Rebuilding Pipes, Rebuilding Trust
How Alabama’s Jefferson County Ended Its Sewer Consent Decree
Hidden inside the Jefferson County Courthouse in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, is a giant terrazzo map from 1930. It fills the lobby floor of the County Commission chambers. Artisans of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) crafted this intricate display from polished marble and bronze, depicting highways in gray stone, railroads in black, waterways in blue, and, surprisingly, sanitary sewers in green.
David Denard, Director of the Environmental Services Department (JCESD) for Jefferson County, points out the map to out-of-town visitors. A native of Jefferson County, he grew up playing in those blue waterways, but he also understands why WPA artists went to the trouble to carve trunk lines in green. Sewers were as critical to the county’s development as rivers, railroads, and roads.
A 16-by-20-foot terrazzo floor map in the Jefferson County Courthouse from 1930 celebrates the natural features and key infrastructure of Alabama’s most populous county.
For decades, this remarkable artwork was covered by carpet. During a major renovation of the courthouse in the 1990s, the map was rediscovered and restored to its former glory. It’s a fitting emblem for another story about restoration in Jefferson County—the recent termination of its decades-long sewer consent decree—and the cultural shift that made it happen.
While Jefferson County has changed significantly since that map was created—it’s now home to 36 cities and a population of 675,000—the infrastructure inscribed in that vintage map remains the blueprint for the county’s future growth and livability. And thanks to the committed, strategic leadership of Denard and his team at Jefferson County Environmental Services, the county’s rivers and the sanitary sewer system have also made a comeback.
The Consent Decree
Wastewater professionals tend to keep quiet about their job. “How the sewers are working in Jefferson County really shouldn’t be at the forefront of people’s minds,” said Daniel White, Deputy Director of JCESD.
“It’s out of sight, out of mind. In some ways, that’s the way it should be—that it’s so reliable, it’s just an afterthought. They should be able to get into the creek downstream of our treatment plants or anywhere else and not have to worry about it.”
White is describing a vision that is closer to reality today than any time in the last century.
In September 2024, Jefferson County and the Cahaba River Society jointly requested that a federal judge terminate the consent decree that had for decades governed the county’s efforts to rehabilitate the sewer system. In a notable display of unity, the two historically opposing parties issued a joint press release, with the plaintiff praising the County’s “hard work and creative approaches” to clean up sewer overflows. It took 28 years to get to that point.
Beth Stewart, who also grew up exploring the creeks of Jefferson County, started her job as Executive Director of the Cahaba River Society in 1995, just as the consent decree was being negotiated. She witnessed sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) degrading not just creeks and rivers but Birmingham's most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Five miles west of downtown Birmingham, this West End community was plagued by routine sewage overflows in wet weather. One “early action” project of the Collection System Asset Management Program removed depressed sewers to eliminate SSOs and provide relief to residents.
“The worst problems were in the oldest part of the system,” she explained. “Village Creek, Valley Creek, and Five Mile Creek, which are predominantly Black communities. Village Creek was flooding with regularity, in people’s houses, in schoolyards. You know those floods have raw sewage contamination, so those pathogens were getting into homes. It’s really dangerous. There was one year when it was a billion gallons just in the Village Creek watershed alone.”
In the years after private citizens, the Cahaba River Society, and the EPA filed their lawsuit over Clean Water Act violations, Jefferson County’s failing sewer system made national headlines for all the worst reasons: skyrocketing sewer rates, political corruption, and one of the largest municipal bankruptcies in U.S. history. By the time Denard and White stepped into leadership at JCESD, their job was not only fixing broken pipes, but broken trust.
Jefferson County’s sewer problems were severe, but not unique. According to a 2023 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, over 700 municipalities across the nation are plagued with combined sewer overflows (CSOs). Most of the nation’s older sewer systems were inadequate to comply with the Clean Water Act of 1972 and this wave of aging infrastructure led to the EPA developing a CSO Control Policy in 1994. Jefferson County was one of the first federal consent decrees under that program, but it was not the last. A 2018 study counted 91 consent decrees issued by the EPA since then.
What is unique is that a federal judge formally terminated Jefferson County’s consent decree in September 2024, a historic achievement for not just the county, but for the industry.
As too many municipalities know, sewer consent decrees are legally complex and resource intensive, requiring decades of system investment and negotiation to resolve. To see one terminated is rare, almost unheard of, but Jefferson County proved that it is possible.
Perhaps just as rare is the collaborative relationship forged between Alabama’s leading water professionals and environmental advocates on both sides of the lawsuit. “We started with a complete lack of trust and a lot of hostility and moved to a place of mutual respect,” said Stewart.
How did they arrive at that place? And could they provide a template for other counties and cities locked in similar consent decrees with no end in sight?
“Where do we go first?”
Daniel White was a young engineer, just a few months out of college, when he started working on projects for Jefferson County. “Everybody in my graduating class was getting jobs that in some way tied into the county’s Consent Decree Compliance Program. It was a great time to be a civil engineer in Birmingham because Jefferson County was spending so much money.”
The consent decree provided “a prescriptive path to do these projects yesterday,” he said. “Everybody’s thinking you spend a couple billion dollars, and you’ve solved it all.”
Despite forging ahead on flashy capital projects for more than a decade, Jefferson County was still being fined for frequent SSOs. By 2008, White found himself as Deputy Director, overseeing the engineering, construction, and operations for JCESD.
“We started realizing these projects didn’t really work like they were supposed to,” White explained. “We were not getting the results that we wanted.”
Village Creek Water Reclamation Facility, Alabama's second largest such WRF, serves most of north Birmingham. With parts that date back to the 1930s, this massive plant demands vigilant and ongoing maintenance to continue to perform as what Daniel White calls “a clean water factory.”
And they needed results. As mandated by the consent decree, the county was required to unify 21 municipal sewer systems across 10 sewer basins with no compensation. Jefferson County’s system expanded from about 700 miles of trunk sewer to over 3,100 miles in just a few years. Little of it was well documented or maintained, as Denard, White, and their team found.
“There were not a lot of great records,” explained Denard. “We had to get maps—to the extent that those systems had maps—and figure out where things were. And we kept finding stuff for years. We would find sewer lines all the time. We would find cross connects with storm sewers, we would find bypasses in the system that were impacting water quality.”
A comprehensive inventory was crucial, but the system was so large, and the problems were so numerous, JCESD recognized that inventory was just the beginning.
“We really had to step back and ask, what’s going on in our system?” said White. “Do we have enough data to be able to know where our capacity problems are or where we have operational problems?”
“And we had real money constraints. We really couldn’t afford to go about guessing if solutions were going to work or not. You had to know that those dollars spent were going to create some type of real benefit,” said White.
It was this desire to make smart improvements and wise investments that led to their Collection System Asset Management Program.
Jefferson County staff use digital dashboards on a regular basis to look at data, study trends, and make informed decisions about priorities and investments.
“A mentality switch”
Since 2012, Hazen has been working with the county to develop the asset management program and system-wide hydraulic models. Engineer Stephen King, Hazen’s program manager for the Jefferson County Asset Management Program since 2015, described the challenge facing the team. “It’s a huge system and it was in pretty bad shape. I don't think anybody’s going to dispute that.”
A key early step was implementing a cleaning and training program for JCESD field staff. Hazen created a plan for prioritizing cleaning and maintenance. “Before Hazen got involved, the county was very reactive and they had a rigid process of cleaning sewers,” said King. “Basically, they were cleaning all their hotspot pipes and not really anything else.”
Hazen’s program put each pipe on a cleaning schedule and frequency, and the cleaning program delivered results right away by reducing SSOs. This systematic approach added critical data to the county’s growing understanding of the system, which Hazen added to the hydraulic model. Using the model to make decisions and target interventions gave JCESD the confidence to experiment.
David Denard (left), who directs Jefferson County's Environmental Services Department, speaks with Hazen Project Manager Stephen King (right). Denard said it took a "mentality switch" as well as lots of hard data to get the county to a point where it could manage the sewer system without a consent decree.
The Chapel Drive Pump Station project was an example of how JCESD was willing to try new things to fix old problems. During rainstorms, this small pump station in Hueytown was routinely overwhelmed by inflow nearly four times its designed capacity. Instead of upsizing the pump station, which would have checked the box for the consent decree, Hazen investigated a comprehensive rehab of the surrounding collection system to reduce the infiltration reaching the station.
Typically, the county would not touch lateral service lines, which are privately owned. Model data supported JCESD’s decision to fix the service line leakage problem. The pilot comprehensive rehabilitation project achieved an 89% reduction in volume and 79% reduction in peak flow.
“It doesn’t get much better than that,” said King. “With rehab you shoot for 50% reduction. This saves the county all kinds of money because rehab prices are much cheaper per foot than replacement.”
This pilot project worked better than expected and proved that sewer service lines, both active and inactive, were a major source of infiltration and inflow (I&I). Since then, JCESD expanded this approach to other pump station service areas. The Chapel Drive project changed the course of the program from upsizing to rehabilitation.
“I think it was really a mentality switch,” said Denard. “We're not going to hide behind the consent decree anymore. We’re going to operate the system in a technically sound responsible way that’s sustainable for the long term.”
Hazen established an office in Hoover, Alabama, in 2015 to support Jefferson County’s Asset Management Program. Project Manager Stephen King reviews plans with Principal Scientist Tina Sheikhzeinoddin.
Making (and showing) progress
Meanwhile, each project added to the power and accuracy of the hydraulic model. Hazen modelers have been able to determine the exact location of an overflow within a quarter of a mile and field crews have been able to locate the issues.
“It wasn’t like if an overflow happens in the middle of the woods, did it really happen?” joked Denard. “With a hydraulic model, if we thought there was an overflow there, we could go out and find it. We were aggressively finding all the problems in the system.”
As Hazen collected data about system conditions in the model, it allowed the county to better understand the deterioration of the system over time. Eventually, the model could simulate inspections and rehab projects to predict the condition of the system over 20 or 30 years based on historical data.
“It’s a powerful tool,” said Denard. “It knocked $600 million off of our capital program and allowed us to identify the highest priority projects on the front end.”
“One of the big benefits of doing that model was being able to tell our elected officials, these are where our biggest problems are. These are the most efficient projects that we can do right now,” said Denard.
JCESD was able to show financial analyses to make sure that proposed projects could be funded and built. The hydraulic model and dashboard were developed to guide spending decisions, but the main side effect was that they helped the county build credibility with their stakeholders.
From a junior engineer fresh out of UAB in 1998 to her role as Deputy Program Manager, Hazen engineer Celeste Lachenmyer has spent most of her career building her knowledge of Jefferson County’s sewer system and personal commitment to resolve issues in her community.
“There were no directions, no instructions in the language of the agreement that led you to termination,” said Celeste Lachenmyer, Hazen's Deputy Program Manager for the Jefferson County Asset Management Program. “Nothing that said, if you achieve this goal and this goal, then the decree will be terminated.”
The consent decree was 137 pages long and included detailed remedial actions, but the main condition for termination was elimination of all sanitary sewer overflows. Over time, and presented with copious evidence, even the Cahaba River Society agreed that achieving 100% SSO elimination was not feasible. In the absence of that metric, the key to termination became convincing the citizen plaintiffs that the county had “achieved full compliance.”
“That’s probably our biggest role in implementing their plan,” added Lachenmyer. “To give the county the tools to visualize data with transparency.”
"That allowed Daniel and David to basically display it all, say, yes, we still have SSOs. But we’re maintaining this work in a prioritized, structured manner that’s affordable and doable.”
Hazen and the county worked hard to constantly improve their communication of the data in response to regulators, the media, the community, and the environmental organizations involved. Cahaba River Society could see the results at regular meetings. SSO reductions were substantial, sustained, and achieved through industry best practices.
“We are the river group,” said Stewart. “All of us have related professional backgrounds, but none of us are engineers or experts in sewer systems. We know what’s going wrong, and we see the impacts. So being able to meet regularly and have open conversation and watch the progress was very educational for us.”
“People like to use the word transparency,” said White, acknowledging that too much data and jargon can be just as obscure as too little. “It’s about being forthcoming. We're not trying to hide or put up walls.”
Eventually, the EPA and a federal judge agreed. “They wanted to see the best run system in terms of the technical innovations, management, staffing, modeling, and capital improvements,” said Stewart. “Every problem is not solved. There’ll always be work to be done—it’s urban infrastructure. But in terms of having all the systems in place to ensure that the work’s planned and funded, the county’s there.”
Parks and trails like this one in Civitan Park provide valuable river access despite their proximity to a wastewater treatment plant, illustrating how balanced public infrastructure benefits community well-being, the local economy, and the environment.
Beyond termination: What does success look like?
There’s a trail near the Cahaba River’s headwaters in Trussville where David Denard likes to run. On a nice morning, the Civitan Park Trail is busy with dog walkers, cyclists, and joggers starting their day by the tumbling waters. This riverside trail, like many others throughout metropolitan Birmingham, was made possible by the original sewer consent decree, which directed fines from SSOs into the acquisition and protection of public nature preserves and trails. The Freshwater Land Trust, formed in 1996, has built 129 miles of trails in Jefferson County and conserved over 12,000 acres of land along creeks and rivers thanks to $30 million in seed funding from those fines.
Even though the Trussville Water Reclamation Facility lies directly downstream, Civitan Park is a put-in spot for urban paddlers. From Trussville, it’s about 20 winding river miles to the canoe landing at Grants Mill Road, another project of the Freshwater Land Trust.
Less than 20 minutes from downtown Birmingham, the Cahaba River Trail and Canoe Drop at Grants Mill Road is a popular escape for swimming, fishing, paddling, and other river activities. Above, former Cahaba River Society Executive Director Beth Stewart photographs the Cahaba near the trail.
Along the well-traveled trail or knee deep in the river, you might find Beth Stewart—who retired as Executive Director of the Cahaba River Society in 2024—shooting photos of the river’s ever-changing surface.
For her, photography is more than a hobby. “It’s meditation, it’s connection,” she said. “It fills the soul. To have a river that natural so close to so many homes and schools is kind of a miracle.”
The scenic Cahaba’s thriving parks, trails, and blueways depend on clean water. Generous public access to these natural areas makes Birmingham attractive to newcomers and developers. And it’s all a result of the consent decree.
Here is the vision of success that White described, of all the elements of a community functioning as they should, in harmony. The county was even able to implement a customer bill assistance program, thanks to the sustainable financing provided through the asset management program.
“This is my community. It’s my home,” said White. “When you start to think about the work and how it affects rates and what those rates do to the people that you serve, you really start getting a sense of the impact that you can make. I'm very proud that now the citizens have a stable rate design. And there’s capacity available for growth in the future.”
Located in suburban Homewood, the Shades Creek Greenway is a popular trail for jogging, cycling, birding, and simply escaping traffic to reconnect with metro Birmingham’s abundant natural beauty. Like many area trails, it runs along a sewer line, on public lands protected in part thanks to fines from the sewer consent decree.
For the Cahaba River Society, success looks like justice.
“So many kids in the Birmingham area grow up playing in creeks. But that was mostly a suburban experience,” argued Stewart. “The kids in the Village Creek and Valley Creek watershed and Urban Birmingham didn’t have that experience because of the flooding and the pollution that was in those creeks."
“Now, because of all the cleanup of the sewage, many more kids in many more economic circumstances and neighborhoods will be able to have that experience of growing up playing in their neighborhood creek safely," Stewart said. “That adds a lot of economic value to those communities, as well as quality of life improvement.”
For Denard, success is delivering results for the community, “whether you have a regulator looking over your shoulder continually or whether you’re doing a check-in with them periodically.”
“We were under a consent decree. We didn't have the tools to adequately manage the system. Now we do,” he reflected. “And that translates into not just that we can terminate the consent decree, that we are currently in compliance with the Clean Water Act, but that we have a system that can maintain compliance and protect clean water for the next few generations.”
“It’s a new day," said Stephen King. “The county now has the tools and processes in place where they can do the work. They control their own destiny.”
At one point, the Village Creek WRF (above) was one of the worst locations for untreated discharges. Today, this outfall releases millions of gallons of clean water daily into a tributary of the Black Warrior River.
