The Brown County Regional Sewer District Board had four goals to finish by October on its timeline for the Bean Blossom sewer project.
One of them was to finalize where the wastewater treatment plant is going to be built. Earlier this year the board thought it had a willing property owner on Gatesville Road, but that hasn’t panned out, so the location question is still unanswered.
That’s OK, said Clint Studabaker, a retired engineer and sewer board member who’s been volunteering much of his free time to help solve environmental problems in Brown County. The October dates on the timeline weren’t hard deadlines; they were just a series of checkpoints to help keep the project on track, he said.
A decision on where the plant will go will probably need to be made by this spring, he said.
In the meantime, the board, its hired engineer and other parties are still working on other aspects of the sewer plan so it can be submitted for funding to state and federal agencies. Part of that work is gathering data on why and where sewers are needed.
This is the furthest that any sewer board has gotten in its quest to bring sewers to the Bean Blossom area, Studabaker said. That effort started in the early 2000s.
“What used to be the Bean Blossom Regional Sewer District board, they’d been working for 20 years on this and they had not gotten to the point where they’re doing the layouts we’re doing and making submittals to the agencies we’re doing, which will lead to the final site selection and grant moneys. We’re way ahead of that whole process. We’ve finally made some progress, in other words.”
The plan so far
In a few weeks, people in the possible sewer service area will get a letter from the regional sewer board updating them on the board’s progress.
Residents received some information in June at a public hearing.
A preliminary service map shows about 275 customers would be served with this project, along State Road 135 North and its offshoots in the Bean Blossom area, the Bean Blossom Trailer Court, Bill Monroe Memorial Music Park, Old Settlers Road, Bittersweet Road, Little Fox Lake, Woodland Lake, Covered Bridge Road and Freeman Ridge Road, as well as parts of State Road 45 and Gatesville Road.
A central sewer plant, estimated to cost $7.355 million, would provide them with sewer service, replacing their individual septic systems.
The plan is for the sewer board to apply for a combination of low-interest loans and grants from state and federal sources to pay for it.
Sewer customers in that service area would pay a monthly sewer bill. The board hopes that it can be kept within the $65 to $85 range, but they won’t know for sure what is possible until they hear from the funding agencies.
The where and why
So far, the sewer board has submitted two parts of the sewer plan to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management: the preliminary engineering report and the environmental review. Identifying the general sewer service area was part of the process.
Studabaker, other volunteers and Brown County Health Department staff are gathering other data to fill out the outline of that plan.
One piece is combing through paper records at the health department which show the location of homes, records of when they were built and when their septic systems were installed. The health department reported more than a year ago that those records were incomplete and difficult to search. That lack of hard data led to problems with rewriting and updating its 20-year-old septic system ordinance.
The health department’s septic ordinance rewrite committee broke into several subcommittees, and Studabaker is serving on the one that’s going through those records and putting information into a spreadsheet. Not only is assembling that data helpful to the septic ordinance rewrite committee, it’s also important to help the regional sewer board decide which areas need sewers.
The Bean Blossom-Woodland Lake-Little Fox Lake-Freeman Ridge area is only the initial area the Bean Blossom sewer project could serve because “as the health department provides us with more information, as we look at maps of population density … are there other areas that could feed wherever this plant ends up, where it would benefit the homeowners and benefit … economic development?” Studabaker said.
“We’re constantly looking … to develop a strategy of what areas do we try to offer service to … whether someone comes to us wanting service, or other evidence tells us we ought to be looking at taking service to those folks.
“We want to be able to help people that live there now and people that will live there later,” he said.
So far, the data coming out of the health department is showing that about 50 percent of Brown County homes either lack any records on when they had a septic system installed, or those systems are more than 25 years old, Studabaker said. However, only about 500 records have been studied of the 8,000-plus households in the county.
After about 25 years, even a well-maintained system will begin to need more care, he said. Septic gasses can build up in the concrete tank, which can cause it to fail or cave in. The pipes themselves might not fail, but the soil around them becomes dirty from years of filtering waste, he said.
“It’s just like a roof, just like a driveway, like any part of your house. It has a certain life expectancy to it, and you have to replace or repair it,” he said.
“Maintenance on this stuff, that’s important from a health point of view.”
As an environmental engineer, and a person who loves Brown County for its natural beauty, Studabaker wants to do what he can to prevent pollution from human waste.
At the October sewer board meeting he reported that stream sampling and testing is under way. Various tests over the past 15 years have shown high levels of E.coli bacteria in Bean Blossom Creek. Samples taken in 2004 registered at the highest level the health department’s equipment would go, at 2,400 parts per million, according to newspaper archives. One of the tests the sewer board is looking to do now would determine if the bacteria are coming from human waste or animal waste.
“I hear people telling me, “I grew up around here. I played in Bean Blossom Creek.’ You know what’s in it? ‘Nothing (they say).’
“Let me tell you about E.coli,” Studabaker said last week. “… You know that stuff that looks grayish at the bottom of the creek, and the kids run around and kick that because it looks cool when it swirls up? That’s E.coli. … Do the kids have any cuts on them? Did one of them push another one and get water up their nose or in their eyes? Let’s talk about life, and what the impact of this stuff actually has on each one of us. That’s my passion.”
What’s coming
Getting the Bean Blossom sewer project in line for funding sooner rather than later is what the regional board’s financial adviser, Steve Brock, has suggested.
For several months, the regional board has expressed interest in trying to partner with Helmsburg, which has its own separate sewer board and plant, because Helmsburg’s plant is aging and its customers’ sewer bills recently rose from a minimum of $45 to a minimum of $70 per month. It could make sense for Helmsburg and Bean Blossom to go into a project together since they’re only about 3 miles apart, but so far, no agreements have been reached.
Brock expressed concern at the September regional sewer board meeting that waiting to partner with Helmsburg might cause the Bean Blossom project to miss the next application deadline, and delays could cause the project cost to rise. He said he’d talked with one of funding agencies, the State Revolving Loan Fund, and the Bean Blossom project is a top priority for them. On the next funding cycle, it might not be.
Studabaker said the plan is still to apply for funding in 2019. As far as reaching any partnerships, “everything’s still on the table,” he said.
The regional sewer board’s job is to figure out methods of waste disposal all over Brown County that make the best sense for those areas.
“Oftentimes, ultimately these projects don’t end with the best technical decision as much as the best compromising decision that includes the technical, but also the personalities of the community, the people that have to live and work with it,” he said.
“The idea is, it’s a utility we’re building, just like a water utility is, an electric utility is, highway infrastructure is, the internet, all those utilities that make up the infrastructure of the county, and this is another one that’s just not gotten there, or got left behind because everybody did their own thing. And that works for awhile, but as we get more and more people and older and older systems, you’ve got to rethink it. We’re trying to get this utility in the toolbox of Brown County to help people.”
