After reading written public comments on the latest draft of the Brown County septic ordinance, the committee that’s been rewriting it is making more changes.

The ordinance was to be on the agenda of the Sept. 17 Brown County Board of Health meeting, but committee members decided Sept. 6 to pull it back after reading detailed comments from six county residents.

The septic ordinance affects the vast majority of Brown County homes, as only Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg have public sanitary sewers.

The committee’s working draft had been posted on the health department’s website along with a way for the public to give feedback. The rewrite committee reviewed comments Sept. 6.

These are the parts of the ordinance that committee members discussed at length, or were going to work on more before the group’s next meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 1.

Pump-and-haul

“Pump-and-haul” is the practice of using a septic tank to hold waste and then periodically having a licensed septic company come and pump it out.

Pump-and-haul is not specifically mentioned in the new draft ordinance, but that’s because state code already allows it, committee members said. However, they didn’t all agree on when and how its use would be allowed, or even in what instances the state code allowed it.

The local health department has granted pump-and-haul permits for five homes so far this season. Four were for new-construction homes that didn’t have a septic system yet; one was a home that had septic system problems, said inspector Ernie Reed.

Holders of a permit can renew them annually if they can show they’ve complied with the terms of getting one, such as showing receipts from when their system was pumped. However, sometimes those people “slip through the cracks” and their compliance history isn’t considered, he said.

“Any way we go about it scares me,” Reed said.

It was not clear to residents if the county was proposing that pump-and-haul could even happen at all, since it was not mentioned in the local ordinance.

Some commenters also asked that pump-and-haul be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Committee member Clint Studabaker agreed that more clarification was needed in the local ordinance. He also said that the procedure needs to be written to help keep track of it.

“I think we’re going beyond the state code in this,” he said about the use of pump-and-haul.

“The perception is we’re not, we’re more restrictive than state code, when in fact we’re not. We’re allowing this to be a usable means, but one that’s controlled by permit.”

The state’s rules for septics, known as Rule 410, say that “a temporary sewage holding tank is an alternative method of sewage disposal subject to the written approval of the department, except as provided in subsection F.”

Subsection F says that “a temporary sewage holding tank may be approved by the local health department as a temporary storage facility where occupancy of the home must continue while and existing residential on-site sewage system is being replaced or renovated; or until soil conditions permit the installation” of a septic field.

State code also says that “A temporary sewage holding tank shall not be used as a primary means of residential sewage except: (1) where necessary to prevent continued discharge of sewage from a failed residential on-site sewage system; (2) when soil conditions exist that preclude the prompt construction of a soil absorption system on a site that has already received a construction permit; or (3) where the holding tank is operated by a conservancy district, sewer district, private utility or municipality as part of its sewage disposal plan for not more than one year while connection to sanitary sewer is being secured. This one-year time frame may be extended upon documentation of satisfactory operation of the holding tank.”

The committee also went back and forth on whether parts of state code should be included in the local ordinance for clarification, or whether they should be taken out so that the local ordinance wasn’t redundant to the state.

Committee member Kara Hammes volunteered to go back through the whole draft and mark where state code was quoted so that the group can decide whether those parts need to stay in or not.

Type of tanks

The proposed ordinance rewrite says that “for new residential construction, major repairs, and replacements, all tanks must be a minimum of 1,250 gallon seamless poly tanks with risers, locking lids, and alarms.”

Reed said that several septic contractors were pushing back on this change. Of the 10 contractors who regularly work in Brown County, six of them had a problem with this new rule because they like working with concrete tanks and have more experience with that technology.

Environmental health specialist Supervisor John Kennard maintained that poly tanks are better than concrete because one-piece poly tanks “dramatically reduce the chance of infiltration or failure.”

Reed, a former septic installer, said that the tricky thing about poly tanks is that they have to be properly installed to work the way they’re designed. If that’s done poorly, like trying to backfill around the tank with rocky soil instead of sand, the tank could get punctured.

A pro for poly tanks is that they’re so light, a contractor could load one in his pickup truck and offload it by himself at a job site, Reed said. A con is that they cost about $200 more than a concrete tank, and the installation might cost a little more because of the backfill sand.

Reed also said that the two-compartment tank they’re talking about results in cleaner effluent filtering out into the soil.

Kennard said he knows of about two to three years of data on how well poly tanks hold up. Studabaker said that’s not a long data set. He suggested that maybe poly tanks be phased in over time, especially since most of the installers in this county have better knowledge of how to install concrete tanks.

No other county mandates poly tanks, but others are considering it, Kennard said.

Studabaker suggested that maybe the county’s ordinance should follow the state here, but he also thought more discussion should happen with the local installers at their January meeting.

System sizing

Hammes asked why the county didn’t allow a smaller septic system size than for a two-bedroom home. Recently county boards voted to allow a small “accessory dwelling” to share a parcel with a home.

Kennard said that although septic tanks are made much smaller than a two-bedroom size, he believes that it toes the line of safety for someone to install the smallest system they can get. What if a person living in that one-bedroom dwelling decides to allow someone else to live with them, or what if they have kids and continue to live there, he asked.

“If we had good soils and they weren’t all clay, I would be more inclined,” he said. “We already deal with a substantial amount of failures.”

Hammes said that since the county also now allows homes to be built on smaller parcels than it used to, not allowing a smaller septic system could create an impediment to someone building on that parcel at all.

“That’s an excellent reason to really investigate the expansion of sewer systems,” Kennard said.

Hammes said it’s not likely that sewers will ever reach everywhere in the county.

The committee did not come to a consensus on this topic.

Modifications

The latest draft of this ordinance includes a section on “landscape modifications”: a definition of what those are, and when a homeowner would need to get their system located prior to doing any of them.

Committee member Brad Williamson said he thought that section needed work. Studabaker said it already had been worked on and he believed the section needed to stay in.

Studabaker has been studying records of septics installed in the county, and he said that about 40 percent of all the homes his group had looked at had no septic records on file at all. That means people might have no idea where their septic system is and might build something over it without knowing.

“If you do have an operable system, you’ll find that out” through this process, he said. “If you don’t, you do that first” before putting on a home addition or doing some other project, he said.

Written SOPs

More than one public commenter mentioned a need to have written standard operating procedures for the health department.

The plan is to have a separate SOP document to complement this ordinance.

Reed and Kennard told the committee that writing those SOPs was going to take a lot of time, and they weren’t sure if they should do that now if the ordinance was going to get changed again.

Committee member Thomi Elmore said they were making it harder that it is; they just need to write down the procedures that they already use.

Studabaker held up a draft document that he said was “90 percent there.”

Meshing rules

One commenter had flagged a part in the draft that says that this ordinance would supersede any other ordinances if there were any direct conflicts.

Reed said one example of why this clause is needed is if the zoning ordinance says a person can build a building somewhere, but he finds that the septic field would be right under that building, he needs to be able to override the zoning rule.

Studabaker volunteered to work with planning and zoning to make sure their ordinances and the septic ordinance mesh.

What’s next?

The committee will meet at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 1 at the County Office Building to talk about possible changes and figure out if the draft is ready to pass up to the health board for review yet. The earliest time the health board could talk about it is Tuesday, Nov. 12, as that board does not meet in October.

Whatever draft the committee passes to the health board will be posted on the health department’s website, browncountyhealthdept.org. That’s also where the current ordinance, in place since 1997, can be read.

After the health board approves it, it will go to the county commissioners for more review and public comment.