At the Commission’s regular meeting on July 27, 2026, Protect Lowndes County announced that it is working alongside the Alabama Rivers Alliance, a statewide network that has spent nearly thirty years building and supporting more than a hundred community and watershed groups working for clean water across Alabama.
The same day, the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a public-records request with the Lowndes County Commission on behalf of both the Alabama Rivers Alliance and Protect Lowndes County. It was filed under Alabama’s Open Records Act, Ala. Code § 36-12-40, which Alabama courts have said should be construed liberally in favor of public disclosure.
The request asks for ten categories of documents: confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements touching the project, site-selection and economic-development records, utility and infrastructure planning, incentive and tax-abatement discussions, the Lowndes County Economic Development Commission’s governance records and its relationship with the county, property transactions tied to the project, environmental and noise studies, permit applications submitted by Cloverleaf, permits the county has issued, and the minutes of every meeting where the project was discussed.
The law requires a written response within ten working days of receipt. Counting from the July 27 email delivery, that puts a response due on or before Monday, August 10, 2026.
None of this changes what this site has been asking since it launched. The documents named in the request are the same ones this site has been asking Cloverleaf and the county to publish voluntarily: the water contract, the electric-service agreement, the site plan, the property records, and the meeting minutes. What changed today is that the request is now on the record, addressed to the county administrator by name, with a legal deadline attached to it.
We are publishing the letter in full. When a response arrives, we will publish that too, whatever it says.12