Four months after a public hearing on Brown County’s new septic ordinance, work is beginning on a rewrite.
The Brown County Health Department’s septic ordinance committee will meet Tuesday, July 17. Their task will be to update the county’s rules for waste disposal through septic systems, which have been in place since 1997. Three other rewrites have been attempted in the past six years; the most recent version was debated at length on March 29 then sent back to the Brown County Board of Health.
At their May meeting, the health board decided to form a new law rewrite committee.
Health board President Thomi Elmore said the purpose of next week’s committee meeting will be to discuss a strategy on how they’re going to approach this new rewrite.
So far, the rewrite committee includes three health board members: nurse Cathy Rountree, Dr. Bill Irvine, and Elmore, who was appointed to the health board as a member of the public. Elmore wasn’t planning to be on the rewrite committee again since she was on the last one, but health board members persuaded her to stay on.
Several other members of the public have expressed interest in being on the rewrite committee, including septic system installers, Elmore said.
It could be helpful to have a county commissioner attending committee meetings as well, she said. “I’m not a septic expert; they by no means want to be or should be either, but we all need to understand the implications of the law and the problems we’re running into, and why Brown County is in this unique situation,” Elmore said.
“I’ve heard a lot of things people have said out there, and they don’t really understand why this has to be done.”
For the last rewrite attempt, which started in 2015 and took nearly two years, a county commissioner was not on the committee and neither were members of the public. The committee included three health board members, septic installers, a soil scientist, a real estate agent/appraiser and two health department staff members.
The commissioners met with the health board three times last spring to discuss the new ordinance, made some changes, then published it in the paper in March 2018 to begin gathering public input.
Residents who attended some of the meetings last spring said they thought the public should have been brought into the ordinance formation process earlier.
Elmore said that’s part of what she wants to figure out during the July 17 meeting: “exactly how to approach this. We don’t want … to be discussing the same things over and over. We want to focus on the strategy we’re going to be using to … be right on target and make meetings effective and positive … before we resubmit it back to the commissioners.”
At the March 29 public hearing, a packed room of residents spoke up about many of the proposed changes.
Some of their concerns: Why parts of the ordinance were stricter than state code; which parts of the rules apply to existing homes and which apply to new construction only; whether or not the county should require septic system inspections before a home can be sold; why a septic system installer would have to be specially licensed by the local health department; penalties for violating the ordinance being too high; and lack of specifics about how the health department staff would enforce the ordinance.
Audience members also asked for a review of pump-and-haul procedures — a method of emptying a septic system that isn’t working property or a tank that has exceeded its capacity.
Elmore said the health board hasn’t yet received a transcript of the three-hour public hearing in March. That was to come from the county commissioners, to help the new committee understand all of the public’s concerns.
A big concern with the ordinance is due process, said Greg Bowes, a local attorney who spoke up several times at the March hearing and also at the May health board meeting. A case involving the local health department, which is in appeals court, raised flags about the “broad discretion” the current ordinance gives health department employees, he said.
“There’s such a huge potential for lawsuits, maybe we don’t want to delay,” Bowes said, about getting a new ordinance in place.
“I’m just saying if there’s anything we can do to make it move faster, we should.”
Elmore said last week that she sees the need to specify the rules and procedures the health department uses, such as entering people’s property to inspect septic systems. However, she doesn’t believe those should be in the new ordinance itself.
It’s not the health board’s role to dictate the day-to-day operations of the health department; and if state code should change or a new wastewater technology would be approved, the local ordinance then would have to be changed, too, she said.
She believes the best way to deal with the procedure questions is to work on them in a separate committee, put them in a separate document, then have the other committee review it.
Elmore said she doesn’t want to delay discussion on the new law rewrite, but she also doesn’t know when a new draft might be ready, as everyone on the committee is a volunteer.
“I would like to get it done by the end of the year, but I’m not sure that’s possible. To be frank, once you get into the election season, then everybody’s focused a lot on other issues and their time is consumed with other things,” like the holidays, she said. “… So, we’re have to be accommodating to people’s schedules.”
In the meantime, the health department is operating under 1997 septic rules.
“It gives significantly more authority to the department of health to enforce these issues than actually the new ordinance, so we’re just going to continue as we have since 1997,” said Brown County Health Officer Dr. Norman Oestrike at the May health board meeting.
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WHAT: Meeting of the septic ordinance committee of the Brown County Health Department
WHEN: 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 17
WHERE: County Office Building, Salmon Room
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