Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority

The Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority (LRWRA) collects, treats, and disposes of wastewater for the city of Little Rock (Pulaski County). The LRWRA oversees more than 1,400 miles of public sewer pipes and three facilities that treat wastewater before pumping it into the Arkansas River.

Settlement in Little Rock accelerated after the site was chosen as the territorial capital of Arkansas in 1821, but no provision for managing sewage was made for quite some time. Instead, residents often emptied their waste into local creeks that ran downtown, most notably Town Branch, which had water flow for more than half of the year. It was also subject to backing up whenever Fourche Creek, into which it emptied, flooded. Only after a flood in 1865 did city leaders start to plan a sewer system, and only in 1879, following a yellow fever scare, was a cement cutoff built to divert Town Branch to the Arkansas River. However, far from improving sanitation, the reduction of flow along the creek only worsened its stench.

In 1881, the Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 84, permitting municipalities to levy taxes for improvement districts. The city council of Little Rock began creating a number of sewer districts. In August 1885, the Arkansas Board of Health ordered that all sewer lines emptying into Town Branch be sealed; the creek was eventually covered over by stone, brick, or concrete as part of Town Branch Improvement District No. 1. In the early twentieth century, Mayor Warren Lenon proposed connecting the various sewer districts into one large system paid for by the entire city, rather than individual districts. The December 23, 1926, Arkansas Gazette quoted engineers lamenting the “crazy quilt” system, writing, “Sewers in different blocks are of different sizes and are on varying grades.”

Act 132 of 1933 authorized municipalities to levy user charges against property owners for the construction, maintenance, and improvement of sewer systems, and Little Rock named a full Sewer Committee. In 1936, the city requested a grant of $738,000 from the Public Works Administration (PWA), a Depression-era New Deal agency, and construction soon began on not just new lines but also the Rogers Pump Station; all untreated sewage was now being discharged into the river at a single spot, north of what is now the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. T. Wilson Clapham was hired as the manager of the Sewer Department on May 1, 1941, and set out mapping the extensive sewer system.

Postwar growth of Little Rock challenged the existing infrastructure. A drought in 1953, which brought the Arkansas River to a low level, emphasized the need to treat sewage before dumping it into the river, as did the authorization of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, which entailed the construction of locks and dams both north and south of the point at which sewage was discharged. By July 1957, the Sewer Committee decided to locate the planned sewer treatment plant just east of the airport, and contracts for the construction of the plant and trunk lines were soon awarded. The treatment plant was completed in March 1960. However, eighteen different sewer lines, constructed much earlier, were still pouring untreated sewage into the Arkansas River. The Riverfront Interceptor was completed in June 1970, and construction on a secondary treatment facility was finished by August 1973.

By this time, Little Rock was expanding beyond its natural drainage basin, with areas west of present-day Shackleford Road naturally draining westward toward the Little Maumelle River, rather than the Arkansas River on which the treatment plant was located. The passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 set new standards of water quality. In 1973, the Sewer Department changed its name to Little Rock Wastewater Utility (LRWU).

To accommodate growth in western Little Rock, LRWU bought twenty-two acres of land in 1976 for treating reclaimed water in the Maumelle River Basin, but local opposition scuttled the plans, and the following year, LRWU began work on three pumping stations to carry the sewage over the hills, where it could then be transported eastward to the treatment plant.

In 1978, Judge Thomas Eisele found the Sewer Committee guilty of making false statements to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about frequency of testing and quality of water discharged into the river, and the committee subsequently undertook a major modernization of the treatment plant, as well as enforcing the requirement that industrial facilities pretreat their sewage before discharging it into the city’s system. In 1989 and 1993, LRWU won awards from the EPA in recognition of its pretreatment program.

In 1989, LRWU opened the Clearwater Maintenance Facility on South Shackleford Road, and the following year, LRWU opened its second treatment plant, Fourche Creek, to accommodate growth at the Little Rock Port Authority. Further growth, especially in western Little Rock, necessitated the construction of the Little Maumelle Water Reclamation Facility on Chenal Parkway just south of Pinnacle Mountain State Park; it opened in 2011. Following a legal settlement between the utility and the Sierra Club, the Peak Flow Attenuation Facility opened in 2018 to reduce sewer overflows during heavy storms. While the facility was under construction, in 2017, LRWU changed its name to Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority.

For additional information:
Griffee, Carol. History of the Little Rock Wastewater Utility. Little Rock: Rose Publishing Company, 1994.

Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority. https://www.lrwra.com/ (accessed March 24, 2026).

Worthen, William B. “Municipal Improvement in Little Rock—A Case History.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 46 (Winter 1987): 317–347.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas