According to court records, Alabama One holds a $7.1 million note on the project, which has never been independently appraised.

Alabama One filed a motion in February 2015 to have a trustee, Peter Colmer of the Atlanta-based corporate advisory firm Finley, Colmer and Company, run the facility, and Bankruptcy Court Judge Jennifer Henderson held a hearing on the motion.

However, a final order naming Colmer was never entered, and Alabama One provided no money to fund Colmer's work, according to May 8 motions Colmer and Lee Benton of the Birmingham, Ala., firm Benton and Centeno filed with the court. The motions asked the court to stay their appointments as trustee and counsel.

"From and after the time of the hearing, putative trustee has been ready, willing and able to serve in his/its capacity as Chapter 11 Trustee, but has received no funding, no agreement to fund, or any other capital to either operate the Debtor, or perform necessary environmental and/or corrective or capital functions for the debtor," Colmer wrote in his motion to stay his own appointment. "Putative trustee has never been in charge or control of the debtor or its operations."

In a May 11 hearing, Judge Henderson took the position that she gave a verbal order to name Colmer trustee and Benton counsel, and asked Alabama One bankruptcy attorney Mike Hall of the Birmingham, Ala., firm Burr Forman to draft it, but he forgot to do so, according to courtroom observers. Judge Henderson has not yet issued an order on how to resolve the matter.

As confusion over who controlled the facility continued, the electrical utility shut off power, the county removed key pieces of equipment and the pipes were damaged to the point where they need to be replaced, according to Howard. She ran the plant from around Oct. 1, 2014, to roughly the end of March 2015, when she showed Colmer how to keep the plant running. Then, she said, she understood she was no longer responsible for the plant.

"I showed them where all the lift stations were and told them that about once a week, usually in the middle of the night, I would get a call because an alarm had gone off somewhere and I had to go in to turn something back on or adjust something," Howard explained. "Then I asked them who was going to be designated to get the call since I wasn't doing it anymore. They all kind of laughed and pointed at me, and I said, no sir, not me. If you all pay me $1,100 an hour, I might do it then."

In an April 20 letter to Benton, Jonathan Bonner, a state-licensed engineer with the Tuscaloosa engineering firm CFM Group, estimated that it could cost $166,000 catch the plant up on all its required permits, replace equipment and repair pipes to get the facility back in working order again.

"I must caution that these are only budget estimates based on my current understanding of the system. I would advise a more prudent route to finely detail an actual Engineers Expected Contract Cost Estimate that I believe would be within 10% of the actual total," Bonner wrote.

Meanwhile, Robert Reynolds, a lawyer with the Tuscaloosa firm of Reynolds, Reynolds and Little and outside counsel to the ACUA said that the agency had not received a formal request to approve a loan and, if it had a trustee would have been involved.

"It is my understanding such a loan would actually be in the nature of a trustee in possession loan upon conversion of the Fosters Water Treatment bankruptcy case to a case under Chapter 7 and the appointment of a panel Trustee," Reynolds wrote in an email. "Mr. Butler would have no role in the case.  The funds would be used by the trustee for the care, repair and maintenance of the AOCU collateral."

No one from from Alabama One commented on the situation or why Colmer did not receive funding as trustee.