Members of the Helmsburg Community Development Corporation are continuing to push the county commissioners to make changes to the appointees they placed on the Helmsburg Regional Sewer District board.
HCD member Jenny Austin — who’s also on the sewer board herself — passed a petition to the commissioners at their Oct. 23 meeting. She said it contained the names of 45 people representing 32 properties in the Helmsburg sewer district. The district has about 63 customers total.
Petition-signers were asking for the county commissioners to remove Denise Broussard and Harrietta Weddle from the sewer board.
The petition mentions the fact that Helmsburg sewer customers are paying $92.50 per month for sewer service, and alleges that Broussard and Weddle are “actively trying to block, or to complicate enough to stop, any improvement possibilities for HRSD.”
Since the petition started circulating over the summer, Weddle and Broussard did agree to jointly enter into a study with the Brown County Regional Sewer District to find facts related to each sewer district’s resources. That study, being conducted by an outside agency, is due back around the end of the year.
Broussard and Weddle also voted over the summer to change the structure of the sewer board from an appointed board to an elected board. The county commissioners’ attorney had warned the board that the county would fight that change. Austin wanted an update from the commissioners about that situation. Commissioner Diana Biddle said she would check on it.
“We’ve come before you several times, and I feel like the ball is in your court to make any changes you feel are necessary,” Austin said.
Biddle said the commissioners “would have a discussion with our attorney as to what’s the best way to move forward for us.”
The county attorney was not present for this discussion. Biddle said she believed that there was a process in state code for how to remove board members. Attorney Adam Steuerwald, a representative from the county’s law firm, Barnes and Thornburg, walked in at about that time and said that “it depends on the board,” but he did not elaborate on what the process would be for this kind of board.
John Kennard, environmental health supervisor for the Brown County Health Department, warned the commissioners that they were “pretty close to operating a sewer plant,” saying that if the sewer board can’t make ends meet, the responsibility for it would fall back on county government.
“Yeah, they’re not very solvent,” Biddle answered.
An audit released in February 2019 for the period of Jan. 1, 2013 to Dec. 31, 2017, showed that the board was paying out more money than it was taking in four out of the five years. It ended 2017 with a positive balance of $9,024. Customers’ minimum sewer bills went from $45 to $70 in the spring of 2018, then to $92.50 about a year later.
Mike Leggins, president of the Brown County Regional Sewer District Board, reminded the commissioners that the county sewer board had tried for years to forge a partnership of some sort with the Helmsburg sewer board, but never got to any agreement. He still believes that having more customers in a sewer district will help that district in the long run because it could spread costs over a larger group of people.
The BCRSD does not have a wastewater treatment plant yet for its planned sewer project in Bean Blossom. It also doesn’t have any land to put a plant on, after Brown County Parks and Recreation backed out of a plan to put the plant on parks-owned land off State Road 135 North at the base of Bean Blossom Hill.
Leggins worries that if land and a plan don’t materialize soon, the Bean Blossom sewer project will get moved further and further down on the state’s priority funding list. It was at No. 1; it’s now at No. 3. “The need is there. It’s time to do something,” he said.
Commissioner Dave Anderson said he thought the Bean Blossom sewer project was on hold because “we were holding to join up with Helmsburg.” Leggins said any holdup was “not on our end.”
Kennard advocated for a completely different plan that hasn’t been talked about in a couple years: Sending Bean Blossom sewage to the Nashville wastewater treatment plant, so that another plant wouldn’t have to be built.
The commissioners did not respond to that suggestion.
Anderson wanted to call a closed meeting to discuss a resolution before the next commissioners meeting, but the commissioners were reminded that this would not be an allowable subject for an executive session under the Open Door Law.
Biddle said they’d “refer all of this to our legal team and see what options they’ll present to us.”
When reached in August to comment about the petition, Weddle said that she didn’t want to comment on it, and said that the situation was “all blown completely out of proportion.”
