The city has spent millions to shore up equipment and operations at the Richmond water treatment plant since last year's service outage. (Photo by Jay Paul)
If Richmond’s government is stuck in a perpetual state of semi-crisis, Chesterfield County just might be the antidote.
Eleven months after a relatively mild storm knocked out power at the city’s century-old water treatment plant, leaving all of Richmond and portions of Henrico, Hanover and Goochland counties without potable water for nearly a week, George Hayes, Chesterfield’s outgoing public utilities director, offered a sunnier-than-expected assessment during a panel discussion on the “State of the County” in December.
Chesterfield, he said, saw it coming.
“Before we knew about the flooding or actually what was happening, we started to learn that other municipalities were starting to see fluctuations in pressure,” Hayes told the audience at the Chesterfield Career and Technical Center on Hull Street Road on Dec. 10. “Within seconds, we made the decision to isolate the supply from the city of Richmond.”
The water crisis, he said, heightened the region’s awareness about the interconnectivity of metro Richmond’s public utilities. The city’s massive water treatment plant, capable of producing 132 million gallons a day, has long made Richmond the region’s primary water supplier. But over the years, Chesterfield and Henrico, the city’s biggest wholesale water customers, have added considerable capacity.
Chesterfield was able to avoid losing pressure by temporarily relying on its own supply.
“I think the events of Jan. 6 really fundamentally reshaped how this region views our infrastructure and our partnerships,” Hayes said. “I can tell you, within minutes of that decision being made — our staff are extremely well-trained — they pulled out our standard operating procedures that we regularly practice, and they executed them flawlessly. Within minutes of that order, we were isolated from the city of Richmond.”
That isolation, it seems, is both a blessing and a curse. In the weeks and months following the city’s bungled response to the water crisis — the facility was understaffed with outdated equipment and operational protocols that were either ignored or missing entirely — Henrico and Hanover counties began pushing for more direct oversight, floating the idea of a regional water authority to improve resilience.
The two counties held a joint board of supervisors meeting in mid-June to discuss next steps. Two weeks later, Mayor Danny Avula invited Henrico’s board to meet with City Council to begin discussing a regional solution. It didn’t go well.
Councilwoman Ellen Robertson told Henrico’s board that the problems at the plant had been “corrected” and insinuated that the city didn’t need the county’s help. Shortly after, Councilwoman Kenya Gibson suggested new data centers in Henrico were straining supply.
“I feel like they got a clear message that our Council was not interested in doing something regionally,” Avula said during an interview in late December, adding that in retrospect he would have pushed the meeting back to give City Council more “runway” to understand the financial implications of regionalizing. “Henrico wanted a temperature check, more than anything else. And the temperature was not great.”
A year later, the urgency has dissipated as the city has shored up operations at the plant, hired a new director of public utilities and invested more than $7 million in capital improvements.
Chesterfield has informed the city that it’s “not interested in being part of another formal water authority,” Avula says, referencing the county’s current participation in the Appomattox River Water Authority.
During an interview in early February, County Administrator Joe Casey said Chesterfield is more focused on how the county’s water sources — Swift Creek Reservoir, Lake Chesdin and a new facility planned along the Appomattox River — could pump water into the city and become a regional source. “Water can flow both ways,” Casey said.
Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas says his jurisdiction is focused on its own $300 million, 13-mile water main project, which will connect residents in eastern Henrico with the county’s water treatment facility on Three Chopt Road and potentially benefit “the region as a whole.”
“We are always open to conversations with our neighbors, but the City Council made it clear to our Board of Supervisors that they were not interested in a regional water authority,” Vithoulkas says via text. “That is the premise that we are operating under.”
Avula says he’s still open to the idea of regionalizing the water system, but primarily in the context of helping Richmond finance $1.4 billion in needed improvements over the next decade. In other words, not right now.
“If the political will were to get to a place and the money were to come together to regionalize, I would absolutely want to make that happen,” Avula says. “I think we’re in good shape in the near term.”
