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South Carolina’s largest private water utility has completed its acquisition of a troubled Midlands water system that had been plagued with customer complaints for years.
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Blue Granite Water Co. was officially acquired by South Carolina Water Utilities on July 1, completing a yearslong takeover of the private utility that serves 30,000 S.C. customers in the Midlands and beyond.
The start of the month might have marked the official union of the utilities, but S.C. Water Utilities had been running Blue Granite since both utilities’ parent companies merged in 2024, the utility’s president told The State, but regulatory hurdles held up the formal combination until now.
The takeover has allowed S.C. Water Utilities to make improvements to a system that was long the target of complaints by both customers and regulators for its operations.
“We’re going to try to clean up some of that branding,” said Craig Sorensen, the president of South Carolina Water Utilities.
Over a 20-year period beginning in the 1990s, when the company did business as Carolina Water Service, Blue Granite and its sister companies were hit with 55 enforcement orders by state regulators over wastewater pollution in state waterways, a previous investigation by The State found. Those offenses wracked up $645,000 in fines for the company.
The town of Lexington went to court to shut down two separate Blue Granite plants that discharged into the Saluda River watershed, and former Irmo Mayor Barry Walker tried to force the utility out of town over a sewer billing system he labeled “flat out evil.”
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In 2021, the former Blue Granite went to the S.C. Supreme Court to ensure its new office space it rented at triple the cost of its previous location would be covered by a rate increase, even as justices described the company’s new digs as “opulent.”
The newly combined S.C. Water Utilities promise a different approach. The new company has already taken steps to improve its operations; the need for boil water advisories are down by more than two-thirds since the changeover, and the company’s own customer surveys show an improvement in customer satisfaction. The newly unified utility has also taken steps to close high-cost Blue Granite facilities and reorganized its field operations and administrative processes, the company said in a news release touting the move.
S.C. Water Utilities now serves a combined 70,000 water and sewer customers across the state. Sorensen said the combined scale would allow for savings and better services for customers.
“We’re larger than Blue Granite was,” Sorensen said. “We’re larger, and we’re bringing more skills and facilities than they have had before.”
The company is planning a $3 million replacement of the Oakland Plantation wastewater treatment plant in Sumter, and are nearing completion on rehabilitating the Trollingwood Wastewater Lagoon in Piedmont. Locally, the Varnarsdale subdivision in West Columbia has been connected to the company’s water systems along Interstate 20, and two miles of sewer pipe were cleaned in Chapin after a video-assisted inspection, with damaged pipes and equipment being replaced, S.C. Water Utilities said.
“I recognize the reputation Blue Granite had, but we’re coming in with a service mindset,” Sorensen said. “The answer to problems in the utilities space starts with service, provide good water, treat wastewater, that’s where you have to start. Everything else kind of fixes itself from my view.”
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