The Liberty County Development Authority says its proposed wastewater treatment plant would bring new homes and businesses – and in turn, more tax dollars and jobs.
But mistrust about how any unused water might affect local rivers, and fears that local officials aren’t telling citizens what’s happening, is fueling grassroots opposition.
On Friday, due to intense interest, the LCDA said Liberty County would livestream a public meeting on the issue, scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 9 at the Liberty County Courthouse Annex, 112 N. Main St., in Hinesville (check the county’s Facebook and YouTube channels).
The LCDA said experts from the University of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, and the Coastal Georgia Water Planning Council will explain the river systems. The project engineer will give an overview of the proposed treatment plant. Then, the floor will be opened for questions and a public hearing.
Not in my backyard
Highly-filtered water from the plant would be used for cooling and irrigation at Tradeport East and a planned mixed-use development that would add stores, a marina, and 5,420 housing units. Unused treated water would be piped into the Laurel View River.
Dockside communities there have organized over the past month with the slogan “Not in my river.” They fear upsetting the estuary’s balance of fresh and salt water.
Instead, they’re pushing for any extra treated water to be piped to the North Newport River, which runs through Riceboro. SNF and International Paper have discharged industrial waste into that river for decades.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Association said the North Newport was in “good” condition as recently as 2024 – before International Paper closed and stopped sucking up 11.2 million gallons per day of Floridan aquifer freshwater.
And Riceboro community members who spoke to The Current GA on Wednesday night said they don’t want treated wastewater in their river, either.
“I don’t need those people’s problems,” Andrew Jones said at a hastily-called meeting of people from inside the city and the surrounding unincorporated community at the historic Briar Bay Praise House.
Lack of communication
The Riceboro-area citizens said they were upset that the city and LCDA had not bothered to include them in the rerouting discussions. They say they want the facts so they can educate other community members.
The group complained that city elected officials had not told them anything about the tentative pipe discussion, that the city’s website hadn’t been working right, and that older residents shouldn’t have to check City Hall or the post office for meeting notices.
“Why would I walk to the post office?” one man said. “I’ve got a rural route box!”
Lloyd Byrd, a disabled Army veteran who owns a small farm outside the city limits, and who serves on the county Assessors Board, said he has had trouble getting basic information from City Hall.
“It’s like pulling teeth from a chicken,” he said.
The Riceboro group also is upset that local officials did not tell them about the Liberty County Development Authority’s public hearing about the project – takong place half an hour’s drive from the Praise House.
Jones said knowing about and going to such meetings is important because “you put them on the spot so you can be able to voice your opinion instead of getting shut down.”
LCDA spokesperson Katie Dye told The Current GA, “Should the North Newport become a legitimate option, we will absolutely be having conversations with neighboring communities and stakeholders, just as we have with those interested in the other alternative.”
But people on the Laurel View side also complain about their elected officials’ silence.
Carey McCartney of Sunbury posted, “WHERE ARE OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS? Not 1 of them is communicating with us via social media or in person…THEY hold a MONTHLY meeting and then citizens cant even talk at the meetings! ELECTIONS ARE COMING UP!”
Two LCDA board members, state Rep. Al Williams and Liberty County Commission Chair Donald Lovette, represent residents in both areas.
The LCDA has devoted a webpage to the project, regularly uploading answers to frequently asked questions, permit-related paperwork alongside press releases and op-eds in favor of the project.
Its stated goal is transparency. But the slew of documents also poses a barrier to people who are less tech-savvy and who might not have a college degree.
‘Telling the truth by exaggerating’
Save the Laurel View River’s president and spokesperson, Donald Payseur, has leveraged Facebook, AI-generated graphics, and YouTube podcasts to get the word out about the group’s opposition to the proposed water treatment plant. And he admits he’s not above poisoning the well – a debate tactic – to keep any wastewater out of the Laurel View.
He acknowledged that some of the more provocative images he’s created do not present objective facts about the project that people can use to weigh the pros and cons for themselves.
“I’m telling you why we’re overstating this,” Payseur said Thursday. “Because we’re trying to make the point that near-drinkable water is poisonous. Okay? That’s the point we’re making.”
Payseur has created viral images that show an open sewer pipe dumping into a river’s surface, as well as a cartoon in which a dolphin says, “And the Human from the LCDA say[s] it would be okay to drink the water.”
But the LCDA never said it was OK to drink the treated wastewater.
“No, they didn’t say that,” Payseur acknowledged. “I said it. I said, ‘Okay, here, drink the water.’”
What the LCDA has said repeatedly is that the plant would produce “near-drinkable” water, suitable for cooling, irrigation, and similar non-potable uses.
In an e-mail Thursday, Dye told The Current GA, “Our messaging says the treated water is ‘near drinking water quality.’ When water professionals use this phrase, they are referring to the high level of purification achieved through advanced membrane filtration. It does not mean the water is potable [drinkable] but rather that it meets very stringent treatment standards.”
The LCDA also never said the plant would discharge from an open pipe above the water’s surface. It specifically states the plant’s discharge would be mixed by high-powered jets, typical of MBR systems, into the water column three feet above the riverbed, below the surface.
“Well, there’s a reason,” Payseur said. “Because they want to bury it, out of sight, out of mind. What my mission is is to show the public that… here’s what’s going into the river. And those are the points that I’m making, and I know they’re harsh, and I know they’re divisive, but I’m just telling you – what’s the old saying? You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”
Dye denied the goal was to hide the pipe. “The discharge pipe is designed to be submerged based on the project’s engineering and water-quality considerations,” she wrote. “The underwater discharge will be at the river’s deepest point for most effective diffusion, maximum mixing, and it is a safe distance from watercraft, among other reasons.”
Just the facts
Georgia EPD, not the LCDA, determines what levels of contaminants are acceptable, based on state and federal laws.
Since 2023, Riceboro’s wastewater treatment plant has been under a Georgia EPD enforcement order. The city plans to apply for a forgivable state rural water loan, as Midway did, and has announced a water bill increase – a particular hardship for a small rural town of elderly residents on small fixed incomes.
Riceboro already has enough wastewater issues, residents say, citing the city’s unreliable lift stations that city employees had been inspecting earlier that day.
Grassroots efforts
Meanwhile, citizens are taking matters into their own hands.
Isle of Wight crabber and river guide Clarissa Zabarac wrote on Facebook that she and others have been taking monthly water samples and collecting data on salinity and other measurements of the Laurel View’s health.
“The Laurel View (Jerico, Belfast, Tivoli, Medway) rivers are totally salty,” Zabarac wrote May 27, adding that she and others had been testing the river’s salinity over the past few months. Zabarac, who is also a real estate broker, did not reply to requests for her methodology or results by publication time.
Ogeechee Riverkeeper Executive Director Damon Mullis says his group is looking for funding to do more detailed monitoring and testing of the Laurel View.
Is the North Newport healthy?
The LCDA is looking at possible sites along the North Newport River, near the county boat ramp, if it does eventually run the pipe to Riceboro.
The river runs alongside water-treatment manufacturer SNF and the now-closed International Paper containerboard mill. Production shut down at IP in October but a skeleton crew remains on site and water treatment appears to be ongoing. Riceboro Mayor Chris Stacy, who was laid off from IP just before retirement, said the mill is still “cleaning up.”
In 2024, while IP was still open, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency monitoring listed the North Newport River’s water quality for aquatic life there as “good.” That means the river was “fully supporting [its] designated uses under the Clean Water Act.”
The Current GA made several visits to the Riceboro boat launch on county property next to the sawmill over the past two weeks, observing alligators, storks, great egrets, and fish jumping. Salt air had replaced the once-pervasive smell of the paper mill’s smokestacks.
But EPA lists Peacock Creek, which runs from Fort Stewart into the North Newport River, as impaired for fishing, citing bacteria and other microbes, mercury in fish tissue, and low oxygen as issues as recently as 2024. That finding was based on data EPA got from Georgia EPD.
SNF, which is in the business of making water treatment supplies, is a major source of income for the city and came to its rescue when IP closed, hiring many who had been laid off. But SNF also has been fined by EPD for failing to pretreat its discharges into the river.
“All this discharge water that they’re talking about putting out is actually cleaner than the water that will go into your septic tank and percolate into the ground,” Byrd said. “Which may be true in numbers and facts and stuff like that, but I don’t eat the fish out of the septic tank. I don’t eat the crabs that come out of the septic tank.”
Who gets a say?
Amelia Phelps, who lives in Midway, wrote on Facebook that she understands the opposition to discharging into the Laurel View River, and that she gets the “the logic” of sending it to the North Newport, instead.
“But I also recognize the NIMBY rhetoric coming into play, and how we’re “just” moving the plant into “somebody else’s back yard,” she added. “And I think it’s worth a conversation about why the industry already exists in Riceboro specifically and not in other places in the first place.”
Historically, industrial sites have located in and around Black communities, including Riceboro, most of whose residents are direct descendants of Gullah Geechee people enslaved on the LeConte-Woodmanston rice plantation. It’s been a tight-knit community for hundreds of years.
Jones said, “You’ve got people that’s coming in from the outside, that we don’t know, coming in.”
Similarly, people who own valuable waterfront property in Liberty County’s Isle of Wight and in Bryan County’s Richmond Hill blame unspecified political corruption, alleging without evidence that the LCDA and Board of Commissioners are getting rich by pushing for the water plant and the mixed-use development.
What both communities share besides a love of Georgia’s coast is a sense of anger – at larger forces, with greater resources, threatening their long-established way of life.
And both are suspicious of treated wastewater, no matter how clean, in their local river.
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