The Mobile Area Water and Sewer System is facing a lawsuit from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office over years of sewage spills that state regulators say went unreported or under-reported, adding the utility to a growing list of South Alabama sewer systems facing legal action over aging infrastructure and stormwater problems.
The complaint, filed in Mobile County Circuit Court, stems from findings by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management that MAWSS repeatedly violated the terms of its discharge permits at two of its largest wastewater treatment plants, the Clifton C. Williams facility and the Wright Smith Jr. plant, between 2015 and 2019. State regulators documented dozens of unpermitted spills at each site during that span, together totaling millions of gallons of untreated or partially treated wastewater released into the environment.
Beyond the volume of the spills themselves, the lawsuit centers heavily on reporting failures. State investigators found that in many instances, ADEM, the public and county health officials were never notified of the sanitary sewer overflows as required under the utility’s permits. In other cases, MAWSS is accused of submitting the mandatory overflow reports well after regulatory deadlines had passed, delays that can leave residents and downstream water users unaware of contamination risks in creeks and waterways near the spill sites.
MAWSS is not the first South Alabama utility to face this kind of action. The Attorney General’s Office previously sued Daphne Utilities in 2017 over similar sewer spill reporting violations; that case has since been resolved, with Daphne Utilities agreeing to pay more than $100,000 in fines and commit to remedial infrastructure work. A separate suit against the city of Fairhope, filed in 2020, remains open.
MAWSS officials have acknowledged the lawsuit but have largely declined to address the specific allegations while litigation is pending. Assistant Director Bud McCrory, who is set to take over as the utility’s director at the end of the month, said MAWSS works hard to operate within its permit limits, even though many overflow incidents stem from factors outside the utility’s direct control, including grease blockages in aging pipes, heavy stormwater infiltration during rain events, and physical breaks in decades-old sewer lines.
“Not one SSO is acceptable,” McCrory said, using the industry shorthand for sanitary sewer overflows. “We’re working through that litigation with the state to come up with a settlement.”
McCrory steps into the director’s role following the retirement of longtime MAWSS Director Charles Hyland, who has led the utility since 2013. McCrory said the utility has already begun addressing the underlying stormwater issues blamed for many of the overflows, pointing to roughly $17 million invested in two new stormwater attenuation tanks along Three Mile Creek and another $18 million spent replacing aging sewer trunk lines in the same watershed, both intended to reduce the kind of infiltration that overwhelms treatment capacity during heavy rain.
Those upgrades represent the first phase of a 20-year infrastructure master plan the MAWSS board approved in 2019 following an independent cost-of-service study. The plan is meant to guide future capital spending across the utility’s aging network of pipes and treatment facilities, which together serve roughly 100,000 customers across the Mobile area.
Funding that work has meant steadily rising bills for MAWSS ratepayers. The utility’s board approved a four-year rate increase in 2019, and customers have already seen a 6.5 percent increase this year, with additional 4 percent increases scheduled for both 2022 and 2023. McCrory said any future increases beyond what has already been approved would require separate action by the MAWSS board, whose members are appointed by the Mobile City Council.
“There’s a lot of reasoning that goes into the rates we charge,” McCrory said, adding that the utility is continually evaluating its financial needs against the cost of maintaining and upgrading its system. “We have a plan for rehabilitation, and we’re going to continue to provide a quality service while meeting all of our regulatory requirements. My goal is to try to make us as efficient as we can be in all we do, and by doing that, it can help us control rates.”
No trial date has yet been set in the state’s case against MAWSS. As with the Daphne Utilities and Fairhope cases, the lawsuit is expected to be resolved either through a negotiated consent decree, which typically includes financial penalties and a binding timeline for infrastructure repairs, or through further court proceedings.