Proposed mega prison will compound Tallassee’s wastewater woes

Jack West

The City of Tallassee has struggled with wastewater problems for years, but the situation could get much, much worse if a new mega prison is built just outside the city limits. Tallassee is home to roughly 5,000 residents, and the proposed prison would house nearly 4,000 inmates plus staff, almost doubling the strain on Tallassee’s already failing wastewater infrastructure, which discharges into the beautiful Tallapoosa River.

To quickly recap Tallassee’s wastewater woes, the Alabama Attorney General and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management sued the city in 2017 for years of repeated violations of the city’s permit for the Tallassee Sewer Stabilization Pond (sewage lagoon) that discharges into the Tallapoosa River. As a result of this lawsuit, Tallassee entered into a consent order mandating that it build a new wastewater treatment plant to be completed in 2021 in addition to the existing lagoons.