The Brown County Regional Sewage District won’t be working with Nashville Utilities or the Helmsburg Regional Sewage District to treat wastewater from the Bean Blossom area.
Instead, regional sewage district leaders are taking steps to build and fund a stand-alone treatment plant on Gatesville Road.
To do that, they’ll need help from the federal, state and county governments.
The estimated cost to build the plant is $7,355,445, according to documents handed out at the April 3 regional sewer board meeting.
The plant will serve about 275 customers in the Bean Blossom, Freeman Ridge, Woodland Lake and Little Fox Lake areas.
District leaders are planning to pay for it with a combination of grants and low-interest loans from the State Revolving Loan Fund and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Program.
How much grant funding will be available isn’t certain yet, as it’s dependent on the federal budget, said Steven Brock, a municipal finance adviser the sewer district board hired April 3.
Funding also depends on other factors, such as how many people a project is going to serve, what their poverty level is and rankings the funding review boards give to the project, Brock said.
In his experience, it’s rare for a project to get funding from both Rural Development and SRF, he said. It’s also rare for a project to be 100 percent or even 75 percent grant-funded, but that won’t stop him from trying, he said.
The goal is to get users’ monthly fees to somewhere in the $60 to $80 range, Brock said. However, that is entirely dependent on what funding he can find for the project.
He recommended charging flat fees for all residential users no matter what their wastewater flow is, but calculating rates differently for commercial customers.
After the new wastewater collection tanks and lines are installed on their properties, sewer customers also would need to fill and compact their old septic tanks. Who would pay for that isn’t clear yet.
Running and maintaining the Bean Blossom plant is projected to cost the district $175,670 per year.
Since the Brown County Regional Sewage District includes all areas of the county that were not in a sewer district as of April 2013, this Bean Blossom plant won’t be the only one the sewer district will build, because it can’t serve the whole county.
Bean Blossom is only the first focus, said Gary Ladd, the engineer who’s been working on this project since 2002.
Later, the regional sewer board would like to study other areas of the county, with the help of the Brown County Redevelopment Commission, to see where it would make sense to build other sewer plants to support economic growth, Brock said.
Kickstart needed
One of the first steps toward getting the Bean Blossom project rolling is for the regional sewer board to find about $270,000. That money is needed to cover some of the costs of starting a new sewer district, Ladd said.
On April 12, sewer district leaders went before the Brown County Redevelopment Commission to ask for a $270,000 loan or grant. The redevelopment commission pledged its support but said they didn’t have direct access to any money, so the sewer board was to ask the county council April 16.
Even though various boards have been trying to get sewers in Bean Blossom since the early 2000s, the Brown County Regional Sewer District is technically a brand-new sewer district, and state law prevents new sewer districts from taking out traditional loans, Brock said. That’s because if the project doesn’t happen as planned, there’s a risk that any loan the group takes out won’t get paid back. The sewer district owns nothing that could be put up as collateral, and it won’t have any income until it is up and running, he said.
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The sewer board could try for a planning grant from the state’s Community Focus Fund, but that won’t come close to covering the bills that need to be paid before the funding agencies make funding decisions. “There’s a big gap between what we need and what is available out there,” Brock said.
The regional sewer district board needs the county’s support on this project, and the county needs the project, too, if it’s going to grow or even survive, he said.
“It almost always takes the county coming in with, whether it’s a grant, loan money, to make things happen,” he said about startup money for the district. “And the county should want to have this happen, because it is part of everyone’s goal here, which is to make things happen in Brown County, and this is how it starts: to get sanitary sewer service in these areas,” he told the county redevelopment commission April 12.
“If nothing happens, that environmental problem isn’t going to get any better,” Brock told the regional sewer board April 3. Businesses won’t move in if they have no sewers, and people might have trouble selling their homes if they don’t have wastewater treatment, he said.
John Kennard, an environmental health specialist with the Brown County Health Department, has been publicly reporting on high E.coli levels in Bean Blossom-area creeks for more than 12 years. A past sewer board called that data into question.
An environmental report is part of the $270,000 in work needed to get this project started, along with engineering and soil studies, legal and administrative fees.
Any partnerships?
Last spring, the regional sewer board went temporarily inactive when three of its five members resigned during a public meeting. The two other members — Deborah Larsh and Mike Leggins — still are on the board now, along with former health department employee Judy Swift-Powdrill and retired soil scientist Phil LeBlanc.
The former board had been working for about a year to weigh all the different options of treating Bean Blossom-area sewage. Those included building a plant in Bean Blossom, building a system to pipe wastewater to Nashville to be treated in the town’s plant, or partnering with the Helmsburg Regional Sewage District to use Helmsburg’s plant.
Before a majority of them resigned, the former regional sewage board voted in February 2017 to build a Bean Blossom plant. Then, that April, the board decided to reexamine the Nashville and Helmsburg options because the state funding agencies had suggested that.
Funding agencies want to see “regionalization,” or communities collaborating instead of building their own treatment plants if there’s a way they could help each other, Brock said.
Last May, the Helmsburg Regional Sewage District sent a letter saying it was interested in possibly joining the Brown County Regional Sewage District. The regional board even left a seat open in 2018 for a person from Helmsburg.
That partnership didn’t pan out, said John Young, the Helmsburg district’s attorney. He said the boards actually have been talking off and on for 10 or 15 years, and money has been the issue.
“Helmsburg’s position has always been, ‘Hey, you guys want to connect to us and get sewers up there? We’re happy to bring you on as a customer.’ The issue has always been that Bean Blossom has never been able to obtain any funding to get lines in place, and Helmsburg’s position, because they are looking out for Helmsburg customers, has always been that Helmsburg is happy to do this, but we can’t be doing this on the backs of our customers. We can’t be subsidizing, basically, putting in sewer lines for Bean Blossom.”
If the Helmsburg district took on debt to build new sewer lines, those costs would have to be covered with higher Helmsburg sewer rates, he said.
Helmsburg’s sewer system, installed around 1996, was funded entirely by the state because the environmental issues were so significant, Young said.
“The bottom line is, Helmsburg is happy to bring Bean Blossom or anyone else on as a customer as long as it’s not going to put Helmsburg in a hole. I think anybody could understand that,” he said.
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Young said he was a little surprised to hear that the regional sewer board was going to build in Bean Blossom because he figured it would be cheaper for them to hook onto Helmsburg, but he also understands the challenge of running sewer lines through hilly, rocky, creek-filled terrain. “Three miles (between Helmsburg and Bean Blossom) may not seek like much, but that kind of topography is a lot of work and money,” he said.
The new Bean Blossom plant is being designed with the idea of eventual expansion in mind, Ladd told the county redevelopment commission April 12. “The good news is, we’ve got the capacity, and certainly, utilities work better with more users,” Brock added about future plans for the Bean Blossom plant.
Young didn’t rule out the possibility of both boards working together someday but only if it made financial sense. He said that if capacity ever did become available in Bean Blossom, and Helmsburg needed it, “certainly, that may create an opportunity for both districts to join, or both plants, and lower everybody’s rates, but that’s just speculation (at this point),” he said.
The Brown County Regional Sewage District Board also talked off and on for several months with the Nashville Town Council about taking and treating Bean Blossom-area waste in Nashville. If that worked, a new plant wouldn’t have to be built in Bean Blossom, residents of Greasy Creek Road could get sewers when the line passed through their neighborhood on the way to the treatment plant, and maybe costs could be lower for everyone because Nashville’s plant would be running at a higher volume than it is now.
But that idea, too, has fallen apart, said Swift-Powdrill, the new president of the regional sewage board. “They don’t want us,” she said at the April 3 meeting.
The regional board had gone to the January council meeting asking if they could get an updated figure for how much the town would charge them to treat sewage from Bean Blossom. Swift-Powdrill said they never got that number.
“We can’t just wait ’til they make up their minds,” Larsh said.
Nashville Town Manager Scott Rudd said that a few sewer board members and town council members met several weeks ago to talk about how the town could help, and he didn’t think the conversation was over.
He said the town was waiting on information from the regional sewer board about how much capacity was needed, where the Bean Blossom line would enter the town’s plant, and other updates on its project before the town spent any more money to study what changes it might have to make to its own plant. The town spent several thousand dollars to study capacity and rates more than a year ago with the idea of taking on Bean Blossom wastewater, and then the former regional board made plans instead to build its own plant.
Also, the town’s situation has changed since it first told the regional board about 18 months ago that it would have treatment space to spare, Rudd said. The Hard Truth Hills brewery/distillery/restaurant, the Maple Leaf Performing Arts Center, and a car wash and restaurant in town weren’t on the horizon then.
“We anticipate the Maple Leaf and Big Woods (Hard Truth Hills) projects to spur some additional development … so it’s very important that we project forward the use that will be required to serve town residents and businesses for those rate payers. That’s very important that we plan for their future and allow them to expand and grow as needed,” Rudd said.
“The council is more than willing to work with them (the regional sewer board) and expressed continued interest in doing that, but also understands that if it’s more beneficial for them to own their own plant, then that’s the way it should go.”
Last summer, the town took on Hard Truth Hills as a town sewer customer, and it has given the Maple Leaf a letter of intent to treat its wastewater, too.
Leggins said he feels like the regional sewer board has tried to make partnerships with Nashville and Helmsburg work multiple times, and it’s time to move on with the next plan, which is building a Bean Blossom plant.
