In the spring, Helmsburg Regional Sewer District customers learned that their monthly minimum sewer bills were going up from $45 to $70 a month because Brown County Water Utility was raising its bill-handling rates. The water company also does the billing for the Helmsburg and Gnaw Bone regional sewer districts.
For some of Helmsburg’s 65 sewer customers, that bigger bill, on top of their water bill, was a challenge.
For members of the Helmsburg Community Development Corporation who are working to boost home ownership and business in Helmsburg, it was one more possible detriment to growth.
In August, about 20 members of the Helmsburg Community Development Corp. voted unanimously to explore a partnership with the Brown County Regional Sewer District. Their goals were offering the lowest possible sewer bill for all customers, expanding sewer access and increasing capacity, and improving the function of the current Helmsburg sewer system.
The Helmsburg Community Development Corp. is a separate entity from the Helmsburg Regional Sewer District board.
At the Helmsburg sewer board’s Oct. 15 meeting, newly elected Chairman Denise Broussard said the sewer board has expressed interest in partnering with the Brown County Regional Sewer District.
The way they would like to do that is to take on the Bean Blossom area as a sewer customer at the Helmsburg plant.
RELATED: Progress being made toward Bean Blossom sewer project
Board members couldn’t say for sure how much more wastewater the Helmsburg plant could take on, but said they could find out by the November meeting.
In 2014, it was reported that the plant was running at 12 percent capacity with 64 customers; as of last month, it had 65 customers.
Broussard estimated that the estimated 275 users in the regional board’s current sewer plan — including the 135 North Bean Blossom area, Woodland Lake, Little Fox Lake and Freeman Ridge — would be too many for the current Helmsburg plant to handle.
“They’re talking out at Woodland Lake. … We’re talking Bean Blossom, the trailer park, Bill Monroe, Brownie’s, that small area. And I think, if I talked with Robin (Willey, plant operator) right, we could take those on without expanding ours. Now. if we take on more, we may have to expand our plant,” she said.
The Helmsburg Regional Sewer District lost its largest customer in 2011 when the For Bare Feet sock factory burned and the company moved to Martinsville, taking 151 jobs with it. The sewer district lost $1,200 to $1,500 per month in income, said longtime board member Harrietta Weddle.
“We would love to have Bean Blossom as a customer. I mean, that would help Bean Blossom out tremendously,” Broussard said. “But we can only take on so much. We’re not going to take on a debt and put Helmsburg in debt to take on more customers right now.”
At the October Helmsburg sewer board meeting, the board signed bank documents to extend a $35,000 line of credit for six months. That money is for doing maintenance on the Helmsburg sewer plant.
“People keep saying it’s a temporary plant, but not really,” Broussard said. “We’re just going to have to update it, just like a house, when you get a new roof and everything else.”
The sewer board also discussed dropping Brown County Water Utility as its billing agent and doing bills in-house. Broussard said that would require the Helmsburg sewer district to buy a computer, a printer, a billing program and find office space. She was checking into whether or not it would be financially feasible at all to make those changes.
Even if the Helmsburg sewer district did drop Brown County Water Utility as its billing agent, that doesn’t mean sewer bills would go down, because the district would have to cover the costs of a sewer office as well, she said.
“Have you ever seen a utility (rate) go down? I don’t see that that would happen if we would start doing our own billing. It would be that maybe in the future it wouldn’t go up as high because it’ll be in-house, and it’s going to be more easy for our customers to get to us and access us and pay their bills, and for questions,” she said.
However, getting more customers might reduce the sewer rates, depending on how many they get and where they are, said Weddle and board attorney John Young.
“When For Bare Feet was here, for example, there was so much usage. … That’s one of the reasons the district was able to keep its rates low,” Young said.
In June, the Brown County Redevelopment Commission voted to support a Bean Blossom-Helmsburg 2028 Revitalization Project. The concept revolves around expanding sewer access and building different types of housing in that region, so that new residents and existing ones have options to live in Brown County in different stages of their lives.
The Helmsburg board has no money to pay to extend sewer lines — which are in a limited area now, mostly in the core of Helmsburg — not even to the larger Helmsburg economic development area, where the community development corporation would like to see growth, such as new housing.
The Helmsburg sewer board hasn’t heard from anybody in several years who wanted to hook onto the sewer, Broussard said, so they didn’t know how much that would cost, and it would vary based on where the property was. If someone was interested in getting sewer service from Helmsburg, she advised them to contact the board and they’d get the plant operator to come up with an estimate. Figuring out how to pay for it would be up to the customer, she said.
Some Helmsburg residents at the sewer meeting groused about the way the sewers were originally put in, saying that if the engineer would have forced people onto it when there was no hook-up fee instead of going around them when they resisted, it wouldn’t be costing them so much now with limited customers.
“All a sewage district can rely on is rate payers. There’s no way you can tax,” Young said. “… Your credit is only as good as the customers you have.”
Combine?
At a couple public meetings this fall, Brown County Redevelopment Commission President Jim Kemp suggested another idea: rolling the Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg regional sewer districts into the Brown County Regional Sewage District.
The existing sewer plants in Helmsburg and Gnaw Bone would remain, but instead of having three separate districts in the county governing sewers in unincorporated areas, they would be governed by this one board.
The current five-member board for the Brown County regional district could expand to however many members it needed to allow representation from Helmsburg and Gnaw Bone, Kemp said.
Bills and administration could be done out of one office to serve anyone who’s on sewer, he said. Right now, that’s not a large portion of the county, but eventually, other areas could receive service after the Bean Blossom project is complete.
The Town of Nashville operates and governs its own wastewater treatment system separate from the three regional boards.
Sewer is “absolutely critical to the economic success of our county,” Kemp said.
“It deserves the respect of being treated like an actual wastewater treatment utility company. … But instead, that’s not what we have. We have three separate boards, three separate regional sewers all being operated by volunteers. … The best thing for us as a county is to have one wastewater treatment utility company that owns multiple wastewater treatment plants,” he told the audience at the October Brown County Redevelopment Commission meeting.
“That will allow us to operate on an economy of scale. The overarching goal … is to bring rates down as low as we possibly can for the customer. That’s the challenge we face currently,” he said.
If that were to happen, Kemp said he would not support forcing people who currently have working septic systems to hook onto sewer right away. If people had failed septics and needed to hook onto sewer, he said he’d like to see the wastewater treatment utility and county develop some sort of financial support system, like offering grants to help cover the cost for low-income people.
The other two redevelopment commission members at the meeting, Jim Schultz and Justin Schwenk, agreed with the ideas of consolidating the three sewer boards and helping expand community access to sewers. Member Jerry Pittman, who’s also a county commissioner and a Gnaw Bone-area resident, didn’t attend that part of the meeting.
Former redevelopment commission member Tim Clark pointed out that when he was on the commission last year, the group came to a related conclusion: That Bean Blossom and Helmsburg together are a region for economic growth opportunity, so it would make sense to think of them as such.
But, he added, he’d like to see data that shows where and if there are problems with septic systems before any property owners are told they have to go on sewer. The board is working on gathering that data in cooperation with the health department, said regional sewer board member Clint Studabaker.
When asked the following week how the Helmsburg sewer board felt about consolidating into the Brown County sewage district, Broussard said she wasn’t sure about the specifics of the proposal.
“Helmsburg sewer is owned by the residents of Helmsburg, so we can’t be shut down,” she said. “… At this time, we don’t want — I mean, we’re running fine.”
Newly appointed Helmsburg sewer board member Jenny Austin said she understood the proposal was that sewer plants wouldn’t shut down, but that they’d be centrally managed.
“We need to take care of Helmsburg and keep us afloat, and do what’s best for our customers,” Broussard said.
