Paul Cross stands under the canopy of the clubhouse in the Wellington Place subdivision watching it rain.

As the unexpected, moderately heavy May pop-up shower drags on, Cross starts to contemplate its consequences to the neighborhood of about 50 single-family homes west of Starkville.

“If it rains like this another 20 or 30 minutes, you’ll see it,” he says.

Then, Cross and a few of his fellow Wellington Place residents insisted, you’d smell it.

Poor drainage causes any significant rain to overfill ditches and cover yards with water, which happened after Wednesday’s 20-minute rainshower. A more significant rain event causes raw sewage to back up into their yards and sometimes into the bathtubs, toilets and sinks of their houses, they said.

“You’ll come out here, and there’s feces laying around on the ground,” said a female resident who requested anonymity. “I wanted a nice yard for my kids to play in, but I can’t let them.”

Another neighbor, a renter who requested anonymity to avoid repercussions from her landlord, said she doesn’t have any trouble with raw sewage in her yard, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaffected by the problem.

“This is terrible,” she said. “There are times I can walk out my front door and smell what is going on.”

Cross has had enough of what he considers abysmal living conditions and lax management at Wellington Place, and he approached Oktibbeha County supervisors on Monday for help. The board authorized its attorney, Rob Roberson, to draft a letter noting resident complaints to the Birmingham, Alabama, company that owns most of the development — including the lagoon that services the subdivision’s wastewater treatment. If that doesn’t compel the company to act, the county will complain to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

“It’s a shame because this could be a nice place to live,” Cross told The Dispatch. “People are just getting tired of it.”

The lagoon

Kenny Morgan, now deceased, bought the land off Old Highway 12 across the road from Emmanuel Baptist Church in 2003, according to Oktibbeha County tax records. The site began development in 2008, and a year later Premier Properties of Starkville LLC of Birmingham owned the subdivision.

Premier took ownership of the lagoon, on an adjacent tract south of the subdivision, in 2011, records show. The Alabama Secretary of State’s Office website lists Ramie Achdut as the manager.

Cross told the supervisors the lagoon — where wastewater is pumped from the homes — is the center of the sewage problem because it frequently backs up.

District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery, whose district includes Wellington Place, said he has heard complaints of the raw sewage smell from residents at other nearby subdivisions, including Whispering Pines.

Montgomery wondered aloud Monday whether the lagoon had been built properly to service that many homes, though he told The Dispatch he has no proof it wasn’t. However, he said beavers frequently build dams in the lagoon, which raises the water level, forcing the county to send someone to remove the dams.

MDEQ governs lagoons, even those on private property. But representatives with the department, in a response Friday to an email from The Dispatch, refused to answer basic questions about when the Wellington Place lagoon was permitted, when it was last inspected or how MDEQ investigated complaints regarding lagoons.

“Per your inquiry, we will have to look into claims of a discharge from a lagoon servicing this development before we can respond,” MDEQ Communications Director Jan Shaefer wrote in an email to The Dispatch.

The county, though, has very few options for directly dealing with a private development, Montgomery said.

Supervisors approved county building codes, which sets permit fees for certain structures and makes them subject to inspection, in 2016. Everything built before then is “grandfathered in,” even if it doesn’t meet approved standards.

“It’s tough to intercede on a private issue as a public official,” Montgomery said. “… I want to try to help them every way I can. I mean, you can’t have raw sewage just going everywhere.

“There’s strength in numbers, so maybe the county and the neighbors can work as a team to hold (Premier’s) feet to the fire,” he added. “Hopefully, our pleas will be heard, and it will force them to improve the quality of life out there.”

Roberson said his letter to Premier Properties would outline citizen complaints and ask the company to address at least the sanitary issues before MDEQ becomes involved.

“We’re not trying to be adversarial,” Roberson said. “There’s got to be a solution to keep people from having unsanitary conditions where they live. … It’s possible the lagoon is just not big enough for what they are doing out there. It would be great if we can get these guys hooked up to a more modern sewer system, but that would cost (the company) a lot of money.”

The county doesn’t offer its own sewer service, instead helping fund the East Oktibbeha Wastewater District’s efforts to install the infrastructure. The district is planning to slowly move toward offering service countywide. Roberson said it would take three to five years for it to expand to Wellington Place.

“We just don’t have the infrastructure to tackle this stuff,” Roberson said. “If we had $10 million right now for sewer lines, we still wouldn’t have enough to hook up everyone in the county.”

‘We’re on our own’

A handful of Wellington Place residents own their homes, but Premier Properties rents out a vast majority, including the Asbury Drive home where Cross and his wife have lived for more than three years.

Cross, a retired electrical worker from Nashville, Tennessee, moved to Starkville when his daughter chose to attend school at Mississippi State University. She graduated this spring, Cross said.

“We’re trying to make it a home, even with all these problems,” he said. “We thought about buying it, but we just couldn’t do that with all these problems.”

Beyond sewer and drainage, “the problems” consist of foundation issues, gutters falling off houses, unkempt yards on vacant properties and an unusable pool at the clubhouse. Even the playground at Wellington Place is grown up in grass and visibly lacking maintenance.

Then there are management issues, Cross said, as he claimed the longtime maintenance man quit several months ago, there has been no on-site property manager for some time and tenants have been informed by letter to send their rent to a Birmingham address.

Residents have no way of contacting the landlord directly, according to Cross, a claim Montgomery said checks out in his experience.

“(Achdut’s) phone number has changed at least a half-dozen times just since I’ve been in office,” said Montgomery, who was first elected in 2011.

The Dispatch could not find a good phone number for Premier Properties either, as one was neither listed on the Secretary of State’s website nor on the letter to Cross indicating where to send his rent check. A Google search of the address Premier listed on the Secretary of State’s website as its headquarters linked it to a shuttered car dealership.

“Anything that happens to us here, we’re on our own,” Cross said.

Dispatch reporting intern Elijah Karriem contributed to this report.

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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