ST. MATTHEWS – Calhoun County announced water projects for the towns of St. Matthews and Cameron during the month of July.
Brian Lynch of Santee Cooper detailed to Calhoun County Council the projects that will allow the county to provide water to the towns.
“We’ve got two reaches that are going to be Calhoun, the Cameron reach and the St. Matthews reach. It’s a two-phase reach approach to reach from where we’re currently serving off of Tee Vee Road and bringing water line up and through the water systems,” Lynch said.
The reaches will come from the Santee Cooper Regional Water System. The project is a cooperative project with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“This water system is really built on the idea of bringing safe, clean drinking water to the rural areas of South Carolina. The Corps covers 75% of all construction costs that are incorporated with these reaches,” Lynch said.
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“That’s critical because the per-capita cost is very expensive to reach rural areas of South Carolina. Without that system, it would be very challenging,” Lynch said.
Lynch detailed the construction costs.
“When we look at the Cameron reach, there’s two parts to that. So we start with property and acquisition and design. Those are the two elements that will cost us first. As we do that, that’s about $2 million for the Cameron reach, and about $1.7 million for the St. Matthews reach,” Lynch said.
The reaches will be 12-inch diameter piping, a total of 22 miles, according to Lynch.
“The estimated construction costs for these projects are fairly expensive. They’re $11 million basically for the Cameron reach and just a little over $9 million for the St. Matthews reach. But the Corps covers 75% of those costs, so they’re covering the bulk of that with the match portion of that being $2.7 million for the Cameron reach, and about $2.3 million for the St. Matthews reach,” Lynch said.
“If you look at the all-in costs for Calhoun County, it’s about $4.8 million for Cameron, and about $4 million for St. Matthews,” Lynch said.
Lynch said the county is currently a member of the agency, owning approximately 0.6 million gallons a day from the system. He said the county only uses approximately 0.1 million gallons daily.
“So there’s plenty of room for growth in capacity and to deliver more to the members of Calhoun County,” Lynch said.
“The plant’s also expandable, so if we ever got to a point where they needed more capacity in addition to that 0.6, they could participate in expansion of plant and get all the capacity they need,” Lynch said.
Calhoun County Administrator John McLauchlin said the projects will cut costs to provide water service in both towns.
