Rosman Mayor Says $1.2 Million Parcel Is "Best" Site for Town Water Plant. And He Owns it.

After failing to reach a long-term utility agreement with Transylvania County, Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton hopes to sell land to his town as a water plant site. Would such a deal be legal?

Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton’s property on Rosman Highway and the gravel road that could lead to the elevated site of a water storage tank.

ROSMAN — Rosman Mayor Brian Shelton recently showed off what he says is an ideal site for a water treatment plant that could satisfy the demands of his town, Transylvania County and even the city of Brevard for decades to come.

The 40-acre parcel straddles Rosman Highway and reaches far enough south to tap into the plentiful flow of the French Broad River. On the other side of the highway, it offers adequate ground for a treatment plant, while a partly finished gravel road leads to a high point perfect for a water storage tank.

It’s also close enough to the town’s existing utility lines to limit the need to lay expensive new pipes, Shelton said.

“This is by far the best site,” he said.

But it also presents obstacles beyond even its steep slopes, flood-prone areas and location downstream from potential polluters such as the Transylvania County Landfill.

For one, Shelton owns the land. For another, he hopes to sell all or parts of the property — worth $1.2 million, he says — to his own town for a far higher price per acre than he paid for a portion of it last year. And no matter the price, such a sale could potentially violate state law prohibiting “self-dealing” by elected officials, according to a lawyer and professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s School of Government.

Then there’s the bigger implications of his go-it-alone plan: It demonstrates the breakdown of the town’s much ballyhooed team effort with the county to build a utility system that has long been seen as one of the area’s greatest needs.

Eighteen months ago, County Commissioners joked about popping champagne corks after receiving a state pledge of $7 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that they planned to funnel into the construction of a new Rosman water plant.

It was seen as the start of a unified push to bolster a Rosman utility system now inadequate to serve the long-term demand of housing and manufacturing projects that the county expects to draw with the extension of the town’s utility lines east along the US 64 corridor.

Though the two sides are still working together on that project, which is expected to be completed this fall, they have been unable to reach a long-term utility agreement, and the county has diverted the $7 million in water plant funding to other utility projects.

All of which means, Shelton says, that it’s up to the town to take the crucial first step towards addressing future water needs — securing property for the plant.

Or, really, up to Shelton, critics say.

He controls the town’s operations tightly and with questionable means, said Rose Baltezore, a water customer who has lived in the same house just outside the town since 1986. And even if the sale does not fit the legal definition of self-dealing, she said, that is exactly what it would amount to.

“It’s going to be the town’s debt and we don’t need to let that happen,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Self-Dealing?

Rosman water customer and Shelton critic, Rose Baltezore

Baltezore isn’t the only nearby resident with issues about how Shelton runs the town, just the only one willing to go on the record.

What are her concerns?

Shelton and his wife, Deedra, a town alderman, don’t live in Rosman, Baltezore said, but on a 5.5-acre parcel on Rosman Highway west of its borders.

Not true, Shelton said. The couple lives at the in-town address listed on election paperwork. But they do plan to move to the parcel on Rosman Highway, he said, and in April the Board of Aldermen approved the first step towards annexing the property.

Speaking of Deedra Shelton, Baltezore asked, “How can his wife be an alderman? How can that work and her vote count?”

Actually, County Elections Director Jeff Storey said, such an arrangement was allowed by law, forwarding a blog post from the School of Government that called family members serving together “perfectly legal,” and adding, “voters may have issues with this, but they can weigh in at the polls.”

State law also clears Shelton from the legal prohibitions against elected officials serving in staff leadership roles in the governments they represent. It’s allowed, the law says, in municipalities smaller than 5,000, and Rosman easily qualifies.

With a population of about 700 and a total budget of $1.3 million, it can’t afford to pay a manager and department heads, said Shelton, who has been mayor for 16 years and serves as town administrator and de facto utilities director.

In such small communities, “it’s pretty common for mayors to take on more roles and wear more hats” than in larger local governments, said Kimberly Nelson, Professor of Public Administration and Government at the School of Government.

There’s a similar excemption in the self-dealing law that generally forbids elected officials from entering into contracts with the public bodies they represent.

“It provides an exception for towns and villages under a population of 20,000,” wrote Scott Mooneyham, communications director for the North Carolina League of Municipalities.

“That is a recognition that in small towns it is not easy for council members, who often have significant business interests in town, to completely avoid business dealings that affect town government,” Mooneyham wrote, adding that “issues for recusal etc. still apply.”

Shelton said that he and his wife, whose name is also on the property’s deed, would not participate in any discussions about its sale and that she would not vote if the proposal comes before the Board. He dismissed concerns about the law, violations of which are punishable as misdemeanors, saying last week he had consulted the League and Town Attorney Don Barton, who did not return calls from NewsBeat.

But Crista Cuccaro, a lawyer and a Teaching Assistant Professor of Public Law and Government at the School of Government said the law is more complicated than the League’s response suggests.

The exemption is limited to “medically related services” and annual  payments of up to “sixty thousand dollars ($60,000) for other other goods and services.”

It says nothing about land sales and case law also fails to address whether such deals are allowed by leaders of small towns, Cuccaro said. “I think it’s a bit of an open question.”

But she also pointed to a stronger statement reached by recently retired School of Government attorney Frayda Bluestein in a 2015 blog post about the self-dealing law.

“There is no indication in the statute,” Bluestein wrote, “that the exception can be used for contracts involving real property transactions, including leases or sales of real property.”

Family Land

Shelton, standing next to a sign near the Rosman Town Hall.

County records show that the land where Shelton wants to build the water plant is appraised for tax purposes at $297,000 and that Shelton bought it last year for $285,000. But another deed indicates Shelton acquired the property in 2019. Explaining the conflicting documents, he said the land has been in his family for generations and the amount he paid in 2022 covered only the last portion held by another heir.

How big a portion? A notation on a tax document says the previous owner controlled three-fourths of the property.

“All that isn’t always accurate,” Shelton said of the tax document, and the amount he bought last year “was supposed to be half.”

Doesn’t that still mean he’d profit by selling the land to the town? Not necessarily, he said. He’s spent more than $200,000 clearing the parcel of large piles of junk, grading it and building the road that would lead to the storage tank.

He said he won’t offer the property for sale to the town until the road is completed, freeing the town of that expense, and until he receives an independent appraisal of its value.

He offered another assurance in an interview on Tuesday, after a follow-up conversation with the League, he said. It advised him that neither he nor his wife are to discuss the potential sale with other Aldermen. He also said this week that the town is looking at other sites, “though I still think this (his property) is the best one.”

He knows it’s worth $1.2 million, he said, because he’s been offered that much by a buyer seeking to build luxury cabins on the land. He’d rather sell it to the town, he said, because of its public benefit as the site of a water treatment facility that could meet countywide demand for as much as a century to come.

Demand will start to increase much sooner than that when development follows the completion of the $5.5-million extension of water and sewer pipes along US 64 from the town to near Island Ford Road.

Farther down the line, it could satisfy the growing demands of the city of Brevard, whose City Council approved a connection with the town’s soon-to-be extended water line at a meeting in May.

The Council’s intention, according to the meeting minutes, was to provide Rosman with emergency access to Brevard’s water, and City Manager Wilson Hooper said the city has an adequate supply for “a decade or two of growth.” But because the city’s long-term water capacity is limited by its intake site on Catheys Creek, Shelton said, it will ultimately need the water his town’s plant could provide.

Future county demand, meanwhile, was addressed in a 2014 county water supply study from the McGill engineering firm, which projected that in 2065 the water use of unincorporated Transylvania would average 3.6 million gallons a day.

It also identified the French Broad as a source that, upstream from Rosman, could safely yield 7 million gallons per day.

What other parcel could efficiently provide that much water, Shelton asked.

None, Shelton said from behind the wheel of his SUV during the tour of potential sites.

Some would entail the crippling costs of laying thousands of feet of pipes to access a river intake and/or the town’s wastewater treatment plant on the French Broad River. Some holdings include ownership of river banks but not the rivers themselves. Some are suited for intake but not as the site of a treatment plant or storage tank.

And yes, he said, it would be easier to secure the largely natural watersheds of the nearby North and West forks of the French Broad, but they don’t carry enough water to meet long-term demand.

 “What’s the most cost-effective piece of land to do the project on?” he asked rhetorically. “Is it a water source that’s going to do for the county for the next 100 years or are we going to go up on the North Fork . . . and be out of water in 30 or 40 years?”

He provided the answer when he pulled up to his property.

“I think this makes common sense,” he said.

So much so, he said, that in discussions with the county, Commission Chair Jason Chappell and Vice Chair Jake Dalton had offered to buy the land.

“That’s not what I recall,” Dalton wrote in an emailed response that listed “significant obstacles to the county purchasing it.”

These include, he wrote, “specific restrictions/regulations on property transactions when elected officials are involved,” as well as the value Shelton has placed on the property.

“County can only pay appraised valuation,” Dalton wrote, “and his asking price is significantly more.”

A Looming Thirst

The French Broad River next to Shelton’s land, upstream from the town. A 2014 engineering report determined 7 million gallons of day could be safely withdrawn from this stretch of the river.

Two facts are clear about both the town’s water and wastewater treatment plants. They are currently being used at well below their capacity — and both need dramatic upgrades before they could anchor the countywide system Shelton has in mind.

Though the 250,000-gallon-per-day wastewater plant is only 15 years old, it struggles to handle surges from heavy rains and infusions of contaminant-rich leachate trucked to the plant from the county landfill, according to an April 2022 letter from the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).

“The Rosman WWTP has received numerous Notices of Violation for chronic non-compliance . . . 35 instances in the previous 5 years,” DEQ officials wrote in support of the town’s unsuccessful request for a grant to upgrade the plant. 

The water system sells only about 75,000 gallons of water per day, Shelton said, and its series of storage tanks can hold 290,000 gallons. But one of those tanks dates from the 1970s and they are all fed by wells with limited potential for expansion.

Shelton identified a new water plant as the highest priority in an interview last year, and at the time the Commission had set aside money to at least start to make that happen.

In April of 2022, it approved a version of a “Capital Project Fund'' totaling $12.9 million. The two main sources were a portion of the $6.7 million ARPA grant the county had previously received — part of which was earmarked for the extension of utility lines on US 64 — and the more recent $7 million in ARPA funding, which would be available for a “water treatment plant,” the document said.

The general plan was for the county to supply and manage the funding and for Rosman to own and operate the plant. But a long-term deal containing the details of this arrangement was voted down that spring by the town’s Board of Aldermen.

Beyond a stipulation in the draft agreement calling for the county to retain the right to “make any final decisions as to design and construction,” the town balked at vague revenue-sharing language in the agreement, Shelton said.

“(County leaders) couldn’t ever pinpoint the share of revenue they wanted,” which raised the prospect of the county accruing large sums while “we’re struggling to get by,” he  said. “It set us up for failure.”

That was not the intent, said County Manager Jaime Laughter. 

The county’s precise share of the revenue would have been settled in negotiations that stalled because the town rejected the agreement, she wrote in an email, and any money the county collected would have been set aside for maintenance and improvement projects agreed upon by the town and county.

The draft agreement was created with input from the School of Government, she also wrote, and the revenue-sharing terms are considered “best practice” — and were necessary to protect the interests of county residents.

If taxpayers contribute to the system, she wrote, their elected leaders need to have a role in determining “future expansion/capital maintenance . . . (and) assuring the county citizens as a whole are getting a return on that investment.”  

Where the Money Is Going

She also highlighted other reasons the county diverted money into other utility uses: the cost of a new plant would come to far more than the available $7 million, and there were concerns that construction couldn’t be finished in time to meet the tight federal deadline for spending ARPA funds.

To make sure it was met, the state imposed an even tighter time frame, requiring local governments to file an “intent to spend funds by June 30 this year,” Laughter wrote.

The terms of the elarlier $6.7 ARPA grant allowed small counties to use them for “revenue replacement” according to a document prepared for the Commission’s March 13 meeting. That’s when commissioners agreed to shift the remaining funds from that grant out of the extension project and into the county’s “unrestricted fund balance.” This could help pay for the much-needed $5.8 million new cell at the landfill, Laughter recently told commissioners.

What about the second ARPA grant, the $7 million intended for the sewer plant? It does not have to be used for that purpose, but any alternatives must be approved by DEQ, according to a department public information officer, Cathy Akroyd.

The current plan calls for $4.3 million of the $7 million to go into the utility line extension along U.S. 64, and at its June 5 meeting the Commission agreed to seek approval from DEQ to use the remaining $2.7 million for three other projects: a connection between the soon-to-be-extended Rosman water line and the city of Brevard’s water system, a study of water intake systems and, finally, engineering and permitting work for both a water treatment plant and wastewater treatment plant.

Those priorities can be adjusted as the jobs progress “and we get more engineering information that can impact cost and timeline,” Laughter wrote.

She justified the requested expenditure of a total of nearly $2 million on the water intake study and engineering, permitting and design, writing that this amount is “in line with typical costs.” She wrote that the work is needed to update and “refine” estimates from the McDill study, which projected, for example, that the cost of building a 4-million-gallon-per-day water treatment plant near Rosman would be about $40 million.

Accurate cost estimates are needed to move forward with projects and, along with engineering work, can help secure future funding, she wrote. “Often construction-funding grants and financing processes want to see preliminary engineering reports.” 

 Shelton, on the other hand, sees a lost opportunity.

“You can waste a lot of money on studies and engineering,” he said.

The now-scrapped draft agreement between the county and town called for the $7 million to be used for a plant with a capacity of 2-million gallons per day. Because it was to be a bare-bones facility — “a package plant,” he called it — those funds could have gone a long way to getting it built, he said.

“Even if you got to 70 percent, it’s better than where we’re sitting at now,” he said, “which is zero percent.”

Going It Alone

What does all this mean for the future of utilities in Transylvania?

Once development begins to follow the completion of the lines in the US 64 corridor, Shelton said, the town may have to install more wells and tanks to meet short-term needs.

But the town is also seeking $13.7 million in state funds for the water plant and $6 million to build a storage tank and install an additional layer of treatment at its sewer plant.

The money for the water plant site, on the other hand, would come from the town, possibly requiring it to take on debt, Shelton said. Still, he sees this as a necessary first step, he said, “because it doesn’t matter if it’s built next week or 20 years from now or 50 years from now, at some point there’s going to be a need for a water treatment plant.”

The county, meanwhile, is requesting $45 million in state funding for a “water treatment plant/water intake plant to serve countywide needs,” according to a letter sent to state Rep. Mike Clampitt, R-Swain.

This funding is based on the estimate from the nine-year-old McGill study, Laughter wrote, as are the county’s possible paths for providing future service — which do not necessarily include Rosman.

“Those options identified include some in cooperation with other entities . . .  and standalone,” she wrote.

But when seeking state funds, Clampitt said, evidence of a team effort is always helpful.

He spoke in general terms and stopped short of singling out the town and the county by name, but said, “cooperation is a high note and I would like to see more municipalities and more local governments work together.”

“All grants,” he said, “stand a better chance if they show cooperation between relevant entities.”

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com

Editor’s note: Recommended reading from Asheville Watchdog — a new story on a suit filed by longtime HCA doctors alleging the company systematically overcharges patients.