Morehead City, NC, Uses an ARIMA Study to End a State Moratorium on New Construction

Morehead City, North Carolina, faced a moratorium on new construction because of problems with its sewage system. We developed an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) transfer function-intervention model to help town officials explain the sources of variation in the volume of sewage-treatment-plant discharge to the state officials who had imposed the moratorium on extending the sewage system lines. The results convinced the state officials that the problems were temporary, not systemic, and that the town’s efforts to rehabilitate the system were improving its operation. Consequently, the state officials cut the moratorium by at least a year, allowing development projects worth $50 million to proceed.