City of Opp officials are seeking funding in an effort to rehabilitate a portion of the city’s ailing sewerage system.

The city has applied for nearly $500,000 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money from the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) to replace the sewerage lines south of Hwy 84.

Opp Mayor H.D. Edgar said this is the second year the city has applied for these funds in order to conduct the sewerage rehab, and said he hopes the city is one of the municipalities chosen.

“Those sewer lines were put in when the cotton mills were built,” he said. “Our problem is that we have breaks in the lines, and we have to go in and patch them. The older the lines get, the more we’ll have to patch them.”

Edgar said the money would allow the city to do a complete sewerage rehab on the Hwy. 84 section rather than just doing the usual routine patching.

Still, the mayor said the city’s problem isn’t bad enough the city would seek other avenues of funding if it isn’t granted the money.

“We aren’t having any problems every other city in South Alabama isn’t,” he said.

“We all have aging sewer systems.

“We can continue to apply the next funding cycle if we aren’t awarded,” he said.

“We’ll know in a couple of months if we were chosen. The project would be in 2011, if we are awarded the money. We will have to get the engineers to come in and do the design work and then there’s a process we have to go through.”