AU Perspective: When Auburn Greed Gets Thirsty

Power outgrowing consent of the citizens thirsts for more and oft requires reaching out. Auburn's incumbent mayor (re)election slogan is 'we' can do it together. The we becomes less ambiguous when connecting the 'I Believe in Felon Hubbard' political thieves. Robert Wilkins put his finger on two of those reaches in a June 30 letter to the Plainsman [https://www.theplainsman.com/staff/robert-wilkins] and readers owe him many thanks for his illumination, whatever they make of his run for mayor. I want to add the third reach he left out of his Plainsman letter; one that runs 'underground' and past the city limits... Wilkins has courageously addressed Auburn's 'odiferous' water issues and been met with the usual fear of speaking out against the machine.

Evaluate actions and facts, not a man's ambitions. Wilkins is challenging incumbent Mayor Ron Anders in the August 25 municipal election and "Citizens First" is Wilkins' campaign slogan.

Two Grabs and Habitual Kleptocracy

The AU Board of Trustees voted unanimously [6-5-26] without debate, to dissolve the University Senate and hand the president a Presidential Academic Advisory Council he largely appoints and controls - claiming final authority over every course, syllabus, and degree. Long time readers know that story. I ask folks to (re)read the recent columns on the Board's unique disdain and disregard for the faculty who actually teach our students.

Wilkins's second point - the elected/installed City Council "deferring or simply rubber-stamping" while an unelected management team runs budgets, development and appointments -- requires an honest asterisk. Auburn runs under the council-manager form, adopted through Alabama's Council-Manager Act of 1982. The city manager is the chief executive by design. Megan McGowen Crouch has held that post since February 2021; she wields authority the charter confers upon her; not authority the council secretly surrendered. So part of what Wilkins called abdication is simply the Auburn political machine, built for itself to transfer wealth to their minions. The University Senate dissolution is the naked grab. The city side is the slow habit of kleptocratic parasites. Same instinct, different speed.

That instinct is the subject here. Unaccountable planners reaching past the bounds that reason and decency would hold them - one planner noted for championing 'wings of corruption carrying him far' is among the most active metastasising Auburn's cancerous, over-subsidized growth. Watch where their habitual political theft runs next.

The Growth Machine

Auburn does not drift toward growth. It engineers it for the desired wealth transfers. The city runs a statistical tool it calls the Auburn Interactive Growth Model, the machine's paradigm which always promotes build, feeding a CompPlan 2030 which keeps redrawing the future land grab map outward. Planning Director Wahid Cotton administers it. The AU Board of Trustees feeds demand from the other side, expanding record enrollment three years running, from 33,015 to 34,145 students, with on-campus housing for 2025-26 sold out by October 2024, ten months before move-in.

Auburn counted 42,987 residents in 2000, 53,380 in 2010, 76,143 in 2020, and 83,761 by the most current 2024 estimate. Roughly double in a generation. Auburn is a cancerous growth machine with a town attached. Past Alabama Gazette columns have addressed Auburn's concentration of power as population increases with the same number of councilpersons.

The Plumbing Confessional

Here is the part the soviet machine would rather you not read. On 18 November 2025, the same City Council Wilkins scolds voted unanimously for a building moratorium, blocking new multi-unit construction in the Urban Core and Urban Neighborhood-West through November 30, 2026. The council cited "rapid, substantial and sustained" growth straining the capacity of public utilities, roads, and nearby infrastructure. Read that again... planners confessed in their own ordinance they grew the city past its pipes and pavement while discouraging competition from short-term rentals to address 'peak-load' demand without more highrises. One of the most corrupt engineers effectively berates citizens who show against some of the most corrupt planners, asserting citizens are wrong - i.e., who you gonna believe... me or your lyin' eyes?

The receipts affirm the confession. In December the council approved a $698,700 citywide traffic study because the roads move so poorly. Auburn City Schools launched a $383,000,000 expansion, a second high school, a new middle school and rebuilds of two aging elementaries, because classrooms are full. On the sewer side the H.C. Morgan facility is permitted for 25 million gallons a day; in 2025 peak daily flow already hit 21.5 million. Furthermore, the city cannot fully water itself. In 2024 Auburn bought roughly 17 percent of its drinking water from Opelika. This spring, when rains failed, the city imposed Phase II mandatory drought restrictions and did not lift them until June. A distorted, over-subsidized growth machine which runs on borrowed water and on rationed showers this spring keeps voting to grow.

Reaching Past the City Limits

So where does this greedy, thirsty city look? Outward, past the city limits, into rural Lee County. If history is any guide, Auburn's over-subsidized, cancerous growth will decay into slums as I observed growing up in the late 60s into the 70s.

In 2009 the Water Works Board of the City of Auburn went to court against the Loachapoka Water Authority, a small rural utility, asking a judge to declare Auburn (not Loachapoka) held the right to serve territory the city was taking in as its limits expanded, including a subdivision the developers called The Greens at Auburn. The developer itself called Auburn's water board nothing but an "alter ego" of the City. A trial judge sided with Auburn on part of the case. The Supreme Court of Alabama, in consolidated dockets 1091297 and 1091461 (decided June 24, 2011) set that ruling aside as premature and sent the whole matter back down. The final outcome never made the public record. The lesson is 'plainer' than the docket. When Auburn wants a rural neighbor's water customers, it does not knock. It files for the desired political theft.

The machine keeps drilling, too. Auburn's wells pull from the Chewacla Marble and Hollis Quartzite aquifers to feed a new Sandhill Road well; the water board ran a transmission main straight through Chewacla State Park in 2019 over public objection. The petition against that pipeline now carries more than 3,400 names. Now word moves through rural Lee County about fresh litigation between the Beauregard Water Authority (a utility serving about 12,000 people) and Auburn city water. I could not confirm any such suit thus will not print a rumor as fact. Given the Loachapoka record, little wonder Beauregard is wary of the cancerous growth impacting them and hard-charging in their direction. The aquifer does not stop at the city line and neither does Auburn's greedy, over-subsidized appetite.

The image above conveys it more plainly than this poor wordsmith can. Auburn brass in YellaWood hard hats, golden shovels sunk to the "Beauregard Aquifer," breaking ground on somebody else's water. It is satire derived from habitual political thieves drawn as a sound forecast.

Who Pays and Who 'Profits'

YellaWood hats in the cartoon are not an accident. They jab at AU Trustee Jimmy 'YellaGrubber' Rane (whose company stamps his brand on their lumber) and at an AU Board which keeps setting enrollment records compelling the city and its water works to chase the demand. Bob (I Believe in financing Felon Hubbard's legal bills) Dumas holds Auburn's Lee County BoT seat. Rane holds a District 3 seat drawn to a board map frozen since 1961, though he lives well to the south in Abbeville. The men who govern the growth keep a comfortable distance from the families who absorb the harm; residency requirements for YellaGrubber and TuberGrubber types don't apply...

Follow the water in the same way one follows the money, downhill to whoever comes out ahead with the wealth transfer du jour. Cancerous growth of this kind socializes its costs and privatizes its gains. The traffic, crowded classrooms, sewer bills, drought surcharges, etc. land upon the families already here and on the rural neighbors who never cast a vote in Auburn - many extracted enough by the occupational 'taxation without representation' abomination. The wealth transfer goes to corrupt developers and landholders whose acreage the growth model redesignates from rural to buildable. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply observation of how a political theft machine like this parcels out what it makes and what it costs.

In Closing

Three reaches, same habitual offenses. The trustees reached into faculty governance and took it. The management team reached into the council's oversight and kept it. The cancerous growth machine, having outgrown its own plumbing by its own admission, now reaches past the city limits toward water that belongs to somebody else. In each case the citizens who are supposed to consent are the last to be asked.

Wilkins is correct meticulously illuminating citizens losing their voice. The remedy is the same at every venue. Show up. Read the resolution past page one. Ask the planning director whose parcels the model 'blessed' this quarter. Ask the water board their intentions toward Beauregard before the shovels break ground, not after. Auburn can grow and keep faith with the people already here and the neighbors just outside the line. It has simply chosen not to so rural folks further feed the cancerous growth harming both sides.

I pray folks in Beauregard and the rest downstream of the Auburn Greed... get asked before getting taken again as the next victims of this habitual offender.

John Sophocleus is a retired Ford Motor Company Warranty & Policy Administrator and a retired Auburn University Instructor of Economics. A former Libertarian candidate for Alabama House and Governor, U.S. House District 3 and US Senate candidate, he's also a monthly Alabama Gazette columnist since 2009.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Alabama Gazette staff or publishers.