The city of Valley’s threatening of residents who don’t pay their trash bills with imprisonment and then jailing those residents violates multiple constitutional rights, according to a federal lawsuit filed Thursday.
The city had come under fire in November when police arrested and jailed Martha Menefield, an 82-year-old woman, for not paying her $77 trash bill — an incident that stirred national outrage.
Menefield was not the first Valley resident jailed for that offense, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court in Opelika.
Santini Little, a former Valley resident who claimed she was arrested for not paying her less than $150 trash bill in 2011 and then jailed on $2,500 bond for the offense in 2013, is accusing the city and Amwaste of illegally threatening delinquent residents with jail time and, in some cases, putting them behind bars.
She is seeking to make the suit a class action to include anyone who has been “prosecuted, criminally, and either jailed or threatened with jail, for the failure to pay a garbage collection fee to the City of Valley” as plaintiffs.
“In the state of Alabama, and in the U.S., people don’t go to prison for civil debt,” Allan Armstrong, one of Little’s attorneys, said in a statement to AL.com.
A message left with Valley’s mayor on Thursday night did not immediately receive a response.
Little pleaded guilty to the charge in August 2013 and was ordered to pay $119.50 in restitution and a $25 bond fee, according to the lawsuit.
Since July 2021, Little claimed she received four show cause orders — or demands to appear in court before a judge — for not paying trash fees, including one appearance set for Jan. 23.
Valley violated the Eighth Amendment against excessive bail and her Fourteenth Amendment right to due process by being “imprisoned for failing to pay a garbage collection fee, and by continuing to be threatened with imprisonment for failure to pay the fee,” the suit contended.
“Ms. Little’s indebtedness was less than $150.00. Her bond to be released from jail was $2500.00. This is not proportionate. Moreover, she now has additional costs imposed for several hundred dollars. This is not proportionate,” the filing stated.
Incarcerating people who don’t pay trash bills is against both federal and state law, the suit alleged.
“In this country and state, we do not have debtors’ prison. The law is clear that jail time for debts, Section 20 of the Alabama Constitution says quite simply, ‘That no person shall be imprisoned for debt,’” the filing went on to say.
Valley “knew, or should have known, that it cannot imprison people, or threaten to imprison people, for the failure to pay garbage collection fees,” according to the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, Amwaste, which provides trash collection for the city, “knew that the City used criminal prosecutions, and jail time, or the threat thereof, to collect fees that eventually benefited Amwaste,” the suit alleged.
“Amwaste was a direct beneficiary of the jail threats because its was paid from revenues derived from a system enforced, ultimately, by the imposition of jail time for failure to pay garbage fees,” the suit claimed. “Amwaste knew of this process. Without Amwaste’s services, the fees would never have been collected.”
The suit also accused the city and Amwaste of engaging in “a pattern of racketeering activity” by using “the threat and intimidation of jail time to extort money from” Little and others.
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