’” explains Gary Fern, ACSA’s executive director. A 1992 agreement terminated the earlier arrangement by buying the rights from Wood for $1 million and from the UVA North Fork Research Park for $150,000.
Though the agreement states that Wood gave up control of Camelot and would get no favors in the future, Wood still felt some entitlement to the plant last year when asked by an Albemarle County planning commissioner if there was enough sewer capacity for his plans for two office buildings and an apartment complex next to the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC).
“We constructed the sewer plant, we actually built the sewer plant ourselves, paid for it, with enough capacity to serve these properties,” said Wood. “I am confident that we have sewer capacity.”
A year later, Wood’s first office building is under construction, but the Camelot plant is swiftly running out of capacity. Though it was originally rated to handle 365,000 gallons daily, its permitted capacity is only 200,000. In order to accommodate Wood’s project, ACSA is pumping $500,000 into the facility to keep it afloat for two years while a new North Fork Pump Station is constructed. Afterwards, ACSA will decommission Camelot.
Last week, ACSA entered into an agreement with a Richmond-based firm to do preliminary engineering work for the new pump station, which would direct waste to the Moores Creek treatment plant. It will be funded in part by the various 29N players with future development plans: the UVA Foundation, NGIC, Wendell Wood, and North Pointe developers. ACSA plans to spend $7 million on the project in the next two years, with a goal of getting it online by 2010.
North Pointe developers say the timing is right. “If things go according to the rough schedule, then the timing should go very well,” says Valerie Long, an attorney speaking on behalf of Chuck Rotgin’s Great Eastern Management Company, the primary North Pointe developer. The company is looking to finish houses in late spring/early summer of 2010—just in time for the 800 new NGIC employees to hit Charlottesville.
Richard Spurzem, who owns the northwestern portion of North Pointe that consists of 188 townhomes, is having difficulty with preliminary site plan approval, so the sewer situation remains the least of his worries.
“It’s only when you’re about to unlock the front door that you need to have the sewer working,” says Spurzem.
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