What about the water?
New Kent County has decisions to make about replacing its water supply — which will cost a bundle.
By Richard Lobb
New Kent County has a problem. How county leaders solve it will have an impact on what the community will look like in several years and the tax and service rates residents will have to pay.
The problem lies in the most ordinary thing — the water that comes out of your tap. Right now it comes from wells. The question is where it will come from in the future.
Wells are a very common source of municipal water supplies. But the state of Virginia is pushing New Kent and other counties to switch to surface water — rivers and reservoirs.
The solution will probably be either to tap the nearby Pamunkey River and build New Kent’s very own water treatment plant — a first for the county — or a enter a regional arrangement based on the James River, but sidestepping Richmond and its troubled facilities.
Securing a new long-term source will cost $150 million or more. But without one, the county could be short of water and less able to attract the kind of tax-paying commercial and industrial development — such as “hyperscale” data centers — that would help pay the local government’s bills. That would increase the burden on homeowners, who already grumble about their property taxes.
“Water is going to be key to development,” Thomas W. Evelyn, chair of the New Kent Board of Supervisors told me. “That’s going to impact our growth. In four or five years, that’s going to be the Number One issue.”
800 feet down
Drinking water coming into the Groves starts its journey 800 feet below the surface and is brought up by two wells owned by New Kent Public Utilities. One is located near the tank that looms over the Spring Elm section of The Groves, and the other is near the intersection of I-64 and Vineyards Parkway.
The county is dotted with 19 wells that supply 10 different water systems under county management. The Groves is part of the Central system, which is by far the largest of the ten. None of the systems needs a treatment plant. All the water needs is to be disinfected with sodium hypochlorite, according to C. Michael Lang, director of Public Utilities. Otherwise, what you get is what comes out of the ground.
According to the water quality report required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the water hits the marks for safety and quality, although the sodium content is considerably higher than the maximum level recommended for people on sodium-restricted diets. The whole county has high levels of naturally occurring sodium, according to EPA reports. (Lang says the disinfectant added to the water is not a significant source of the sodium.)
On the other side of the water cycle, the county maintains a sewer system and has a treatment plant permitted to discharge treated effluent into the lower Pamunkey River near Eltham.
The New Kent County system provides drinking water to about half the population of the county. The rest is produced by privately owned wells or investor-owned water companies.
Growth is outrunning supply
The steady growth of the county — the population grew by fifty percent from 2010 to 2025 — is placing strains on the water system, to say nothing of roads and schools and other public facilities and infrastructure. Lang told the Board of Supervisors in August 2025 that homes in the Brickshire area (southeast of The Groves) were already experiencing low pressure during peak demand periods.
The Bottoms Bridge area, west of The Groves, is served by a main well and a backup on Cary Road. Water usage in the local system has occasionally outstripped the capacity of the backup well, Lang said. And more residential growth in the area has already been approved, adding to the future strain on the system.
With the existing systems across the county stretched thin, Lang’s department has already had to object to requests for the rezoning needed for two new developments seeking approval, one industrial and one residential, he said.
The county is “cutting it awfully close” in its ability to supply water without significant improvements to the system, Lang said.
The county plans to address the Brickshire problem with a new 1-million gallon above-ground storage tank, costing $10 million. A plan is pending to connect the Bottoms Bridge and Central systems with a pipeline along New Kent Highway, alleviating the Bottoms Bridge problem. But it may face some opposition on the Board of Supervisors. Amy Pearson, the board member who represents The Groves, has her doubts about the project.
“I think the New Kent Highway Interconnection Project could possibly be deferred by replacing the Cary Road well for much less,” she said.
A $150 million solution?
Overshadowing the discussions, however, is the fact that the state decided long ago that the widespread use of wells to provide drinking water in eastern Virginia was tapping out the underlying aquifers. The state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is steadily reducing the amount of water localities are allowed to pull from the aquifers as a way of spurring them to move to surface water by 2038.
The closest source of surface water for New Kent is the Pamunkey River on its northern border. The county has a DEQ permit to withdraw and treat water from the Pamunkey as an alternative to ground water. Unlike well water, however, surface water needs serious treatment to remove or neutralize contaminants like bacteria or fertilizer runoff. The intake is proposed to be in the far northwestern corner of the county and will have to be piped to the more populated sections in the middle. Lang says he is looking at an estimate of $150 million for the treatment plant and pipeline, “and that might be the low end.”
The water and sewer systems in New Kent are financially self-supporting and rely on connection fees and rates paid by customers. Water rates could ratchet up eight percent or more over a period of years to help pay for the new infrastructure.
Another source: James River
Out to the west, however, lies an even bigger source of fresh water — the James River. The James provides drinking water for the city of Richmond and environs, whose over-age and under-resourced treatment plant is famous for breaking down. An outage in January 2025 left people in and around the city without clean water for almost a week.
Henrico County buys water from Richmond but actually gets most of its supply from its own treatment plant, upstream from Richmond on the James. Henrico has been thinking big. The county recently completed work on a billion-gallon reservoir in Cumberland County, 50 miles from Richmond, to make sure its treatment plant gets enough water during periods of drought. Hanover County, startled by the Richmond collapse, is talking to Henrico about a long-term partnership. The concept of a regional water authority that could include New Kent has been floated.
Henrico plans to run a new pipeline to its eastern part, and in theory New Kent could build a pipeline of its own to meet Henrico’s, thus linking New Kent to the James River and the Cumberland reservoir.
While some observers are reluctant to see New Kent as the junior partner in a deal with Henrico, which has ten times its population, leaders in New Kent are open to the possibility.
“I think it all comes down to dollars and cents and what the affordability is going to be for the end user,” Evelyn told me. “We are speaking to Henrico to see what kind of a proposal they come up with,” he said. New Kent will “explore all of our options” before deciding whether to commit to its own Pamunkey River intake or to partner with other counties, he said.
Supervisor Pearson is also open to the regional approach.
“It seems tapping into the Pamunkey and building our own water treatment plant may not be cost effective and purchasing water from another locality should be considered,” she told me via email. “This is acceptable as long as we can ensure the water supply is uninterrupted and maintained so it is safe and as cost effective as possible for our citizens.”
Whichever direction is chosen, a stronger water system is considered vital to the county’s future, since the county hopes for more commercial and industrial development to provide tax revenue and ease the burden on homeowners. Those facilities are often heavy users of water.
The new gold rush
In particular, New Kent hopes to join the gold rush for large data centers, the so-called hyperscalers that already dot the Richmond area landscape.
“Data’s here whether you like it or not,” says Evelyn. “We might as well try to get a piece of the pie.”
Each data center would pay local taxes on their property and on equipment they use, he notes. He sees a data center as an attractive development.
“You don’t have to educate it and you don’t have to police it,” he chuckles. “It doesn’t put a huge burden on the county.” But the massive banks of computers need to be cooled, which usually involves water, and “that could have a huge impact on water usage,” he said.
Evelyn is already targeting an area along Eltham Road (State Route 33) leading to West Point that already has the necessary utilities and could be given a special zoning to encourage hyperscale development. A proposal for an “overlay district” will be considered by the supervisors early in 2026, he said.
Time is also pressing on the need to decide whether the water in New Kent’s future will come from the Pamunkey River or the James.
“We are pretty close to bumping up against our maximum capacities,” Lang said. It takes years to build new systems, he notes, and “they need to be operating by 2038.”