The Tuckahoe Creek Service District
Part I
An announcement that the operating fund for the Tuckahoe Creek Service District (TCSD)had a $150,000 deficit made at the July 7 Goochland Board of Supervisors’ meeting was the latest drop of worry in a cauldron of concern that has bubbled from its start.
Created by local ordinance in May 2002, the TCSD held much promise as an economic engine to attract high quality development to eastern Goochland and in turn relieve the burden of funding needed services and infrastructure from residential taxpayers.
Somewhere along the way, the project went awry and has never lived up to its potential. Instead of being self-sustaining, the TCSD is in danger of becoming a bottomless pit draining county financial resources needed elsewhere.
Covering 13.5 square miles in eastern Goochland, the TCSD is statutorily bounded on the south by Route 6, the north by the Hanover County line, the east by the Henrico county line and the west roughly by Manakin Road. Although parcels of land inside those boundaries are eligible for inclusion in the TCSD, not all land there is included.
Before the TCSD came along, water and sewer lines crawled out Rt. 6 in a piecemeal fashion. When Motorola announced that it would build a computer chip plant in West Creek in the mid ‘90s, the county negotiated an arrangement with Henrico to provide the plant with water. As the reality of that plant faded, the water allocation was used for other businesses that built in West Creek, including the Capital One campus.
The TCSD was not the first effort to provide large scale public utilities in eastern Goochland.
The first attempt came in the late ‘90’s and resulted in a debacle recalled by long time residents as the “toilet wars.”
The county planned to build its own sewage treatment plant on the James River, near the beautiful and historic Ben Dover property on the south side of Rte. 6.
Much of the planning for that scheme seems to have been done in secret, because Lou Preston doyenne of Ben Dover only learned of the project when she found survey teams measuring her property.
The resulting outcry from county residents, especially those who live in the nearby Meadows at Manakin, shut down that effort. To make her point, Preston arrayed old toilets along Route 6 in front of her property hence the name.
There was a memorable public meeting held in the auditorium at the old high school where a consultant proudly displayed a photo of a sewage treatment plant in the midst of an upscale northern Virginia neighborhood. When his uncomfortable silence answered the audience question, “which one of those houses is yours?” the meeting and plans for the sewage treatment plant ended.
We will probably never know why the supervisors decided to piggyback onto the public utilities of neighboring jurisdictions rather than build water and wastewater treatment plants in the county.
The coming of the Capital One Campus and completion of Rt. 288 as a high speed limited access highway that brought road access to the heart of West Creek changed everything. The supervisors seemed to have finally realized that Goochland’s location at the western edge of Richmond with excellent interstate access provided an opportunity to capture a portion of the growth moving its way.
West Creek seemed well positioned to be the next Innsbrook, but only if served by public water and sewer.
All of these factors birthed the TCSD, whose mantra became “those who benefit from the TCSD will pay for it.”
The premise behind the TCSD is simple. The county would install water and sewer trunk lines throughout the district. Sewer lines roughly followed creeks and water lines ran roughly along main roads.
A complicated set of agreements with Henrico County and the City of Richmond provided for connection to the Henrico water treatment plant at the comer of Gaskins and Three Chopt Roads and the Richmond sewer lines near the intersection of Cary Street and Maple Avenue behind St. Catherine’s School.
In addition to the water and sewer lines, a massive wastewater pump station was built behind the C&F Bank on Rt. 6.
To finance construction of this infrastructure, Goochland borrowed $62,747,167 via a Virginia Resource Authority bond issue in 2002. The estimated cost of building the initial infrastructure was about $58 million.
The VRA, however, seems to have had concerns about Goochland’s ability to service such a large debt, at the time more than the entire annual county budget, and mandated that the county borrow an additional $5 million to be invested for the sole purpose of generating $300,000 annual interest revenue as a debt service cushion.
Goochland levied an ad valorem tax on all property included in the TCSD on top of existing property tax.
When the TCSD was in the formative stages, county officials met with property owners large and small to explain the tax. At one meeting homeowners in Hickory Haven and Sammary Forest were told in the spring of 2002 that the ad valorem tax was not expected to exceed 15 cents per hundred dollars of assessed valuation. The initial ad valorem tax rate was 50 cents per hundred. Currently, it is 23 cents, but assessed valuations have increased drastically. A modest home in Hickory Haven pays about $600 ad valorem annually.
Reality seems to have set in over the summer of 2002. At an August meeting with financial counselor Lynn Ivey, who was instrumental in creation of the TCSD, urged the supervisors to begin levying the ad valorem tax at the start of 2003, well before any utility services were available, to ensure that debt service payments could be met.
The repayment schedule for the debt was back loaded, to allow the TCSD to grow and generate more revenue. In addition to the ad valorem tax, the TCSD was to be financed by connection fees, user fees and a portion of the increase in real estate tax above the 2004base year value of $225,900,600. According to figures produced by the county assessor, the assessed valuation of the TCSD in January 2007 was $656,367,300.
Because increasing the portion of county revenue derived from non-residential uses was the goal of the TCSD, residential use there was limited to about 30 percent. Kinloch was included from the start as was the Hermitage Country Club. Homes in Broad Run, however, were specifically excluded from the TCSD, so homeowners there with tired failing drain fields should save up for alternate on site septic systems instead of waiting for sewers.
The entire scheme looks really good on paper. Unfortunately, the devil seems to have been in the details.
Bad weather, including record rainfall in 2004, contractor disputes and cost overruns resulted in trunk lines that did not run all the way to the TCSD boundaries. Lawsuits, discovery of prehistoric native American artifacts and construction problems combined to make the TCSD seem snake bit from the start.
The punitively high connection costs and complicated easement process resulted in far fewer users than indicated by initial projections.
The million gallon water tank that rises like a giant plunger thrust skyward from Centerville has never been more than half full. To prevent it contents from becoming stale, the county often spills thousands of gallons on the ground, for which is pays Henrico handsomely.
It is not too late to get the TCSD back on track, but it will require a thorough, honest and transparent evaluation and an attitude change to succeed.
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