A public hearing on the new septic ordinance has not been set and will not happen until sometime after the first of the year, as the Brown County Commissioners plan to welcome a new member in January.

At the Dec. 9 commissioners meeting, President Jerry Pittman also questioned the purpose of the rewrite. He said he had looked at ordinances in other counties and some had not been changed in decades.

“I don’t want to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I really have some questions about the justification for this ordinance,” he said.

“I’ve heard various comments made from the health department from ‘we have disastrous septic systems in some areas’ to the statement that ‘we don’t have any failing systems.’ We want to bring on a new ordinance with changes in it, but what problem is it going to solve?”

The majority of Brown County residents have homes with septic systems as opposed to sanitary sewers. This ordinance governs how those systems are installed, inspected and repaired, and contains rules that apply to professional installers, the health department, homeowners and business owners.

The commissioners were going to have a virtual public hearing on the revised ordinance on Nov. 30, but that was canceled due to illness. That cancellation followed months of delay due to COVID-19.

The last time the commissioners accepted public comments on the proposed new ordinance was in February.

If accepted, the new ordinance will replace the current ordinance, passed in 1997. A replacement has been under consideration since 2015 and has been through at least four rewrite attempts.

At the Nov. 18 commissioners meeting, a first reading of the ordinance was done and was approved 2 to 1 with commissioner Dave Anderson voting against. The next step is a public hearing, after which changes could still be made.

Chuck Braden will take over Anderson’s spot on the three-member board of commissioners at the beginning of 2021.

A committee of volunteers, organized through the health department, has been working on the ordinance rewrite in public meetings for more than a year.

On Dec. 9, Commissioner Diana Biddle suggested scheduling a meeting or work session with the health board to bring Braden up to speed on the ordinance.

Pittman said that would be a “starting point.”

“We’ve had a number of proposals for things in the county that propose to solve problems that haven’t actually been documented,” Pittman said.

“We have possibly a sewer district in the works, possibly changes to our onsite septic system ordinance, and yet I can’t get a feel for what it is we’re trying to solve here because we don’t really have good information about what’s really going on out there.”

Biddle said the commissioners appoint people to boards, like the health board, to “be our eyes and ears for that board.”

“I certainly think we’re doing them a disservice by throwing out all of work that they’ve done over the last two or three years,” she said.

“If I was someone serving on that board, I would feel like I had been kicked in the seat of pants because I did all of that work.”

Pittman agreed the board had done a lot of work on the new ordinance, “but they haven’t brought the supporting documentation for why it is needed. I really want to hear that,” he said.

“It’s always been my philosophy that I don’t try to fix something if it isn’t broke,” he continued.

Biddle said she would get with the health board to set up a work session with them and the commissioners.

She estimated that the public hearing on the septic ordinance would most likely not happen until sometime in February.

Pittman said on Dec. 16 that he had received an offer from a local group, the Brown County Leadership Network, to help develop the ordinance “in a way that would be completely transparent and hopefully acceptable to the majority of people in Brown County.”

“I’m not satisfied this is the best way for Brown County to go forward,” he said.

“This has been a problem for quite some time. People come to Brown County, they want to spend a lot of money, build a nice home, and sometimes the first problem they run into is getting a septic permit. That is unfortunate. I want Brown County to be a very welcoming place. I think we really need to consider it very seriously before we move forward.”