Three Brown County communities are in some stage of developing or rethinking sanitary sewers. Here are some updates about where those projects and discussions stand.
HELMSBURG
About 50 people crammed into a lower-level meeting room at the library last week to hear what the Helmsburg Regional Sewer District board was going to do about possibly lowering their bills.
In April, the board voted to change sewer bills from a rate that was based on water use to a flat rate of $92.50 per month. For some users, this was a break; for others, it was a rate hike.
Minimum-use sewer bills rose to $70 per month starting in the spring of 2018. Before that, they were $45, and that base rate hadn’t changed since 2001.
The rate changes were made to help keep the 64-member utility afloat. As of the June 17 meeting, the sewer district had $304.58 in the bank.
Many people at the meeting were Helmsburg sewer customers, but several were not. Non-customers included two members of the Brown County Council, two county commissioners, the president of the Brown County Redevelopment Commission, two members of the Brown County Regional Sewer District board, and several attorneys, two of whom were representing the county.
Many of them were there to hear whether or not the board would support an offer to study combining sewer service in Bean Blossom and Helmsburg. Ten Helmsburg sewer customers had signed a petition in favor of it.
That partnership could take many forms, said Clint Studabaker, a member of the Brown County Regional Sewer District board which is working to bring sewer service to Bean Blossom. Maybe some Bean Blossom sewage would go to Helmsburg, or maybe Helmsburg sewage could go to the new plant being designed near Bean Blossom, or maybe it wouldn’t make sense to combine because of the cost of doing so, Studabaker said. That’s what the study would show, he said. It also would look at the financial situation of the Helmsburg sewer district.
The idea behind combining in some way is that with more customers, costs could be spread out over more people, keeping everyone’s bills lower. The regional board is hoping to get Bean Blossom’s sewer rates to $65 to $70 a month, he said. That is not yet guaranteed.
The study would be covered by a $30,000 grant which the regional sewer likely will get if the Helmsburg sewer board supports it. It would cost Helmsburg nothing, said attorney Jim Roberts. It would give the Helmsburg sewer board the “hard numbers” it had been seeking from the regional sewer board for several months, as well as information about the Helmsburg plant’s current condition.
Roberts was there representing Helmsburg resident Bill Austin. Austin, the husband of sewer board member Jenny Austin, had proposed a sewer partnership between Bean Blossom and Helmsburg at the April sewer board meeting. He was not the first to bring up that idea; discussions have been happening off and on since Helmburg sewers were installed in the 1990s.
Helmsburg sewer board President Denise Broussard said she did not want to sign a letter of support for the grant-funded study until she could have the board’s attorney, John Young, look over the grant application and other specifics.
Young, of Franklin, had been at the meeting for about an hour and a half, but left during the discussion about the grant because of flooding concerns at home. He had told board members they could “make any decision you want to tonight” and that it seemed like there was no risk for the district to agree to the study, which he said sounded like a “win-win.” He’d had some concerns in the past about the State Revolving Loan Fund, which would fund the grant for the study, but said that the regional sewer board seemed to have taken those points into consideration.
Angry comments erupted from a few customers in the audience who were trying to persuade the board to vote to support the study, including Helmsburg resident Dorothy Scott and resident Allison O’Shea, who is also director of community relations for the Helmsburg Community Development Corporation volunteer group.
Scott called board members “bullheaded and stubborn.” “You could help us all if you listen,” she said.
Broussard asked for more time — possibly until the next regular meeting in July — to review the actual grant application. Audience members and board member Jenny Austin wanted to know why they couldn’t meet to discuss it sooner, and board member Harrietta Weddle said she didn’t have time, as she had made other plans.
“If you can’t have another meeting in two weeks, you ought to step down,” O’Shea told Weddle.
Other comments were traded between a corner full of sewer customers and O’Shea about people — board members and customers — not showing up at past board meetings.
When asked about the importance of agreeing to the study now, Studabaker said that if they get a letter of support from the Helmsburg sewer board soon, and if the study shows that combining forces would be a good idea for all parties, they will try to redesign the project to account for that — but if the study isn’t done in time, it won’t slow down the Bean Blossom project. The Bean Blossom project is set to go into the next cycle of grant funding, and if all goes well, construction on the new sewer plant would start in the spring of 2020, Studabaker said.
Austin made a motion for the board to write a letter of support for the grant-funded study, but Broussard altered it to propose that they have a meeting to talk about it “toward the end of the month if possible, when John’s available.”
Austin agreed to go along with that if the meeting could be scheduled before the end of June. The motion passed 3-0. As of press time, no date had been set for that meeting.
Roberts — who was in the Helmsburg High School Class of 1960 before countywide high school consolidation happened and Helmsburg High School closed — said that a fear of losing Helmsburg’s “identity” might be a concern for some people when considering partnering with other communities.
“Time marches on,” he told the room. “Growth is inevitable, and this is a wise step,” he said about the sewer partnership study.
About a dozen customers of the Helmsburg sewer district also attended the Brown County Commissioners meeting on June 19 in an attempt to get support. The commissioners appoint Helmsburg sewer board members.
Jenny Austin said that her concern is that high sewer bills are going to deter people from living in Helmsburg, and that’s the opposite of what the Helmsburg Community Development Corporation is trying to do. Residents made comments in the June 19 meeting and in past Helmsburg sewer board meetings about whether or not they could afford to stay there.
“The commissioners are supportive of helping them,” commissioner Jerry Pittman told the Helmsburg residents at the June 19 meeting, “but we think the best way to do that probably is consolidation with Brown County (Regional Sewer District) and Bean Blossom folks up there, so we’re working towards that ultimate goal for the best interest of the people who have to pay those $92.50 bills.”
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Two of the three members of the Helmsburg Sewer District board voted last week to make their board elected rather than appointed.
Denise Broussard and Harrietta Weddle voted for it, while Jenny Austin voted against.
Currently, the Brown County Commissioners appoint all three members of the Helmsburg Sewer District board. The member most recently appointed was Austin.
Broussard had asked the board’s attorney, John Young, to draft a resolution saying that the board would be changing to one that is elected by “the voters in the district.”
Broussard said that the reason for the change is because there had been delays in the past with the commissioners choosing replacement board members when an opening occurred. The resolution says that “in order to provide for more efficient operations of the district and to provide the ratepayers of the district with better representation on the district board … board members should be elected.”
County commissioner Jerry Pittman said he couldn’t recall a delay of more than “maybe a couple months” in filling a vacancy. Some of the challenges in appointing anyone to that board is that “all the people in Helmsburg are related” and that it’s been tough to find people that are “qualified” and “fair-minded,” he said.
Young disputed the notion that relatives couldn’t serve on the board together. Lauren Box, an attorney with the county’s legal firm, Barnes and Thornburg, said that the firm hadn’t been asked to give an opinion on that matter, but she was “not saying that wouldn’t be” their position. County commissioner Diana Biddle mentioned that the county has a policy against nepotism, or giving jobs or positions to family members.
Pittman said the county commissioners would “vigorously oppose any attempt to change this board from appointment by the commissioners to a ratepayer-elected board.”
“We do not believe you’d be successful in doing that,” Pittman said. “But we can’t stop you from trying.”
County Attorney Jake German, also from Barnes and Thornburg, handed the board a letter stating the same and pledged to “plead our case against the change” before the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, which also will have a say since it was involved in creating the board in the first place.
Local attorney James T. Roberts, who was there representing Austin, also opposed the change.
Since the resolution passed with “yes” votes from Broussard and Weddle, it will now be scheduled for a hearing before IDEM, Young said. He didn’t know right away when that would be.
Austin said that it seemed like this resolution “came out of the blue sky,” but Weddle said it hadn’t; she and former sewer board member Sharon Rivenbark had talked about it many years ago before Broussard or Austin were on the board.
Bill Austin, Jenny Austin’s husband, challenged the board to start over right now and pick new members in an “immediate election,” since a lot of ratepayers were at the meeting anyway. That suggestion didn’t go anywhere.
[sc:pullout-text-end]LAKE LEMON
Property owners in one part of the county are taking it upon themselves to study what wastewater solutions are right for their neighborhood.
About 80 Lake Lemon property owners are talking about banding together to investigate their options, something other than traditional, individual septic systems.
Resident Russ Herndon announced the effort at the May 14 Brown County Regional Sewer District board meeting. In addition to serving on the Brown County Area Plan Commission, Herndon also has been active in discussion on the county’s septic ordinance.
His area of about 80 to 100 homes “doesn’t have a good situation for our septic,” he said. Some of the lots are small and/or sloped with a high water table, limiting the kinds of septic systems that work effectively there. In addition to affecting the lake, the limitations of septic systems also can affect the extent of renovations that can be done on homes.
Seeing as how Lake Lemon is a backup water supply for Bloomington, Bloomington is interested in possibly helping with a solution, Herndon said.
Herndon attended the WWETT “international septic show” in Indianapolis in February to learn about different types of systems. He mentioned a system that would allow property owners to keep using septics, but it would divert the wastewater in a different way for a cluster of homes. Another system would grind up the waste and push it to a treatment plant.
One place Herndon mentioned for a “sewage plant of some type” is Little Africa, a peninsula and wildlife viewing area on the lakeshore which Bloomington owns. The city has talked to them about that possibility, Herndon said.
Brown County Regional Sewer District board member Clint Studabaker encouraged Herndon and the other homeowners to keep investigating and report back, and maybe the regional board can eventually help in some way.
Lake Lemon is not part of the project that the Brown County Regional Sewer District board is currently working on, which is providing sewer to the Bean Blossom area.
BEAN BLOSSOM
The Brown County Regional Sewer District Board has set a construction timeline goal for the new Bean Blossom sewer plant: this coming spring.
Behind-the-scenes work is continuing on the plan to bring sewer to Bean Blossom, a project that has been in the works in some form or another for about 20 years.
Engineer Gary Ladd is collecting information by mail from property owners in the path of the sewer so that he can design the system that will be used on each property, as well as the treatment plant that will serve them all. As of June 11, he had heard back from 122 of the 245 property owners.
At the June 11 meeting, the sewer board heard an hourlong presentation on how two different types of sewage disposal methods work and their pros and cons: the grinder pump and the step system. Which kind of system will be used at which property will depend on the property’s characteristics. It’s likely that a mix of both systems will be used throughout the Bean Blossom sewer service area, board members said.
The board has not made public whether or not it has acquired land for the treatment plant to be built on, nor where it will go, but it met in closed session on June 5 to discuss that subject.
Board members are pretty confident that they will receive a $30,000 grant to study the feasibility of combining forces in some way with the Helmsburg Regional Sewer District — if the Helmsburg sewer board will agree to it. The State Revolving Loan Fund would pay for that study. Last week, the Helmsburg sewer board voted to delay a decision until they could see the grant application and get their lawyer’s OK.
The Brown County Regional Sewer board has another grant application in with the Lilly Endowment-funded Regional Opportunities Initiative, for $78,000 to $108,000, to do a comprehensive assessment of sewer and septic service in other areas of the county. “I think we stand a reasonable chance of hearing in a couple-three weeks that we’ll be awarded that grant,” said board member Clint Studabaker.
The regional sewer board is tasked with studying solutions to wastewater disposal in all areas of Brown County except those that are already in another sewer district. Only Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg have sewer service now.
The Bean Blossom plant is planned to serve 245 customers in the “greater Bean Blossom” area, which includes State Road 135 North and its offshoots in Bean Blossom, 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.
Once sewer is installed, property owners would be required to fill and crush their individual septic systems.
The Bean Blossom plant, lines and individual systems were estimated to cost $7.355 million, but Ladd said at the June 11 meeting that that figure is likely to change. The work is to be funded through a mix of state and federal grants and loans.
The regional sewer board is planning for its project to be considered during the next funding cycle with the State Revolving Loan Fund. The application is already in, but parts of it are undergoing some revisions, such as the engineering report. It will need to close on any loans by the end of this year, Ladd said.
Once the funding is in place, the sewer board will have a firmer idea of how much monthly sewer bills will be for customers. The target rate is $65 to $70 per month.
Last year, the Brown County Council gave the sewer board $270,000 to kickstart the Bean Blossom sewer project. As of the June 11 meeting, the board had $133,689.73 of that left, or about half of the original total. The other half has been spent on system design, preparations to get easements from property owners, legal support, financial advice, and “administration” expenses such as sewer association dues and office supplies. Sewer board members do not get paid.
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Brown County Regional Sewer District Board: 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 9 at the Fruitdale fire station on State Road 135 North, Bean Blossom
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