Every flush at the Bill Monroe Memorial Music Park costs Ben and Rex Voils about 20 cents.

As they evaluate their plans for the landmark entertainment venue in Bean Blossom, conversations always come back to what they’re going to do about waste.

“Every time we come up with an idea or something we’d like to do, it all falls back and hinges on the sewer,” said Ben Voils.

“With 20,000 people there, that’s a lot of flushing going on,” he added.

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The Brown County Regional Sewer District is in the process of applying for a combination of grants and loans to build a sewer system in the Bean Blossom area which would replace more than 200 individual home and business septic systems. It’s a project that’s been in the works in some form or another for 20 years.

Last month, board member Clint Studabaker reported that so far, this board has gone the furthest any has in making it happen.

One of the reasons for building sewer infrastructure is to spur and support economic development.

For the Voils’ project — keeping the 67-year-old Bill Monroe Memorial Music Park operating and growing its events — sewer access is critical.

Ben Voils said they have at least three major construction projects coming in the next five to eight years at the park — the details of which he didn’t want to discuss right now — and “those are impossible without sewer.”

Like many businesses outside Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg, the Bill Monroe park had been operating on a septic system. Currently, the park has to pump out its tanks and haul the waste to Nashville’s treatment plant, as its system isn’t functioning as it should.

Building a stand-alone “package plant” to treat their own wastewater is their backup plan if, for some reason, sewers don’t come to Bean Blossom, Ben Voils said. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management doesn’t want to see a package plant be their solution right now because of the regional sewer option in the works, he said.

The state is allowing the park to be on pump-and-haul on a year-to-year basis, Voils said. As long as progress is being made to find a permanent waste disposal solution, he believes they’ll be allowed to continue doing that.

However, pump-and-haul is costing about $40,000 a year. If park attendance triples as he hopes it does, the cost of disposing of waste by that method will go up as well — and that is a big consideration when trying to make a business work.

How much a sewer bill will cost, Voils isn’t sure yet, because the funding to build the Bean Blossom plant and sewer lines hasn’t been worked out. Regardless, the Voils are banking on it being much less than their current situation.

“I think we’ll know in the next few months about their funding and whether or not they’re going to get it,” Voils said about the Bean Blossom sewer project. “It really will help us.”

About 25 percent of the population in the United States lives outside the reach of public sewer systems, according to the National Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association. Access varies by states and regions, with urban areas being more likely to have them.

In Brown County, the percentage of households not having sewer access is about 91.5 percent. There are about 8,400 households in Brown County and only about 700 have sewer access, according to data from the Brown County Regional Sewer District Board.

Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg have their own plants; the Brown County Regional Sewer District Board — which is in charge of finding wastewater treatment solutions for the rest of Brown County — is currently focused on developing a sewer system for the Bean Blossom area.

Seeing as how Bean Blossom sits at the junction of two state highways, parts of it have high-speed internet access and are fairly flat, and Brown County Water Utility is based there, members of the Brown County Redevelopment Commission believe it could be a good area for business and housing development — things they believe Brown County needs if it is to survive and thrive.

Why build sewers?

Many communities invest in water or sewer facilities to encourage economic growth because those projects tend to attract new business or help existing businesses expand, wrote Fagir Bagi, an economist with the United States Department of Agriculture.

In 2002, he published a study about the economic impact of water/sewer projects on 87 rural and urban communities which had been funded by the Economic Development Administration in 1989 and 1990. Fifty-four of the projects were in rural areas.

Among the 87 communities, on average, these projects saved 212 permanent jobs, created 402 new permanent jobs, and added $17 million to the local property tax base, Bagi wrote. Most often, these jobs were manufacturing. In addition, “indirect beneficiaries” like retail stores, service industries and restaurants, saw 31 permanent jobs saved, 172 new jobs created, and added $3 million to the local property tax base, he wrote.

“Small rural towns or urban areas with only one or two main industries are vulnerable to economic downturns in those industries or sectors,” Bagi wrote. “Water/sewer systems, by facilitating the growth of a wide mix of local businesses, can diversify the local economy, as evident in all 15 communities investigated in detail.

“Increasing and expanding business activity will at least maintain and likely increase values of local properties, including private homes. … Growing business activity and rising local incomes also add to the local property tax base, sales tax revenues, and even local/county income tax revenues,” the report continued.

Generating more tax revenue is something local government leaders have been talking about for many months. They’d rather raise that money through growing the population than by raising taxes, county council President Keith Baker said earlier this year.

State population projections show Brown County losing 9 percent of its population through 2050 if we do nothing different than we’re doing now, while surrounding counties are projected to gain people. A declining population means less tax revenue, and less tax revenue means fewer services for residents and/or a higher tax burden on those who remain.

Those possible impacts concern Jim Kemp, a financial adviser who serves as the volunteer president of the Brown County Redevelopment Commission. He’s well aware that 53.1 percent of Brown Countians live on $30,000 or less a year, and that paying more in taxes — or picking up a new monthly sewer bill, for that matter — is a burden they can’t easily shoulder.

Again, with no funding yet secured for the sewer project, estimated to cost $7.355 million, it isn’t certain how much sewer bills will be per customer, per month. But the target, according to the sewer board’s financial adviser, is $65 to $85.

In public meetings, residents have expressed worries about the cost and skepticism about the need for sewers.

Kemp would like to see some sort of aid program be put together to help people with waste disposal costs besides the federal programs already out there, as well as a waiver program that would exempt people with functioning septics from hooking up to sewer right away. What those processes could look like hasn’t been decided yet.

County residents and leaders need to get together and talk through the economic and environmental issues surrounding the future of Brown County in a cooperative, open-minded way, Kemp said. This county is interdependent — with everyone needing to rely on each other in some manner — whether we realize it yet or not, he said.

“We have those in the county that are living on the edge,” he said. “So if we’re going to have any sort of humanitarian mindset, then we’re going to have to put our heads together. This narrative of, ‘Just go out and get a job, it’s your own fault you don’t have any money,’ some of that may be true. Some may be in the same condition that they’ve grown up in. … Some of it may be fourth-quarter people that are hanging on for dear life and don’t want to leave Brown County, but there’s not a lot of opportunities for them to sell and downsize and stay in the county they fell in love with.”

Kemp also believes that all residents have a responsibility to take care of the land they own or live on.

“Once I’m gone, I don’t own anything anymore,” he said. “Some other family will take that property over, and I have a stewardship responsibility, and especially in a county that is the greenest spot in Indiana, to be a good steward with the real estate that I’ve been blessed to be able to have the use of for a limited period.”

Blight and pollution harm property values, and thus the county’s overall economic health, he said.

“At the very core of this issue is the environmental issue of both blight and wastewater treatment,” he said.

The Indiana Regional Sewer District Association, which the Brown County district is a part of, also makes that connection.

“Many people may not be aware that construction of sanitary sewers is quite costly,” the group’s brochure reads. “… The construction of sanitary sewers can also be unpopular and an economic hardship to low-income households.

“However, not constructing sanitary sewers will not solve the pollution problems and public health concerns presented by failing or inadequate septic systems. In many areas of Indiana, commercial and industrial development and redevelopment is often impossible without public sewers, which could lead to the loss of economic vitality for small communities whose residents have to travel farther from the community in which they live to their place of employment.”

How things work

Any economic development conversation — whether it’s building one new house or business, or a dozen of them — is going to involve the waste question, said Studabaker, a retired civil and environmental engineer.

“It’s first and foremost. … You’ve got to have water, you’ve got to have electric, it’s nice to have gas, but you’ve got to have sewer, something that’s going to get rid of all the waste I’m going to produce, whether that’s a housing development, a manufacturing business, a restaurant, an amusement facility like Bill Monroe. … So I would think that evaluation process and the lack of any centrally available sewer is a detriment, and whether it’s one of those you check off and can’t put a check mark next to and it kills the deal, that’s a developer question or a new homeowner question,” he said.

If sewer isn’t available, a developer or new homeowner will likely look at a septic system next and what demands are placed on them through the county’s septic ordinance. “I’d look at that question pretty strong,” Studabaker said.

The county’s septic ordinance is currently under rewrite after the community and the county commissioners rejected several proposed changes to it last year. Studabaker and other volunteers are part of the process along with the health department and health board. They’re also cataloging the scattered paper data about septic systems around the county, such as where they are and when they were installed.

“And the next question might be … what does the soil tell me about it? It says here (in the septic installation process) that I’ve got to have soil tests. … Now I’ve got an investment decision to make to decide whether I’m going to invest further,” Studabaker said. “And then I’d start asking the other questions: ‘Where’s the water line?’ and so on and so on down the line of infrastructure.

“… It has an influence, a big influence. It really does,” he said about sewer availability. “It might have no influence to somebody … who might just want to build another bedroom, but if it’s somebody who wants to invest in the community, in this area, then they’re going to raise the question. And what the sewer district is concerned about is how do we provide service to those folks, but first and foremost, how do we provide service to our existing residents and customers? And if you’re not doing it for one, you’re not doing it for the other.”

One of those existing residents and customers is Brownie’s. The restaurant, a Bean Blossom landmark, closed at the end of October because of waste disposal problems. Its five-year-old septic system had failed more than once, and rather than go on pump-and-haul or replace the system again, owner Ed Brown opted to close.

“If they bring the sewers in, I’ll hook on and open back up,” Brown told the newspaper the week before he closed.

In other places in the county, lots are so small or sloped that no state-approved system can be placed there. The Brown County health board has gotten involved in at least two such appeals from homeowners in the past year.

Soil conditions, like the terrain, vary throughout the county, wrote Phil LeBlanc, a retired soil scientist and sewer board member, in a guest column in last week’s paper. The most common kind is silt-loam, a mixture of sand, silt and clay. The higher the silt and clay content, the “heavier” the soil, and the longer it takes for wastewater from a septic tank to enter the drain field to be broken down by microorganisms.

When that soil system slows down, the soil can become “clogged,” and eventually, the septic system can fail, he wrote.

Instead of keeping wastewater to be treated on the site where it is created and released back into the ground, sewers take wastewater through a series of pipes to a central location where it is treated and eventually can discharge into a waterway.

There are no state regulations that prohibit businesses from utilizing a septic system, except for hospitals, said Mike Mettler with the Indiana State Department of Health.

However, it can be harder to operate a business without a sewer, according to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

“They are responsible for their own sanitary wastewater as well as any industrial process wastewaters they generate,” wrote spokesman Sarah Bonick in an email. Certain businesses, such as gas stations, may have “very limited options, as shop floor drains may be prohibited from discharging to an on-site septic system and certainly should not have a direct discharge, and they are still responsible for management of their own domestic wastewater.”

Other options?

Building a public sewer doesn’t always make financial or environmental sense, according to the National Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association.

Rural communities need to look at all the options before deciding whether or not sewers are right for them — studying the water and energy use, the terrain the transmission pipes have to cross, the staff needed to run the treatment plant and other factors, according to a paper on the NOWRA site called “Does your community need a ‘sewer’ system?”

Septic systems are one type of decentralized system. That’s a good technology if it’s done right, Studabaker said.

“Package plants” — a preengineered, custom treatment solution for a specific site, cluster of homes or business — are another type of decentralized system. A few months ago, a couple sewer board members went to Martinsville to look at a system like that which served a specific neighborhood. They’ve also attended wastewater “trade shows” to learn about options.

One tricky part about having multiple, small wastewater treatment sites around the county is that someone needs to maintain them and make sure they’re doing their job, Studabaker said.

A neighborhood or new business could put in their own such plant, but they’d also have to go through a multi-step permitting process through the state, he said. How to pay for it is another question.

There are also other wastewater options — known as TNI, technology new to Indiana — which the state hasn’t yet approved for wider use.

IDEM said last week that it “generally assumes there is a beneficial economy of scale that comes from having a sewer utility. … This type of community system is often not an option in rural and less populated areas. Homeowners in areas without a community wastewater treatment system are responsible for funding and maintaining their own on-site systems, as discharging systems are not allowed.

“In areas where the soil or lot size does not allow for a traditional or on-site septic system, their options are limited and they may be prohibited from building a home. Industries considering locating in an area without sanitary sewers may also have limited options.”

The Brown County Regional Sewer District board and its engineer have been studying and documenting Bean Blossom’s options for years, including the possibility of partnering with an existing treatment plant at Nashville or Helmsburg.

Looking at a map, bringing together the Bean Blossom-Freeman Ridge-Woodland Lake neighborhood in some fashion makes sense, Studabaker said.

“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “It’s more complicated than that. It involves each individual person and what their unique circumstances are and where they happen to be in a geographical sense. It has soils issues. It has community grouping issues. It has the hard engineering aspect, continued O&M (operating and maintenance) aspects, so on and so on, and that makes it seem difficult, and it is.

“… But, still, is there value in working together versus all as individuals?”