Bryson City wastewater plant breaks ground

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Bryson City wastewater plant breaks ground

Many have been instrumental to the project throughout the 8.5 years since its inception. Lily Levin photo

The new Bryson City wastewater treatment plant broke ground on May 19 in a public ceremony, but town Director of Engineering and Public Works Nate Bowe anticipates far less recognition during the next phase of the project.

“In the utility world, there’s not a lot that’s typically visible, except during construction, when we’re in everybody’s way, and we’re making a mess,” he said, adding that “public feedback is not usually positive.”

Lack of awareness often means the systems are working as usual. Most people don’t think too hard about their drinking water when it flows cleanly and freely from the tap.

“The best thing that can happen is that nobody knows; there’s no effect to anybody’s service,” said Bowe.

But while residents go about their days, a litany of operations — most importantly, the new sewage plant — are occurring behind the scenes to make the town more livable.

The future facility will have a capacity of 900,000 gallons per day, a significant increase from the current plant’s 600,000.

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McGill Senior Project Manager Mike Waresak said it’ll be more modern and produce cleaner discharge through environmentally friendly methods like ultraviolet disinfection. Despite just breaking ground this month, the plan is over eight years in the making. Four-term Bryson City Mayor Tom Sutton on May 19 put that number into perspective — the project, he told the audience, has been in the planning stage since his second term in office.

Given the already sweltering temperature and harsh 11 a.m. sunlight, each speaker talked only briefly, recognizing important individuals on the project. Sutton was no exception, expressing gratitude for key players like Bowe, veteran wastewater plant operator Greg Passmore, former Bryson City manager Regina Mathis and current town manager Sam Patillo.

Bowe admitted he hadn’t prepared a speech, but like Sutton, he thanked someone who’d been instrumental to the process.

“[Waresak] took over a project that was a bit in flux, and we value-engineered this thing multiple times to get it down to a level where we could meet our funding and to not put the town over a barrel in terms of any kind of loan money that would be difficult for us to repay,” said Bowe.

The “in flux” nature of the project, Bowe explained to The Smoky Mountain News, had to do with the unpredictable nature of its cost. Most town funding for the project — $15 million — was appropriated through the American Rescue Plan Act, former President Joe Biden’s massive COVID-19 stimulus package. But that money is set to expire Dec. 31 of this year, which Bowe said raised major concerns.

Project engineers expect to complete the facility by the end of 2027.

“We’ve gone back and forth with the state repeatedly and through our design process trying to dial this in to reduce as much as possible the debt service, and also allow us to build our project,” said Bowe.

But recently the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality sent out a notice that ARPA fund disbursement had surpassed a certain threshold, enabling the state to take on all unappropriated money and allocate it without a deadline.

“They came through for us in a big way,” he told SMN.

Bowe surmised a motivating factor behind this decision to be that other municipalities also had undistributed funding. Projects like these take time, he said. He asserted that because ARPA funding was so generous — over $8 billion to North Carolina and $1.9 trillion nationwide — infrastructure projects were pursued at a rate that outsized those available to implement them.

“It’s had a kind of a weird effect in that you’re not getting as many bids as you would hope for because the contractors are so busy. They’re not taking the time to bid on these other things, because they don’t have the people to actually complete those jobs,” he said.

But while that stage is over, uncertainty remains a part of the job.

At first, construction plus “soft costs” totaled just under $17 million, which Bryson City Public Works expected to fully fund through the ARPA grant and an initial $2 million NCDEQ Clean Water State Revolving Fund loan.

But then the town faced skyrocketing costs. For example, Bowe recounted that a major equipment vendor raised equipment prices by 40% in response to Trump administration tariffs, forcing the town to reduce the scope of the project.

“Currently, we run waste loads through a belt press, which de-waters it, and then that gets transported to a landfill down in Georgia,” he said, adding that the town must pay for that service.

Engineers wanted to implement a processor that would treat sludge and convert it to fertilizer, which could then be used to landscape or maintain roadside areas. “Unfortunately, we had to cut that to save costs,” he said.

Bryson City Mayor Tom Sutton spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony. Lily Levin photo

Nonetheless, the plant would end up more expensive than Bowe anticipated, forcing him to seek out other funding sources. The town applied for a second CWSRF loan and received $9.2 million toward the project in summer 2025. The first loan had come with $500,000 of forgiveness, and the second with $3 million, bringing what Bowe described as “free money” to a total of $18.5 million.

The public works director still anticipates having to pull $1 - $2 million from the loan to complete the project, especially if future price hikes — due to other geopolitical issues like the Iran war — were to also occur. But in order to borrow CSWRF money, public works must prove a financial capacity to take on and eventually repay the debt to other local officials. “We have to be very sensitive about the debt service that the town takes on, because we’re limited with a small number of customers,” he said.

Other improvements

Bryson City has long had problems with its water and sewer infrastructure. SMN in 2022 covered an NCDEQ moratorium on large-scale developments in the town requiring sewer connections due to various flow limit violations.

Bowe chalked it up to “deferred maintenance.”

“Much of [the piping] was put in in the 1960s, and so a lot of it, also smaller extensions over the years, were undersized,” he said, adding that the mindset looked like solving immediate problems rather than preparing for the future.

Funding availability constituted the other half of the equation. Such utilities upgrades are multi-year projects.

“A lot of the funding programs — really all of them — have certain priorities that they want to fund,” he said, adding that the grantee must fulfill these priorities.

A few years ago, Bryson City scouted out — and eventually turned down — a U.S. Department of Agriculture funding opportunity. But before an offer was made, the town generated and coordinated engineering reports in conjunction with the agency. The USDA determined inflow and infiltration to be the town’s most severe infrastructure problem and encouraged engineers to proceed in that direction prior to the wastewater project.

Inflow involves “surface water that finds its way into the water system,” explained Bowe. Whenever a storm hit the area, rain would seep into the piping through a poorly constructed manhole, creating a spike in volume.

The plant “had the hydraulic capacity to receive and treat that stuff,” Bowe said, but its permit was based on average daily flow.

Such an influx would often violate those provisions, hence the moratorium.

Infiltration, on the other hand, means that groundwater has entered the system, typically due to cracked, inadequately sealed pipes or manholes.

Bowe and other town staff were able to curb inflow and infiltration. But that didn’t change the more widespread problem: the sewer main has a diameter of four inches, half of the state minimum design criteria. So, when an individual seeks permission to build a home or business, “a lot of times it’s a real struggle to make that determination, whether or not we can allow someone to connect to the system,” he said. Such a process often involves extending undersized four-inch pipes, some of which are made of clay.

And public health can become compromised when too many houses or businesses are hooked onto inadequate piping.

“We end up with sewer spilling out on the road,” he explained.

Another issue the town has confronted is infrastructure that crosses private property, the terms of which were agreed to in the 1960s through, say, a handshake, rather than an easement.

In such an instance, if a pipe were to break on one private property, no repair could happen without the owner’s agreement — even if the line were shared by several residents. Bowe recounted a situation in which an owner refused the town permission and a neighbor was forced to install septic.

But those jurisdictional issues notwithstanding, the engineer has pursued important upgrades to the town’s water and sewer systems, many of which have been financed by a post-Hurricane Helene state funding initiative. Bryson City received nearly $10 million “to upgrade and strengthen specific components of our water distribution and sewer collection systems,” Bowe wrote in an email to town officials.

“Our average dailies at our wastewater plant are now in the 300,000 gallon a day range, so we got relieved of the moratorium,” he said.

With assistance from Southwestern Commission, public works also secured a grant through the North Carolina Department of Commerce’s SmBIZ Fund to restore a second waterline.

Helene took out a pipe along the bottom of the Tuckasegee River, so currently, only a single pipe along the Everett Street Bridge delivers drinking water to half of Bryson City residents. If, during the storm, he said, “[the water] had raised another foot or so, we may have lost that other pipe, which would have totally eliminated service to half our customers.”

With the grant funding, Bowe and his team directional-drilled a new pipe about 30 feet below the river. It’s sitting underground right now, he said, adding that the crew is “probably 75% finished” hooking the line into the main system.

“That’s an installation that’s going to be, for all intents and purposes, flood-proof,” he explained.

Even after the second pipe is online, Bowe doesn’t plan to halt the infrastructure improvements. If funding is secured, up next will be a replication of the previous project: another river bore to install another water line.

“Our only goal here is just to make sure that we’re providing a reliable, safe service to all the customers,” he said.

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