Two Brown County boards have begun talking about topics that they know will probably become hot ones: what to do about abandoned vehicles, and how to “preserve and protect our natural environment” in a county that is sensitive to edicts about personal property use.
The discussions started in two separate board meetings late last month, without either seemingly aware of the other’s discussion.
On April 23, after a room of residents had left a public hearing about an unrelated zoning request, the Brown County Area Plan Commission (APC) conducted a brief, initial conversation about abandoned vehicles on private property. It’s a conversation they plan to continue at their May 28 meeting.
Two days later, on April 25, the Brown County Redevelopment Commission (RDC) talked for more than an hour and a half about what its focus should be for the rest of the year. Much of that discussion was about “developing an effective approach to support our community members in providing a defined, legal process of disposal of all household items.”
To continue that conversation, the RDC wants to gather a coalition of people from other boards such as the Brown County Solid Waste Management District/Recycle Center, school board, board of health, Brown County Regional Sewer District, Brown County Area Plan Commission and Keep Brown County Beautiful.
The APC’s discussion about vehicles and the RDC’s discussion about cleaning up properties are separate so far, but the two issues could merge if this coalition comes together.
Why talk about all this now?
The APC has been picking one part of its 1960s-era zoning ordinance to update every few months. After learning about the few rules county officials have to go on now regarding abandoned vehicles, APC members agreed to make that the next topic of a possible zoning ordinance revision. It was next on a “short list” of topics which the APC came up with in 2016, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.
Across town two days later, RDC President Jim Kemp told fellow board members that he’d recently “sparred” with residents on social media about the condition of some properties around the county. Those conversations “allowed me to kind of have a better understanding of their perspective,” he said, including the belief that cluttered properties are tied to poverty. “I don’t see it as a poverty issue. There’s a disconnect with me. But that’s what’s true for them, and that’s fair,” he said.
He said his goal in starting conversations on social media was “to just get us as a community to simply acknowledge that we’ve got an issue.”
“So, how in the world can we move forward on it?” he asked.
Kemp said he wants to create a sense of urgency because he sees the county’s environment as being closely tied to its future, and he doesn’t believe the RDC can make progress on much else — such as increasing the availability of affordable housing — if the county doesn’t commit to taking care of the remarkable land it has.
Vehicle and ‘junk yard’ regulations
Brown County has little in the way of laws on the books to govern the storage of vehicles on private property.
“We have a definition for junkyard, but that brings in the commercial aspect and doesn’t address the widespread problem,” Ritzmann said by email last week.
APC members are aware that this can be a touchy issue.
“When does it cease to become an asset and then become ‘junk’?” asked member Russ Herndon at the brief discussion on April 23.
“That’s a tough one,” said APC attorney David Schilling. “That’s why, usually, it has to look pretty bad before you actually go in there and get it cleaned out.”
State law does address abandoned vehicles in a couple ways, Schilling explained by phone last week.
If a vehicle is parked in the public right-of-way — such as along a road — state law allows that vehicle to be tagged and towed if it is not moved within 72 hours, he said. You may notice police doing that fairly regularly along highways across the state.
For vehicles that are on private property, if an “obviously inoperable vehicle” — such as one on blocks or missing doors, wheels or an engine — is “visible from a public way” (a public road), “then that can be taken care of as well” by state law, Schilling said. Putting up a fence to shield the vehicles from view could be enough to make a vehicle collection legal under that rule.
Removing vehicles from private property does not happen very often, APC members said at the meeting.
APC member Jane Gore, who’s president of the Nashville Town Council, could think of one instance recently. Earlier this year, the council voted to have an inoperable vehicle towed because a resident was habitually parking one of his three vehicles in the right-of-way on a public street. He had said it was because he didn’t have space for all three in his driveway. The council also had given him the option of creating a new parking space for his third vehicle on his property.
Speaking during the APC’s meeting on April 23, Schilling mentioned that questions about vehicle collections had come up before. “I know in this county there was a person who loved to buy cars and purchased dozens and dozens and dozens of them, and they all worked. His yard looked like a car lot, but there’s nothing we could do about it because it wasn’t junk.”
In the county’s zoning ordinance, “abandoned vehicle” is not defined.
County ordinance does define “junk yard”: “a place, usually outdoors, where waste or discarded used property other than organic matter is accumulated and is or may be salvaged for re-use or resale.”
Junk yards are allowed on land zoned “forest reserve” or “industrial” if the owner applies for and receives a special exception.
One condition for receiving a “junk yard” exception is that the lot it’s on has to be at least 10 acres. Also, a junkyard must be at least 1,320 feet from a property zoned residential (R1 or R2) or lake residence (LR). The same requirement applies to the distance from a state highway, according to county zoning ordinance.
If vehicles are being kept on a property for the purpose of auto repair or painting, the property owner can ask for a “home occupation” permit with a special exception. Still, “no more than four licensed vehicles other than the owner’s own vehicles, and no unlicensed vehicles” can be stored on the property, according to county ordinance.
At a property where vehicles are not being kept for the purpose of a business, there is no requirement that those vehicles be plated, Schilling said. Only the “inoperable” part in state law applies in regards to them being seen from a public road.
If county leaders chose, they could make a rule that says that any vehicles on private property have to be on an “improved parking surface,” Schilling said — gravel or paved, something other than in the yard. “Parking vehicles like that, the problem is a lot of times they leak out gas and other stuff on the ground,” he said.
Vehicles are not specifically mentioned in Brown County’s dumping ordinance, passed in 2008. But it is a violation to discharge any non-food oils or chemicals onto the ground which pose a potential hazard to the environment, by state code and by county dumping ordinance.
“If I can’t find dripping water and gas, and the vehicle moves, I can’t do anything about it,” said John Kennard, Brown County Health Department environmental health supervisor, in a 2017 story.
Redevelopment and environment
In a separate meeting on April 25, Kemp told the redevelopment commission that he sees “salvage yards, blight and squalor” as three separate and distinct issues in Brown County.
Redevelopment commissions across the state are responsible for identifying and eliminating blight. RDC member Justin Schwenk read a definition of blight at the meeting — “visible trash and refuse that is a public nuisance” — but the board did not adopt that or any other wording as its definition at that time.
One of the board’s challenges will be to clearly define “salvage yards,” “blight” and “squalor” and figure out how to measure them, Kemp said.
Kemp said that what he didn’t realize until a couple weeks ago, after reading about trash disposal issues in the newspaper, is that Brown Countians cannot very easily load up their old couches or box springs or whatever might be piling up in their garages or yards and take them to a landfill, because the landfills in Monroe and Bartholomew counties don’t accept out-of-county trash.
That could be contributing to the number of furniture pieces and tires that are illegally dumped along county roads.
Some people might be able to rent a Dumpster, but not everyone has that ability.
This year, for the first time, the Brown County Recycle Center is putting Dumpsters at two places in the county for anyone to use on June 14 and 15 or until they are full.
“Until we address that issue, I don’t think it’s fair to begin to look at code enforcement, because those are two separate issues,” Kemp said. “If we can’t, as a county, develop a program or something that helps support the community in a way that they can get rid of their stuff, then how, on the other hand, can you begin to look at code enforcement? Because if you don’t have a process in place to do it legally, how are you going to charge them on the illegal stuff?”
For the August presentation it is planning at the Brown County Playhouse, the RDC is trying to get in touch with experts from other communities who can come talk about how they dealt with these sort of issues.
As far as creating local programs, policies and procedures, the RDC voted unanimously last month to “take the lead on bringing together local entities (mentioned above) to start the discussion to protect and preserve our natural environment.”
If county leaders and residents fail to make protecting the environment a priority, Kemp sees a domino effect: People and businesses won’t want to move or stay here; tax rates will have to rise to cover the cost of government as fewer taxpayers are left to pay into it; and more families will leave, hurting the school system, which is one of the county’s major employers.
To stop school enrollment from declining now, Kemp believes more affordable housing options need to become available; “but there’s no way we’re about to improve our housing inventory unless we have the infrastructure, and the infrastructure is the environment,” he said. “And under some areas of the county, with the level of blight, that’s an issue. Nobody’s going to want to live in this county.”
Getting community support
An eventual goal of the RDC-led coalition would be to write a proposal on how local government could help people legally dispose of any type of household item, Kemp said, as well as policies and procedures to support it and estimates on what this would all cost. Those documents would then be taken before the council and commissioners.
Kemp clarified that when and if a coalition comes together, “I’m not saying that the RDC is going to come in here and tell these other departments what to do … but what I am saying we can do is to facilitate this conversation.”
One county commissioner, Jerry Pittman, sits on the RDC. He was silent through most of the discussion April 25, but shared his thoughts near the end.
Pittman, a county native, said he’s driven every road in Brown County and “over the years, there are areas I’ve been ashamed of and I hoped the tourists didn’t see. This is not a new thing.”
It’s also not something that only Brown County is dealing with, Kemp added.
Pittman said he thinks the RDC is on the right track by getting interested entities together. “The problem you’re going to face is, you’re going to have to figure out a way to avoid having anyone coming in here thinking we’re telling people what to do. … Figure out a way to communicate with the general public of what we want to accomplish and why without pointing fingers.
“Potentially, there is a lot of stuff laying there because people don’t have a place to take it or cannot afford to get rid of it. On the flip side, if you’re going to create some way to get rid of it, that’s going to cost money, lots of money. That’s the council’s job (to figure out how to pay for it). … And then, if properties end up simply abandoned, there’s going to be stuff left there and nobody to be held responsible,” he said.
RDC member Jim Schultz, who also serves on the Keep Brown County Beautiful volunteer group, said a goal of this RDC-led coalition has to be “how do we develop these policies without raising the ire of the people who are dead set on … ‘this is a takeover by the wealthy’? And that’s certainly an opinion right now, and has been for a very long time.
“People want to defend these behaviors, when, in actuality, these behaviors are just really bad habits,” Schultz said.
“The most significant thing is to get all citizens to buy in,” he later added, “and you’re not going to do it without developing an awareness campaign.”
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Brown County Area Plan Commission including a work session after the regular meeting about abandoned vehicles: 6 p.m. Tuesday, May 28, County Office Building, Locust Lane in Nashville
Brown County Redevelopment Commission meeting including discussion about preserving and protecting the local environment: 6 p.m. Thursday, May 23 at the Brown County Junior High School Makerspace (former school library)
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