Mamie Mitchell moved to University Place more than four decades ago. The north Baton Rouge subdivision, located behind Southern University, was a quiet, family-oriented community then.
Right across the street was a city-parish wastewater treatment facility. At first, it was little more than a single shed and one pump. But as the city grew, the plant expanded until it was practically right at Mitchell’s front door.
“As the plant grew, the problems grew,” says Mitchell’s son, Greg, who was a child when the family moved to the neighborhood and later became one of its most vocal advocates.
As 225 details in a feature from the current issue, it took decades of fighting, but Mamie Mitchell and some of her neighbors finally got the city-parish to move them away from the sewage plant. Mitchell, the last to leave in April, has settled into a comfortable home in the quiet confines of Baton Rouge’s Park Forest subdivision.
Today, she sounds more resigned than victorious.
“You get to the point where you fought for so long, you get tired,” she says. “I should have fought some more.”
The fight began in 1996, when, according to Greg Mitchell, some 200 or so University Place residents sued the parish. The group won at trial, and Mitchell says the judgment was worth about $3 million. That money was not specifically meant to buy out the residents; rather, it was meant to compensate them for the suffering and health problems they say were caused by the plant. The judgment was thrown out on appeal, although Greg says his mother got to keep $20,000 to pay for depreciation on her home.
But the Concerned Citizens of University Place, with Greg as their primary spokesman and leader, kept working. Greg says he contacted every government official he could think of, from the Metro Council to members of Congress. He wanted to make sure the council heard from University Place residents, not just city-parish attorneys.
