Bean Blossom and Helmsburg: Two communities, less than four miles apart, connected by State Road 45.

Both have some residents, some businesses, but neither in the quantity they used to have. Residents of both areas still talk wistfully of how it used to be.

All could benefit from working together, some local volunteers believe.

Earlier this summer, a group of those volunteers, elected officials and some members of the public started talking about developing a shared vision for that corridor. In June, the group, by a show of hands, decided to take steps toward the Bean Blossom-Helmsburg 2028 Revitalization Project.

What exactly the “project” or “projects” will end up being over the next 10 years hasn’t been decided yet. The Brown County Redevelopment Commission — the group that’s adopted this concept as their focus — has been talking over and over about how the people in those communities need to drive those decisions.

Last week, the people of Helmsburg took one step toward a possible joint project. Their newly formed Helmsburg Community Development Corporation voted unanimously to consider working with Bean Blossom in some way on sewer service. About 30 members of the Helmsburg community participated in that vote, said county redevelopment President Jim Kemp.

Helmsburg has a sewer system and a sewer board that’s run separately from the Helmsburg Community Development Corporation. Helmsburg’s sewer board has made no decisions about working with Bean Blossom, and exactly how they might work together has not been determined.

Brown County Regional Sewer District members, who are managing a Bean Blossom sewer project, said they’ve had one meeting with the Helmsburg sewer board so far and it was a good first step.

Helmsburg residents are dealing with rising sewer bills and an aging sewer plant. The plant could handle more wastewater than its getting, and getting more customers could help spread the cost around, Kemp said. However, the existing Helmsburg plant couldn’t handle all of the wastewater that Bean Blossom is estimated to produce, he said.

Bean Blossom has no sewers, but various people have been working for about 20 years to get them. Supporters believe that installing them will bolster the area’s economy, allowing current businesses to stay, others to move in, and attracting interest from new residents who might build new homes or rescue older ones.

Helmsburg Community Development Corporation members also want to see their community prosper. Last summer, they made a list of values they share: honesty/trust, accountability, security, family/friends and neighborhood. At the top of their want list was to get more people to live in Helmsburg on a permanent basis, not on a short-term rental basis, so it could feel like a cohesive community again.

Land exists in the Bean Blossom-Helmsburg area where new houses or low-impact businesses could go. The area is close to state highways; some of it even has high-speed internet. But without sewers, that kind of revitalization isn’t likely to happen, Kemp and other volunteers have said.

“I think this sewer availability is at the very core of the economic health of the county,” Kemp said at last week’s redevelopment meeting.

The Brown County Regional Sewer District has designed a project to hook up about 200 customers in the Bean Blossom area to a sewer plant and get them off individual septic systems. Funding agencies have already been contacted to see how much grant money they could give to make bills reasonable for sewer users.

But if Helmsburg wants to possibly work with Bean Blossom, that would be better, said regional sewer district member Clint Studabaker. “They’re open to discussion with us, and we’re going to have these discussions as far as they can go,” he said about Helmsburg at last week’s regional sewer board meeting.

The Bean Blossom-Helmsburg area is “an ideal corridor for the kind of development you’re talking about, because you can link up (Bean Blossom to) Helmsburg, go to Fruitdale, and those are areas that can have some of these clusters of homes, a community which has a very small environmental footprint,” Studabaker had said at the June redevelopment meeting. Maybe someday those communities could support a gas station, or service-type businesses for residents, like a barber shop or grocery store, he added. They all used to have them, like a lot of small communities across America.

If community leaders do nothing, they fear that conditions in those communities aren’t going to improve or even stay the same.

County redevelopment members are in the process of gathering data for a series of community meetings that they’ll take out into the townships, showing the “state of the county” and asking where residents think they should go from here.

Some of their data so far: More than half of Brown County residents are of low to moderate income. More than half of the land is owned by entities like the state and federal governments, which don’t pay property taxes. A variety of different tax sources — property, income, sales, gas, wheel and other taxes — fund the services that residents expect to have in a community. With fewer residents and businesses, that funding burden can become heavier on each taxpayer until tough decisions have to be made.

Taking steps to retain residents and businesses and/or bring in new ones could reverse that course, Kemp and others have said.

But they’ve also said that any development has to be done with an eye toward not changing what makes Brown County, Brown County. It’s rural, woodsy environment is a big part of that, Studabaker said at the June meeting.

“If you look at the United States … hone in … that great big green spot in the Indiana area, it’s Brown County. … That’s branding, to me. That’s what this place is, and can remain, if we understand how to put infrastructure in place that allows for it,” he said. “A 50-unit apartment building in the Bean Blossom corridor, that would be a wonderful thing, and it would not interfere with the great big picture.”

“People want to come to Brown County for their kids to go to school, so we’re doing that part right,” said county commissioner Diana Biddle. “We know how to play. … We’ve mastered that. Now we have to sell that to this millenial group, these 20-, 30-something young adults starting new families, that this is the place to come, and that’s the piece of the puzzle we don’t have yet.”

Not just affordable family housing is needed, but also housing for senior citizens and for people who work in service industries, like hotels and restaurants, said regional sewer board member Mike Leggins.

Making all those pieces come together is going to take a different leadership approach and higher level of cooperation than what might have been seen in the past, said county redevelopment member Jim Schultz.

“We’re going to be successful with people wanting to move here if they can see clear leadership that is aimed at stewardship,” he said, mentioning the work that groups of volunteers do to fill in where government-funded groups can’t.

“People come here and they feel the energy of Brown County, if we can use that term. We have to figure out how to optimize that. We have to be as efficient … as cooperative as possible in order to get something that actually works,” Schultz said in the June meeting.

“Our core challenge, because we’re a small community, is our ability to look out front instead of toward the rear and put the past behind us, and start working together in an interdependent, collaborative effort,” Kemp said.

“Anyone who wants to be actively involved in a civil, fair-minded approach is more than welcome,” he added later in the meeting. “Because the reality of it is … we can go out and spend all sorts of money on plans, but if the community as a whole doesn’t buy into it, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

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The Brown County Redevelopment Commission is planning a series of meetings to take place in all four townships in September and October.

Dates, times and places had not been finalized as of press time.

The purpose of those meetings will be twofold: To inform residents of the “state of the county” economically, and to gather opinions on where residents think the county should go with its economic plan in the future.

The redevelopment commission has hired a consultant to write the plan with grant money, but resident input is needed to go in it.

Watch The Democrat for meeting dates, times and locations as soon as they are confirmed.

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