$2.9 million effort to address wastewater woes in peril in Lowndes County

A $2.9 million effort to address longstanding wastewater treatment shortfalls in rural Lowndes County is in jeopardy after a recent decision by the county commission left a key participant off the sewer board.

The Lowndes County Commission on Monday voted to appoint a new slate of sewer board members six days after an event heralding the installation of the effort’s first wastewater treatment system at the home of local advocate Perman Hardy.

Hardy, who has volunteered hundreds of hours over the past decade to raise awareness about insufficient wastewater treatment in her home county and push for remedies, says she was appointed to the board several years ago. Carnell McAlpine, who served on the county commission for eight years ending in 2020, said that he made the appointment “in ’15 or ’16.”

But the commission’s current chairman, Charlie King – who defeated McAlpine at the polls last year – claims that Hardy was never formally appointed to the sewer board, and on Monday the commission did not appoint her to the new board.

That decision has led to an impasse that could mean the end of a federally funded program charged with modernizing wastewater treatment in Lowndes County that had only just begun to have an impact.

Hundreds of low-income residents of the majority-Black rural Black Belt county have lived for years with failing septic tanks that regularly back up into their homes and some have resorted to straight pipes that spew raw sewage into open cesspools in their yards.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded over $2 million to the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Program Sewer Board, an organization that Sherry Bradley, director of the state Bureau of Environmental Services, incorporated as a nonprofit in 2019 with Hardy named as its incorporator and authorized agent. The grant required a 25% local funding match, and Bradley led a drive that raised over $695,000 from major companies, area businesspeople, politicians, and other donors.

Last week, Bradley led an event announcing the successful installation of the first treatment system funded by the program. She gave crystal commemorative awards to some of the top local donors and took attendees to Hardy’s home in rural Collirene to see the nearly $70,000 system that was recently installed in her backyard to treat wastewater from three homes including Hardy’s.

But on Tuesday, Bradley announced in a letter to King that the county commission’s failure to appoint Hardy to the sewer board left the future of the wastewater treatment program in peril.

“Because of the action taken by the County Commission, and it leaves me no choice, I respectfully must withdraw the 25% match funds to the USDA funding of 75%,” she wrote. “All contributions are being returned to the contributors.”

In a phone interview Thursday afternoon, Bradley said there is still time to avoid rescinding the funding and save the project if Hardy is appointed to the county sewer board. But she said that if the commission does not take that step, the effort is finished.

“Ms. Hardy signed all the USDA paperwork for the 75% wastewater grant,” Bradley said. “All her signatures are on everything we have. For this grant being given to her, I can’t just give it to someone else. It’s non-transferable. … I would have to do everything all over again and I’m not.”

Hardy said she is heartbroken.

“We’ve been fighting, and we finally got a solution for getting the sewage off the ground. And we’ve got elected officials who don’t want to see it happen,” Hardy said Thursday.

“This project was not through the county commission. The commissioners didn’t do anything. … Now the solution is here, and you want to snatch it away from me? I don’t understand.”

King, the commission’s chairman, said in a Thursday phone interview that he invited Bradley to “come down and talk to us and see if we could work it out,” but she declined.

Asked why he would appoint someone else to the sewer board if it meant jeopardizing the nascent wastewater treatment effort, King said, “if I had known that I would have appointed her,” but contended that he cannot simply swap her in for one of the other members now that the new board is in place.

Bradley confirmed that she has no intention of meeting with King or the other commission members if they are not willing to appoint Hardy to the sewer board. She said she tried to reason with King before the Monday commission meeting and explained that Hardy must be on the board for the project to move forward, but said that he refused to do so.

“There’s an easy fix to this. I told Commissioner King to just put Perman Hardy on this new board you’re creating. I don’t care if she’s a secretary. But he won’t do it,” she said.

King said he does not believe Bradley’s rationale for returning the matching funds is sound.

“I don’t understand the concept that just because one person is not on the board that the money has to go back,” he said. “My question to Ms. Bradley is if she’s concerned about the people in Lowndes County, why would she send the money back because a person of her choice is not on the board?”

King added that the “the commission is committed to” raising funds to fund the wastewater treatment upgrades that would have been completed via the federally funded program.

“The money that was on the table – the $2.9 million – I understand that was grant funding that was coming, but we will raise money to match that,” he said. “How will we raise the funds? We have various entities, towns, and we will do what we need to do to raise the funds. We can do it.”

Asked what she thought of King’s pledge to raise nearly $3 million, Bradley said simply “good luck.” She said she is dismayed by the fact that the project appears unlikely to succeed after three years of work.

“Ms. Hardy worked like a dog for this. She worked on weekends, worked on holidays. Ms. Hardy almost got snakebit one time trying to dig in the sun. And she didn’t charge one penny. We worked,” Bradley said. “So for someone to come in and try to take this over – it ain’t going to happen.”

Nivory Gordon, director of the USDA’s Camden area office – which serves Lowndes County – did not respond to requests for comment, nor did a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, who has been instrumental in securing federal funding to address wastewater issues in the Black Belt. Lowndes County Administrator Jacqueline Thomas declined to provide comment for this story.

McAlpine, the former county commissioner, said he hopes that there is a way for the project to be salvaged.

“I would like to see this issue resolved as quick as possible,” he said. “There’s a lot of people in this county that have wastewater issues and I’m hoping that something like this doesn’t stop them from getting septic tank and sewage issues resolved. It’d be very unfortunate. I’m hoping we can move forward.”