The Brown County Regional Sewage District has no sewer plant, no sewer lines and no paying sewer customers. It can’t provide sewer service yet.
If it keeps giving away customers in its territory to other sewer providers, it never will have any of that, board member Mike Leggins said in the midst of a discussion about service territory last week.
“If we wouldn’t have given up Big Woods, we’d have customer No. 3. And if we wouldn’t have given (up) the three houses next to Parkview … we’d have customers No. 4, 5, 6,” Leggins said May 15.
“You’ve got to start somewhere, and again, we keep giving away customers and we keep kicking ourselves in the teeth,” he said.
The Maple Leaf Performing Arts Center was one of the properties they discussed. It lies outside the town’s sewer service boundary.
However, after a meeting on Monday morning at Town Hall, sewer board, town council and county council members were optimistic that they were heading toward an agreement.
“We want to make all the districts perform as best they can,” Leggins said. “It’s not in our best interest to take customers from the town or anywhere else; it’s in our best interest to help make everything make sense.”
The regional sewer board met with Diana Biddle, representing Brown County and the Maple Leaf Management Group, and Scott Rudd and James T. Roberts, representing the town of Nashville, on May 15 to discuss how to get sewer service to residents and businesses that need it, but who are outside Nashville’s service area.
Town council, county council and sewer board representatives had a follow-up meeting on May 21.
Making it work
Only Nashville, Gnaw Bone and Helmsburg have sewer systems, and all have their own separate sewer boards. The Brown County Regional Sewage District — formerly the Bean Blossom Sewer District — was expanded in April 2013 to include all areas in the county that weren’t in one of those three other sewer districts at the time. It was expanded to make the Bean Blossom regional sewer project area bigger, so it could compete for grant funding, said John Kennard, who works for the health department.
Some building projects, such as the Maple Leaf, can’t wait years for a regional sewer district plant to be built, Biddle said at the May 15 meeting.
The regional board is applying for funding to build a plant on Gatesville Road — about 6 miles from the Maple Leaf project site off Hawthorne Drive in Nashville.
Nashville’s sewer plant is about 1 mile downstream from the Maple Leaf site. But because the Maple Leaf land lies just outside Nashville town limits, it is in regional sewer district territory, not in town sewer district territory.
“We were planning to connect to town because we’re sitting right here looking at their pipe there. … We weren’t thinking we needed to go to a middle man to get to the town of Nashville,” Biddle said.
Last year, the town offered to provide sewer service to the Maple Leaf. Maple Leaf organizers took that to the bank, which granted the county a $12.5 million loan to build the 2,000-seat performing arts center.
“Maple Leaf needs a resolution by the end of next month,” Biddle told the sewer board. “We need to know how you’re going to be connecting our project (Maple Leaf). We need to know how you’re going to connect Maple Leaf to the town of Nashville (system). We need to know how much it’s going to cost, and how much service you’re going to be providing, and you’ve got 30 days.”
“Or what?” asked Ron Lawson from the audience.
“Or we have to come up with another solution. We have to have, for Maple Leaf’s part, we have to have our utility infrastructure together. We’re up against an actual deadline,” Biddle said.
Keeping to the Maple Leaf’s construction schedule is important because the first loan payment to the bank is due in June 2019. During the 18-month construction period, the county is only paying interest, according to information given at the April Maple Leaf Management Group meeting.
Leggins said at the May 15 meeting that he doesn’t want to stop or stall the Maple Leaf, but the regional sewer board needs to look out for Bean Blossom people, whom they’ve been trying to bring sewer service to for nearly 20 years. Their rate consultant, Steven Brock, told them at their April meeting that it isn’t a good strategy to give away customers to other providers, because as they shrink their customer base, that makes it harder to serve the area in a cost-effective manner.
Last summer, at the property owners’ request, the regional sewer board gave sewer service rights to the town of Nashville for three homes on Old State Road 46, and the 300-plus-acre Hard Truth Hills development owned by the Big Woods family of companies. The three homes had failing septic systems; Hard Truth Hills needed sewer service for a large restaurant/brewery/distillery. All were outside the town’s sewer service area. When they are hooked up, those customers will pay the town.
Regional sewer board members estimated they had 38 cents in the district checking account as of last week, and they need about $270,000 initially to get the Bean Blossom sewer project under way. They’ve asked for that much as a loan from the county council, but hadn’t heard back.
What Brock had suggested was that the regional sewer district work with Nashville to treat the Maple Leaf’s sewage; however, the Maple Leaf would still be a regional district customer.
“This means that the Maple Leaf Performing Arts Center is within BCRSD’s service area and BCRSD will own the collection system and transmission line to the point of connection to Nashville. BCRSD will own, operate and maintain the sewer system within its service area and pay a monthly treatment fee to Nashville for sanitary sewer treatment,” he explained in a letter to the board. “BCRSD will bill the customers in its service area and collect the monthly sewage fee from its customers.”
Brock wrote that he has no objection to allowing the Maple Leaf project to hook onto the town’s sewer via this interlocal arrangement. “This is the normal and typical way that these situations are handled,” he wrote.
After their May 21 follow-up meeting, Rudd and sewer board members Leggins and Phil LeBlanc said it was looking like the town would serve the Maple Leaf with sewer, if the agreement plays out the way they discussed.
“We don’t want to stall economic development in the county. We need it,” Leggins said.
Buffer zones
Discussion at the May 21 meeting included the concept of carving out “buffer zones” around existing sewer plants in the county, so that landowners who are close to them but are technically in regional sewer district territory could still connect to those plants.
“We are not here to compete for customers with you. We share common goals,” Roberts said at the May 15 meeting. “I think those two major goals are good sewer service and good economic development.”
Everyone needs to be clear on where their territory is so that they and other groups can do some long-range planning, he said. “If a permit gets hung up on red tape and waiting for multiple boards to make decisions, that project may pass Brown County and Nashville by,” he said.
Roberts had asked for a 1-mile buffer zone around Nashville’s, Helmsburg’s and Gnaw Bone’s current sewer districts.
A uniform radius might not make sense, LeBlanc said Monday morning, because of the nature of Brown County’s land. However, the town and county regional sewer board reps agreed to look at the “logical boundaries” of where each entity could serve.
One item on the sewer board’s May 15 agenda involved a family who owns two properties next to each other. One is in the town’s sewer district and one is in the regional sewer district. They were wanting the town to also serve the one outside the town boundary so that they could build on it.
The sewer board didn’t take immediate action on that request because they need to treat all such requests fairly, said regional sewer board President Judy Swift Powdrill.
“I don’t think any of us want to delay anything, but we need to do it correctly. … We need to have an agreement and it needs to be for everybody,” she said.
