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Last year's Blacksburg Town Council election put an end to a plan to build a public sewer in the mostly rural Toms Creek Basin that officials said would solve overflow and capacity problems all over town.

But since then the town has been working, one sewer line and one pump station at a time, to fix capacity problems in the current system and make room for future development.

For several years, council has spent and borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix cracked pipes, seal leaky manholes and repair or replace old pump stations.

If all goes as planned, next week work will begin on a big new sewer pipe to be installed at the intersection of Prices Fork Road and University City Boulevard. It will serve commercial development and Virginia Tech projects there for the next 50 years, Blacksburg Planning and Engineering Director Adele Schirmer said.

Upgrading that line might allow engineers to route sewage from overstressed lines and pump stations into the new line, Schirmer said.

Or not. It depends on the intensity of future development at University Mall and on the Tech property along Prices Fork Road and on what council decides to do with any extra capacity, she said.

A second project to install another big pipe along Webb Street by next year may allow North End landowners such as Lindsay Coleman to build on property that's been sitting idle because of sewer capacity issues.

Coleman has wanted to build houses on 2 acres off Giles Road for some time now, but couldn't get a building permit because of the overloaded sewer, he said.

Nearly all the sewage from the North End eventually ends up in the Webb Street line, where it bottlenecks during heavy rain storms. The sewage then backs up into nearby apartments and spills into a tributary of Stroubles Creek.

To keep the problem from getting worse, the town instituted a temporary policy that required developers to find ways to make enough room in the sewer for their projects by finding and fixing leaks in the system. But small landowners couldn't afford to do that.

A larger pipe at Webb Street would relieve that bottleneck and make it possible for landowners to develop their property. If all goes as planned, the pipe will be installed by next summer, Schirmer said.

But there's no such project on the horizon for residents of the Toms Creek Basin who want public sewer service. The congregation of St. Mary's Catholic Church plans to relocate to the basin sometime next year and have been struggling with the lack of sewer options.

Most people who live in the basin have basic septic systems, some of which have been in the ground for decades. Soil studies through the years have said that much of the land doesn't always drain well enough to support them. As new developments spring up, the risk of failing systems grows more urgent.

Church leaders at St. Mary's had hoped to build a high-end alternative to the traditional septic tank and drain field allowed by the Virginia Department of Health and then convince town council to maintain it as a demonstration project for other new developments in the basin. But council has been reluctant to agree to the plan.

The town's public works crews are not trained to maintain such systems, according to a memo on the subject from Public Works Director Kelly Mattingly to council.

The memo also questions the feasibility of taking over such systems on a wide scale and suggests that council devise some cost-sharing incentives that would encourage developers to use newer, more expensive technologies in the basin, but keep them privately owned.

"I think we're at a point where we're looking at it on a case-by-case basis. I'm very interested in if there are some ways we could develop some policies that would guide development" of alternative systems in the basin, Councilman Tom Sherman said.

But he and Vice Mayor Ron Rordam said they are waiting for more information from an engineering survey of the whole town system that is currently being negotiated, before considering what policies might work.

Mayor Roger Hedgepeth, who supported a conventional sewer in the basin because he said it better fit the big picture of the town's future, said he hopes council will "look at Toms Creek as 38 percent of the town land mass and try to determine what is going to work best for the entire town, rather than divide it into pockets."

In the meantime, St. Mary's will go ahead with plans to build the more expensive system and hope that the town will help in some way, pastor Jim Arsenault said.

"We want to be a model for the Toms Creek area."