Mergers: Growing and improving TriRiver Water

TriRiver Water was born via merger in 2024, and opportunities to grow and improve continue to exist.

A year later, Chatham County and Siler City joined TriRiver Water via merger, upping the number of water utility customers from approximately 23,000 to 40,000 and increasing the service area to approximately the same size as Rhode Island.

TriRiver Water is now in charge of Chatham County and Siler City water utility facilities as well. That means operating a total of four water filtration facilities, five wastewater treatment plants, and 1,000+ miles of water and sewer lines.

These mergers present a significant undertaking, but they also offer a path toward more sustainable and cost-effective water and sewer services. 

"Having one water and wastewater utility will really allow this area to more closely reach its full potential," Sanford Assistant City Manager Vic Czar said.

Why merge?

Costs

A large treatment plant serving 100,000 people will have lower costs per gallon of water than a small treatment plant serving 1,000 people.

Mergers allow nearby communities to pool their resources. Pooling resources helps spread out the cost of operation and maintenance, thus reducing the cost per customer. A combined, larger utility system can negotiate better prices for equipment and supplies, borrow money at lower interest rates, and hire more skilled personnel. Reducing this type of operational overhead directly affects water rates.

Municipal water utilities are funded by the water rates their customers pay. So when expansion or maintenance is needed, the customers paying for the water must absorb the costs. Mergers add customers and keep operational overhead at a minimum, thus allowing the utility to keep water rates as low as possible.

Costs continue to go up for everything. So it would likely be inaccurate to say that mergers will lower water rates. But it is safe to say that mergers will cause water rates to go up less than they would have if the merger didn't happen.

Reliability

Increasing the footprint of TriRiver Water helps ensure a consistent supply of safe drinking water and efficient wastewater management for all customers.

Having multiple filtration facilities with different water sources diversifies our portfolio. It reduces risk and improves system-wide reliability because a problem in one location could be mitigated by other parts of the system until the problem can be fixed. 

Growth 

The access to clean water and safe wastewater treatment is vitally important for any population center. Areas without that sort of access cannot grow; they may face government-mandated development moratoriums or simply begin to see growth decline due to deteriorating conditions.

Larger utility providers can better prepare and adapt to expansion needs. 

The exorbitant cost and prolonged timeframe associated with water utility projects restricts many utilities from planning expansions. Smaller utilities tend to have to wait until expansion is absolutely necessary to even begin the planning process. That results in multiple years of delay and ultimately higher costs to execute the needed expansion.

Are mergers rare? 

Quite the contrary -- mergers are happening regularly in the water utility world, as a changing economic landscape forces utilities to search for new ways to succeed.

In North Carolina alone, there have been several recent water utility mergers. Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach are merging their water utility systems in 2025. The City of Southport and Brunswick County did the same thing in 2024. Raleigh merged with several of its neighboring utility systems in 2006. 

Merging allows local utilities to tap into regionalization. Regionalization allows communities to share resources in a mutually beneficial way. 

This trend toward mergers and regionalization may seem unusual, but it might be the result of there being too many individual water utilities.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are more than 148,000 water utilities in the United States. It's hard to contextualize that number, but consider that there are just 3,000 electrical utilities in the country.

Is merging the only way?

Merging is not the only way to achieve the benefits of regionalism for water utilities. 

Some utilities prefer to enter into partnerships -- those can help utilities share resources while still allowing them to retain their autonomy.

TriRiver Water, in addition to merging with multiple area utilities, is also taking advantage of partnership opportunities.

Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina were looking for ways to increase their water capacity in the coming years. So they agreed to join as partners the project to expand the Sanford Water Filtration Facility from 12 million gallons per day to 30 million gallons per day.

As partners, Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina agreed to fund part of the expansion project on the water facility. In exchange, they will gain access to some of that water capacity, meaning some of the finished water filtered in Sanford will come out of the taps in Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina.

Merging into TriRiver Water 

“The formation of TriRiver Water ... is a win-win for our region. As we look at managing community growth, this agreement is an opportunity to build on regional partnerships using good fiscal stewardship and smart planning to provide sustainable and cost-effective water and sewer services," Sanford Mayor Rebecca Salmon said during the 2024 rollout of TriRiver Water.

While TriRiver took control of Pittsboro's utility infrastructure on July 1, 2024, the process to fully integrate Pittsboro into TriRiver Water will take some time longer. This will be the same for Chatham County and Siler City too. 

That's because the mergers will not be complete until the systems are working as one entity. Currently they're all working as independent cost centers being managed by TriRiver Water.

To get the systems working as one, the water and sewer lines must be physically connected. That means significant capital improvement projects must be completed. The merger agreements make it clear that existing TriRiver Water customers will not be required to subsidize those types of projects for areas wanting to join TriRiver Water.

The mergers will be complete and rate parity will be reached when the new groups complete their capital improvement projects and pay off those debts. Rate parity would mean all revenue was going to the same place and all expenses were being shared across the complete customer base. This would help keep water rates down across the board because costs would be spread out among more people.