As Alabama’s sweeping new immigration law reshaped daily transactions across the state, the Mobile Area Water and Sewer System told customers it had no plans to alter the way it established service — setting the region’s largest water utility apart from some of its counterparts to the north.
A law with wide reach
The law, among the strictest in the nation, was designed to identify people living in the state illegally and criminalized a range of business transactions involving them. Its breadth left utilities, landlords and other service providers scrambling to determine whether their routine practices for signing up customers needed to change to stay in compliance.
In Decatur and Huntsville, utility boards had revised their service policies within days of the law taking effect. The Board of Commissioners of MAWSS, however, concluded that its existing procedures already met the mark.
What MAWSS required
“We do not request proof of citizenship to establish service, but we require a photo ID and Social Security number,” said MAWSS spokeswoman Barbara Shaw. Acceptable identification, she said, included a driver’s license, military card or passport.
For MAWSS, that combination of a government-issued photo ID and a Social Security number was deemed sufficient without adding a citizenship check to the sign-up process. The utility’s position reflected a judgment that its long-standing intake practices did not run afoul of the new statute, sparing customers along the coast the added documentation hurdles that were surfacing elsewhere.
A patchwork response
The differing approaches among Alabama utilities underscored the uncertainty the law had introduced. With little established guidance on how far providers needed to go, boards in different cities reached different conclusions about what compliance required. Some tightened their rules out of caution; others, like MAWSS, held steady.
For south Alabama residents, the practical effect was that turning on water service in Mobile looked much the same as it had before the law — a photo ID and a Social Security number — even as the broader debate over the immigration measure continued to ripple through farms, businesses and public agencies across the state. The water board’s decision to leave its policy unchanged offered a small measure of stability amid a period of considerable confusion over how the new rules would be applied.