One Loan Through, One Loan Waiting on Columbia's Water Project

The state cleared financing for Columbia's water treatment plant, but a much larger loan tied to a new river intake is on hold until a statewide watershed study wraps up, all while ratepayers are already watching their bills climb.

Columbia Power & Water Systems cleared a major financing hurdle last week, but the utility's larger and more expensive project is still waiting on Nashville.

The Tennessee Local Development Authority approved a $75 million loan on July 27 for CPWS's expansion of its water treatment plant on Nashville Highway, adding roughly 12 million gallons a day of treatment capacity. The board had deferred the same request a month earlier, on June 22, sending CPWS back to make its case again. That delay came with a real price tag: CPWS Vice President Matt Wheeler told the board in June that "every month of delay adds $2 million to the overall project cost."

The treatment plant expansion is one piece of a roughly $520 million program CPWS says it needs to keep water flowing to a fast-growing county. The rest of the plan centers on a new downstream intake on the Duck River, capable of pulling up to 32 million gallons a day, well above the utility's current draw of around 20 million gallons a day, along with more than 16 miles of new raw water transmission main to move it. That piece comes with its own price tag: a $315 million federal loan the utility needs to build the intake. Board members did not act on it at the July meeting, choosing instead to wait on findings from the governor's Duck River Watershed Planning Partnership, a group studying how the river's water should be divided among the communities that depend on it.

CPWS President and CEO Jonathan Hardin has described the treatment plant loan as a way to keep moving while the bigger regional questions get sorted out. "It allows us to meet needs in the near term while other discussions fully take shape with the stakeholder engagement it takes to flesh out those solutions," he said.

Why CPWS Says It Cannot Wait

CPWS serves more than 27,000 direct customers in Columbia, plus wholesale customers including the City of Spring Hill and the Maury County Water System, a combined service area the utility says tops 250,000 people who depend on the Duck River. Utility officials have said that without the expansion, Columbia could face mandatory water restrictions as soon as 2028 or 2029.

Jason Gilliam, a board member for the Maury County Water System, has tied the water constraints directly to the county's growth prospects. "We are already at a point where we are turning away business and industry in this county," he said, a statement made before recent announcements including Medacta International's planned Spring Hill headquarters and manufacturing hub and GM's $275 million investment in its Spring Hill assembly complex. The Journal could not confirm a direct, on-the-record link between those specific projects and CPWS's water planning, but the timing underscores the pressure a growing industrial base is putting on the county's water supply.

Not everyone is on board with how fast CPWS wants to move. Doug Jones, president of the Duck River Conservancy, has raised concerns about how much water the river can safely give up. "The Duck River is fragile," he said. "We can't support another 32 million that TDEC's going to let Columbia Power drain right there at the edge of the river."

What It Means for Your Water Bill

Columbia's City Council already approved the ratepayer side of this equation back in January, voting for increases of up to 20 percent a year for five years, a cumulative jump of nearly 150 percent by 2030 or 2031. A typical residential bill inside city limits, based on 5,000 gallons a month, was $34.75 before the increases began; CPWS projects it could reach roughly $86.47 by 2030. The new rates took effect March 1, and CPWS has said the increases in the later years of the plan may come in below the full 20 percent if the larger financing package, including loans like the one approved last week, comes together as planned.

State and federal loans are expected to cover roughly 80 percent of the total program cost, with the remaining share falling to ratepayers, which is the reasoning behind the increases already on the books. Hardin has been blunt about why rates are the last lever CPWS wants to pull. "The last knob you turn is the rates on your customers, grandma and grandpa who have lived there their whole life," he said.

State Comptroller Jason Mumpower, whose office oversees the Tennessee Local Development Authority, has framed the CPWS project as part of a bigger shift underway across Tennessee. "The future of utilities in Tennessee is regionalization," he said.

For now, the treatment plant work can move forward. The intake and pipeline, the more expensive half of the project and the piece that would let CPWS draw more water from the Duck River, stays in limbo until state officials decide how much of the river the whole region can share.

Sources: Main Street Media of Tennessee / Main Street Maury. WSMV. Tennessee Lookout. Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation.

Correction, Aug. 7, 2026: An earlier version of this article misidentified Jason Gilliam as a Maury Alliance economic development official. He is a board member of the Maury County Water System. The article has been corrected.