The pump station is a permission, not a purchase

“No adjacent gravity sewer” reads like a number. On a lot of sites it is not a number, it is a permission, and the town does not have to give it to you.

A pump station and an offsite force main price out like any other piece of infrastructure. Feet of pipe, a station, an easement or two, a contingency. It lands in the budget as a hard cost, which makes it feel like a decision you get to make by yourself.

It usually is not. Getting to the sewer is engineering. Getting permission to solve it that way, and then getting capacity through it, are two separate decisions made by other people.

Gate one: can you physically reach it

This is the only gate most pro formas model. Where is the nearest line, what does it take to get there, what does the pipe cost. It is real work and it is the easy part, because the answer is a number and the number can be argued down.

Gate two: will they let you solve it that way

Towns do not want pump stations. Every one they accept is a piece of equipment they own, power, maintain, and get called about at two in the morning for the next forty years. Several jurisdictions have written that preference into their standards, and the language is blunt.

Hillsborough’s utility standards state that pumping stations are not permitted on new projects unless the applicant can demonstrate it is hydraulically not feasible to serve the development with a gravity system. Then they close the door most developers would reach for next:

Distance to the existing sewer system or potential costs of a gravity sewer system extension are not sufficient reason for a proposed pumping station.

Read that twice, because it inverts the usual logic. The argument that a gravity extension is prohibitively expensive is not a point in your favor. It is explicitly excluded as a justification. The standards go further and reserve the right for the Board of Commissioners to decline to serve projects that require a municipal pumping station at all, with every station requiring board approval and a Preliminary Engineering Report accepted by the Town before construction drawings that rely on it can even be reviewed.

Holly Springs takes the same position in its own words. Gravity sewer shall always be preferred over pump station and force main construction, a pump station in lieu of gravity service requires approval from the utilities director, and the Town reserves the right to disallow pump stations that are not in alignment with its Comprehensive Plan or other adopted long range plans.

That last clause is the one to sit with. Alignment with a long range plan is not an engineering test. It is a policy judgment, and it can be applied to a station that works perfectly well on paper.

Gate three: will they give you capacity through it

Reaching the line and being allowed to discharge into it are different approvals. In much of the Triangle and its eastern edge, allocation is a separate application with its own policy and often its own board action.

Johnston County requires an allocation permit for any development that wants to connect, and treats any modification or expansion of an existing approval as new allocation requiring a new permit. Its own policy language notes that near term capacity projections are preliminary estimates and subject to change, which is a fair warning that an allocation figure quoted early is not a reservation.

Fuquay-Varina adopted a water and wastewater allocation policy in November 2021 for the stated purpose of allocating capacity in conformity with the Town’s own strategic goals. In July 2023 a national builder went to the board for 94 single family lots and asked for 28,200 gallons per day of sewer and 33,840 of water. That is what allocation looks like in practice: a named request, for a named project, decided in public, against a policy that is about the town’s priorities rather than your hydraulics.

The public alternative is not a schedule you can borrow against

The reasonable response to a $2 million private trunk cost is that it is district scale infrastructure and somebody else should build it. That is often true, and it is a good conversation to have. It is not a timeline you can underwrite.

Apex’s Big Branch pump station and force main had a master plan in June 2021 and a preliminary engineering report in August 2021. The council was still ratifying amendments to the design services agreement in April 2025. Four years in, that project was in design. Public infrastructure gets built and it solves exactly this problem, but the gap between a master plan and a connection is measured in years, and your contract is measured in days.

One watch item

Allocation discretion has been contested at the General Assembly. House Bill 765 in the 2025 session proposed a statutory allocation process, including deadlines and a guarantee of service once capacity is approved. As of a legislative update given to the Carrboro council in November 2025 it had not passed, and staff expected it to return under a different bill number rather than that one.

We are flagging it rather than relying on it. If you are underwriting today, underwrite the local policy in front of you and check the current status of any state process separately, because the answer may have moved.

What to do with this

• Read the utility standards before you read the sewer map. The map tells you the distance. The standards tell you whether distance is even an argument you are allowed to make.
• Find out who approves a pump station. If it is the governing board rather than staff, you have a public discretionary approval in your critical path and should schedule it like one.
• Treat allocation as its own approval with its own timeline. Ask whether capacity is reserved on application, on approval, or only on connection, and get the answer in writing.
• Ask what happens to the allocation if the program changes. In at least one jurisdiction any expansion or modification resets it.
• If a public project would solve it, find out what stage it is actually in. Master plan and under construction are not the same answer.

A cost you control belongs in the budget. A cost that depends on someone else saying yes belongs in the schedule, and in the list of things that can end the deal.