FOLEY, Ala. — A stormwater project that has been under construction in one form or another since 2008 is close to done, and it took one more grant to get it there.
The Foley City Council voted on June 29, 2026 to accept an additional grant from the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program to complete the Beulah Heights Regional Stormwater Facility in southeast Foley. Leslie Gahagan, the city’s sustainability and natural resources director, briefed council members on where the project stands.
“We’ve been working with them on the Beulah Heights Stormwater Management Facility,” Gahagan said. “To date, they’ve given us about $320,000 in grant funds. They added another $70,000, which will bring us to $390,000 to complete that project.”
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management previously contributed a grant covering part of the cost, money that supported the earlier phases of drainage work in the Beulah area.
What the facility does
Once complete, the facility will improve drainage across roughly 480 acres in southeast Foley — expanding capacity, improving water quality and reducing flood risk for a part of the city that has dealt with all three problems.
The environmental case is just as direct. Before the drainage improvements began, stormwater runoff in the area flowed straight into Wolf Creek with no filtration, carrying whatever it picked up along the way. The updated system diverts that water into retention basins first, cutting both the volume and the pollutant load reaching the creek.
Designed to be maintained
One feature of the new facility addresses a problem that quietly undermines a lot of municipal stormwater infrastructure: sediment. Retention ponds fill in over time, and digging them back out is expensive enough that cities often defer it until performance has already degraded.
The Beulah Heights facility includes a system designed to trap sediment before it settles into the retention pond, and to allow that sediment to be removed without crews having to excavate it manually. City officials expect that to make long-term maintenance meaningfully cheaper and more likely to actually happen on schedule.
Timeline and what comes next
Gahagan told council members the Beulah Heights Regional Stormwater Facility should be fully complete this fall. Once it is, the city intends to continue drainage improvement work across the broader Beulah area.
Foley officials framed the project as part of a longer-running commitment to managing stormwater and protecting the waterways that run through and out of the city — a concern that has grown as development has spread across south Baldwin County and replaced absorbent ground with rooftops and pavement.