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Florence, SC & the Pee Dee Region
Your Community Guide
Front Porch Talk
There was one sentence, on page 44 of a 481 page Florence County Council packet, that caught our attention.
"Water and Sewer Authority Study: The initial feasibility study has been completed."
That was pretty much it.
But it raised a bigger question. Wait. What study?
Florence County already has water and sewer providers. The City of Florence operates a major water and wastewater system. Several smaller towns run systems of their own. So why is the county studying whether to create something new? And what could it eventually mean for Florence?
We started digging. What we found goes well beyond that one sentence.
Let's be clear about where things actually stand.
Florence County has not announced that it is creating a Water and Sewer Authority. What the county has done is study whether creating one would be worth pursuing. The full study is not public yet. HelloFlorenceSC has requested it, and we will report back once we have it in hand.
Here is what the county's own record says today. The initial feasibility study is complete. County staff is evaluating it to decide whether further action makes sense. County Council is supposed to receive the report for review and comment.
That's it. No vote. No proposal. No timeline.
So this isn't a decision. It's a question the county is taking seriously enough to have studied.
Here's something that surprises a lot of residents. There isn't a single utility serving all of Florence County.
Florence County is served by seven public water and wastewater providers. The City of Florence is the largest, but Johnsonville, Lake City, Coward, Olanta, Pamplico, and Scranton all run their own systems too. Some parts of the county still have no public water or sewer service at all.
That last part isn't just a talking point. We found direct evidence of it in the same county record that started this whole search.
Tucked into that same 481 page packet were 19 separate zoning requests along Arthur Road, just outside the city. Each one is asking the county to formally zone a small piece of land for single family homes.
We checked the water and sewer availability listed for every single one.
Seventeen of the nineteen properties list no water and no sewer availability at all.
To be fair to the full picture, most of these are existing homes on land that was simply never formally zoned. This isn't a case of a new subdivision being approved without utilities. It's a case of Florence County catching up on paperwork for houses that have likely relied on wells and septic tanks for years.
But it's still a useful, real world snapshot. In the same month the county's water authority study came up, county staff were processing nearly twenty properties with no public water or sewer connection at all. That's not an abstract policy question. That's Arthur Road.
A few miles away, the picture looks completely different.
The same county packet includes a separate rezoning request along East Palmetto Street, about ten acres headed toward commercial use. That property already has water and sewer availability through the City of Florence.
It sits inside something called the Highway 76 Corridor Project. We counted every parcel named across the ordinances tied to that project this year. The total comes to 431 individual properties, spread across 20 separate ordinances, all moving from unzoned land to a formal zoning designation. That corridor runs right through the part of the county seeing the most industrial investment, including the AESC battery plant and the Florence Global Technology and Commerce Park.
So put those two things side by side. In one part of the county, land is being formally organized for growth with city utilities already in place. A few miles away, homes are being zoned with no water or sewer access at all.
That contrast is really the whole story in miniature. Florence is growing unevenly, and the infrastructure underneath it is trying to keep up.
While the county studies whether to create something new, the City of Florence has already been rebuilding what it has for years, and the numbers are bigger than most residents probably realize.
Back in 2023, the city's utility director warned Council that growth, especially the arrival of AESC's battery plant and thousands of newly approved homes, could push the water system over capacity within a matter of years if nothing changed. The proposed fix at the time totaled around $537 million, most of it financed through bonds, with water and sewer rates set to climb steadily for several years to help pay for it.
Since then, the plan has moved forward in stages. In 2025, City Council approved borrowing up to $270 million for sewer work in east Florence and upgrades to the interceptor line that connects Florence to Timmonsville. At the city's January 2026 planning retreat, officials pointed to roughly $138 million in currently active bond funded projects. By March 2026, the scope of the surface water treatment expansion had been revised, from doubling capacity outright to a more measured increase from 10 to 15 million gallons a day, at a cost of about $200 million. Of that $200 million, $80 million is going specifically toward removing high iron content from the water supply. That's a quality issue as much as a capacity one, and it's one most residents have probably never heard tied to a dollar figure before.
None of those numbers contradict each other. They're different chapters of the same long project. But as far as we can tell, nobody has laid out that full timeline in one place before now. Consider this your explainer.
If you want one number that captures why all of this matters, here it is.
According to a state environmental filing from the SC Department of Environmental Services, the sewer lines serving central and western Florence have overflowed a documented 74 times, a direct result of growth outpacing the system's capacity. The state signed off on a $23.4 million first phase repair project for that exact stretch of pipe in November 2025.
Seventy four overflows is not a hypothetical. It's a number attached to a real state document, describing a real problem, in a system serving real people right now.
Here's a detail worth knowing as this conversation moves forward. The City of Florence already operates the water and sewer system for the Town of Timmonsville, under an existing agreement between the two governments. City officials have also talked about eventually retiring Timmonsville's own wastewater plant entirely and routing that flow into Florence's system.
In other words, some version of "one system serving multiple communities" already exists here. If county leaders are studying whether a broader authority makes sense, this existing arrangement is a working example sitting right next door. It would be a fair question to ask county and city officials directly: is this the model being considered?
If Florence County ever does move toward creating an authority, residents deserve clear answers to some basic questions.
Who would control it, and who would appoint its board? Would it own infrastructure outright, or coordinate between the systems that already exist? Would Florence, Lake City, Johnsonville, and the other towns participate voluntarily, or would it be required? How would rates be set, and could they change? Who pays to extend service into places like Arthur Road that don't have it today?
None of these questions have answers yet. That's not a criticism. It's simply where things stand. But they're exactly the kind of questions that deserve public attention once the full study becomes available, not after a decision has already been made.
Florence County commissioned a study on whether a countywide water and sewer authority makes sense. Existing utility providers took part in the process. The initial study is finished. County staff is reviewing it. County Council is expected to get a copy for comment.
The county has not announced plans to create an authority, take over any city's system, or eliminate any town's water department. We want to be straightforward about that, because it would be easy to read more into this than the record currently supports.
What we can say is this. The question is serious enough that the county paid to study it, brought every water provider in the county into the conversation, and finished the analysis. That alone is worth Florence paying attention to.
HelloFlorenceSC has requested the completed study. When it arrives, we'll read all of it, and we'll come back with what it actually says.
Until then, maybe the real question for Florence isn't whether a new authority gets created. It's this: as our community keeps growing, who makes sure the pipes underneath it grow along with it?
Know your city. Enjoy your city.