Cindy Case-Brown and Connie Norris sit on the far side of the nearly empty hearing room in the Galvez Building in Baton Rouge, several small stacks of documents and binders spread out before them. Across the room sit representatives from the Louisiana Public Service Commission and Magnolia Water, accompanied by a squadron of attorneys.
The two Magnolia customers traveled from the Northshore to the state capital to oppose a plan that would allow the private equity-backed company to continue to increase water and sewer rates annually. In recent years, Magnolia has bought up utility systems across the state, becoming one of Louisiana’s largest water and sewer providers.
Like many Louisiana residents, Case-Brown and Norris have seen their utility rates soar since Magnolia took over their water and sewage. Unlike most, they dove headfirst into the regulatory muck.
It has been an uphill battle since day one.
“I had very little knowledge of what was going on and how the system worked,” says Norris, who eventually became an intervenor in one of Magnolia’s repeated requests to the LPSC for permission to raise its rates on customers like herself.
The process is similar to court proceedings — only Norris and fellow Magnolia customers don’t have anyone to represent them but themselves.
According to LPSC records, Magnolia now provides sewer to more than 82,000 customers across the state and water to an additional 79,000 connections. The company continues to expand through acquisitions.
Since Magnolia started expanding in 2019, the company has increased utility rates for its customers nearly every year, making its sewer rates the highest in the state. Residents in Lafayette’s Quail Hollow neighborhood saw sewer rate hikes as high as 200%. Most customers now pay more than $73 a month for sewer service, along with a starting water rate of $44. By comparison, the statewide average is $56 for sewer service and a $19 starting water rate.
Fighting those increases, as Case-Brown and Norris set out to do, is difficult.
The LPSC, the state body in charge of regulating and approving rate increases by private companies like Magnolia, has a tendency to approve them without much discussion, in part because it sees its role as ensuring that those companies have the financial wherewithal to continue operations and comply with federal and state regulations.
“The LPSC is responsible for ensuring that utilities are able to generate enough funds to maintain compliance with these regulatory agencies,” writes LPSC staff in its Magnolia hearing filings.
Meanwhile, Magnolia has done everything in its power to make intervention as painful as possible, arguing that ratepayers like Case-Brown and Norris should have to sign non-disclosure agreements to see the financial data the company used to justify its rate increases, and even requesting insight into their personal finances and medical records in return.
Magnolia did not respond to any requests for comment by The Current for this story. All quotes from Magnolia representatives come from public hearings and filings.
The company argues it needs to raise rates in order to fix the many old systems it has taken over that had fallen into disrepair under previous ownership.
Higher operating costs, shrinking populations and lack of government support have left many small towns with failing systems and no money to hire engineers to fix the deficiencies.
According to a 2020 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, spending on capital improvements to water infrastructure in 2019 at the local, state and federal levels totaled only $48 billion.
This fell $81 billion short of the $129 billion ASCE estimates is needed to effectively modernize the system. At the same time, ASCE gave water systems across the country a D rating, meaning improvements are needed for failing systems now.
Those are exactly the kinds of systems Magnolia and its parent company have taken over in Louisiana and beyond.
Like the water system serving the town of Kilian, Louisiana, which is among the for-profit utility provider’s most recent acquisitions.
Until 2026, the town’s water system consistently received a D or F rating from the Louisiana Department of Health.
The town tried, and failed, to drag itself out. “We were going to go bankrupt. Hiring these engineering firms or these contractors is incredibly expensive,” says Mayor Caleb Atwell of the repairs needed to keep Killian’s water drinkable.
Manganese and iron concentrations are high in the area’s groundwater, and improper filtration makes the water coming out of the tap less than appetizing.
“You’re turning on your sink, and it looks like gumbo is coming out,” says Atwell. “And not the good kind of gumbo. We’re talking tomato.”
Atwell was elected mayor in 2025. By that time, the town’s water system had already been in receivership, meaning the state had taken ownership of the system due to the persistently bad ratings. Meanwhile, residents paid less than $30 for water service a month, nowhere near enough to generate the funds for necessary repairs, he argues.
“People really don’t care too much about the pipes that are in the ground, until they start breaking,” says Atwell. “You’re only charging people $28 a month, great, but you can’t put in the dollars that it takes to upgrade.”
After over a year in receivership, the Louisiana Department of Health came to Killian with an ultimatum: Sell the system to Magnolia or fight the court-ordered sale of the system.
“We really didn’t have an option but to go with Magnolia,” says Atwell.
Magnolia Founder and CEO Josiah Cox agrees. “I believe we’re the only entity that’s kind of capable or willing to step into that situation,” he told the LPSC in a February hearing.
But unlike a public utility like Lafayette Utilities System and many of the water and sewage districts it takes over, Magnolia is backed by private investors and expected to turn a profit for those shareholders.
Magnolia’s most recent rate plan approved by the LPSC ensures customer rates provide a 9% to 10% financial return for Magnolia, on top of the tens of millions in expenses the company already recoups from acquiring and operating systems.
According to its application for rate increases in 2025, Magnolia owed more than $37.5 million to its parent company, funds that have been used to support the company’s expansion across the state. Continued expansion, Cox argues, is necessary for the company’s business model to function, something he says will bring down rates in the long run.
“We can buy equipment that smaller utilities couldn’t afford on their own, because we’re managing multiple utilities across a larger footprint,” Cox said in the February hearing.
Assessing the validity of that claim and arguing against it, if necessary, requires a level of expertise that many ratepayers — and even regulators — lack, says Jackson Voss, a law student working for the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a nonprofit that intervenes in electrical rate cases on behalf of ratepayers.
“Doing that requires very active regulation and very active balancing of the interests involved,” says Voss. “And that’s not something that [the public services commission] does a good job of.”
Part of that is due to a lack of experience with water and sewer systems in general, many of which had so far been managed on the local level.
“The LPSC has not had a super long history of dealing with private water companies,” says Voss. “Water is not their primary focus. It was railroad monopolies … now it’s become electricity.”
As for ratepayers, if they lived in another state, there may be a state-funded advocate helping them pursue fair regulation of their rates. Louisiana is one of only a handful of states that don’t offer such representation.
“It’s a pretty bad time, in my view, to be a customer in Louisiana who’s hoping that the LPSC is going to protect them from what these companies want to do to them,” Voss says.
Case-Brown and Norris’ attempt to fight the rate increases on their Magnolia-issued bills failed. In June, the LPSC approved the company’s rate plan for the next three years.
But their fight, along with an increase of ratepayers across the state who find themselves in a similar situation, has brought unprecedented attention to the issue.
Magnolia will now be subject to an audit of its operating company’s finances before applying for another rate increase, ordered by the judge in Case-Brown and Norris’ intervention proceedings.
There’s also an election for the commission seat representing their area, and several candidates have made Magnolia a central part of their campaign. Norris herself is running.
Her opponent, following a recent runoff election, state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, R-Metairie, called on the commission to stop any new rate hikes or acquisitions by Magnolia. “The residents that have Magnolia Water cannot deal with another ‘moderate’ rate hike,” she told the sitting commissioners this June.
Case-Brown, who lives in Mandeville, is proud of the work she and fellow Northshore ratepayers like Norris have done to call attention to an issue few understood or were aware of before, and against an opponent that seemed to have all the power on its side.
“We stood up to a bully and I’m proud of that,” she tells The Current. “More people need to do the same.”
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