The Statesboro-Bulloch County Airport is jointly owned by the city and county but has a city water line smaller than standard for fire protection and no connection to the city sewer system. City Council on Tuesday morning approved a joint city-county resolution, which the Bulloch County commissioners approved that evening, asking for state funding to extend Statesboro’s water and sewer systems to the airport.

Without city sewer service, the airport has relied on septic tanks to get rid of wastewater. Currently the airport is building two new hangars for corporate planes with some federal and state funding, which Chairman David Bennett of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners described as coming through the Georgia Department of Transportation.

“We have a lot of opportunity to grow our airport. …,” Bennett said at Statesboro City Hall on Tuesday morning. “We have right now about 70 people that have airplanes that would like to hangar them at our airport. We have a waiting list. The problem is we don’t have hangar space for them. If we put in a hangar — like we’re building two corporate hangars right now — we got funding from GDOT so it’s very low-cost to us locally — but for each one of those you have to put in a septic tank.”

Each septic tank requires a drain field, he noted, so this in turn takes up land at the airport.

“We have 900 acres around that airport that we could grow, and the thing is every one of these airplanes that gets a hangar brings in revenue to the county because they pay personal property tax on that airplane,” Bennett said.

He had sat in the audience for the City Council meeting, where the joint resolution was approved 4-0 with one council member absent. Bennett only listened during that meeting. None of the council members commented before or after the vote, but City Manager Charles Penny had first explained some of the thinking behind the resolution.

“We have a lot of folks that use our airport, and they’d much rather come to our airport than to have to go to Savannah,” Penny said. “So we also have the opportunity for the possibility of some industries locating at our airport; however, we don’t have water and sewer at our airport, and so that means if they expand, they would have to be on wells and septic tanks.”

At its previous meeting, on Jan. 20, City Council had approved an easement for work extending “infrastructure” to the airport, Penny noted. That was actually for Georgia Power to install underground electrical service to the new corporate hangar site.

Also recently, on the same day that some Statesboro city officials were in the Atlanta area looking at data centers, Bennett and Bulloch County Manager Chris Eldridge were in Atlanta talking to legislators about funding for the airport and were advised to obtain a joint city-county resolution, Penny said.

Request to lawmakers

As usual with local government resolutions, this one has a series of preamble “whereas” clauses.

The second clause states: “Whereas, for purposes of enhancing the operation of the Airport and encouraging economic development, the City of Statesboro and Bulloch County desire to extend the City of Statesboro’s water and sewer system onto and around the Airport property to serve the Airport …”

The next clause states that the city and county “desire to obtain financial assistance from the (state) … to make it feasible to extend” the water and sewer systems to the airport. Then, after the “be it jointly resolved” clause, the resolution calls on “the local legislative delegation” in the Georgia General Assembly “to take necessary action” to provide this financial assistance.

That delegation includes Sen. Billy Hickman, R-District 4, Statesboro; Rep. Lehman Franklin, R-District 160, Statesboro; Rep. Butch Parrish, R-District 158, Swainsboro; and House Speaker Jon Burns, R-District 159, Newington.

Cost undetermined

The resolution says nothing about the expected cost of the project. The cost remains to be determined by consulting engineers with the Hussey Gay Bell firm, Penny said after the City Council meeting.

Enquiring about where the city’s water and sewer lines end now in the direction of the airport, the Statesboro Herald learned that while the airport has no connection at all to the city sewer system, the situation regarding water isn’t that simple. The city does supply water to the airport’s main office, but through a four-inch-diameter water line, which the city doesn’t consider sufficient for supplying fire hydrants, said Statesboro Public Utilities Director Matt Aycock.

Meanwhile, a city sewer line extends out U.S. Highway 301 to a manhole beside the entrance drive to the Brodie International factory. This is about one-third of a mile from the airport. But the sewer extension would actually be a second phase, with a larger water line being the priority, according to Aycock.

“For the short term, for the hangars, we were just in discussions with them about extending the water and doing a larger water main because, per code, we want it to have fire protection and we like to put fire hydrants on a minimum of a six-inch water line, for fire flows,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

The first step could be to add a six-inch line onto the existing four-inch main to reach the hangars, but with the idea that the city would eventually loop back to replace the old four-inch main with a six-inch line, and not have a smaller line feeding a larger one.

The consulting engineers, Aycock said, have been asked to do “a preliminary sketch and cost estimate of what it would take to get water and sewer for the airport area.” Until this is received, he said, officials have no clear idea of the final cost because, among other uncertainties, they don’t know whether the sewer main would be a gravity-fed line or require a pumping station.

“But for the short-term, for the time-being, it’s only a water extension to feed the new airport hangars,” Aycock said.

He mentioned that a preliminary cost estimate could be available within the week.

The Bulloch County Board of Commissioners agreed to the resolution by a 6-0 vote during their 5:30 p.m. meeting.