On Wednesday morning, the Union County Health Department (UCHD) adopted a resolution to force residents in Raymond and Peoria to abandon their private septic systems and start using a public system.
The Union County Commissioners were ordered by the Ohio EPA to construct a public septic system in Peoria, which was completed in 2015, to combat a number of properties with failing sewage systems that discharged and created unsanitary conditions in nearby areas.
According to the resolution, the UCHD must order “owners, agents or assignees of the properties… to properly abandon the private household sewage treatment system serving the property and connect to the system installed and maintained by the Board of County Commissioners.”
“Once the project was substantially complete, which was in July 2015, we had six months to get everyone connected,” Union County assistant engineer Bill Narducci said. “We knew that was an aggressive timeframe and, when talking to other communities similar to ours, we knew that necessarily wasn’t going to mean we’d get 100 percent (of people connected) even though that was what our goal was.”
Narducci said, since 2015, residents of Raymond and Peoria have received letters of correspondence, as well as had the chance to attend public meetings hosted by the UCHD, to connect to the public septic system. He said the system serves nearly 160 customers, and since 2015, there are still around 20 homes that have not yet connected.
“(The residents) were well aware of the project in advance but, like a lot of situations, it’s a financial factor,” he said. “Fortunately, we were able to fund 100 percent of the people who applied, which is a good thing, but we know there were probably more people who could have taken advantage of it but, for whatever reason, didn’t respond well after the project’s deadlines.”
He said there is funding available for those who can’t afford to connect to the public septic system. With this, he said the county was “fortunate enough” to qualify for a lot of grant funding to assist residents because of it being a low-income area. However, he said a lot of the residents who “could have qualified” or “were just over the threshold” did or could not “take advantage of some of the opportunities we had to physically connect them to the system.”
Narducci said he then reached out to the UCHD to find out how to get the remaining people to connect. In early 2016, he said, during assessment hearings, the county had the ability to “assess property owners on their tap fee,” which is a monthly user fee of $54.50 in the system. He said, though strange sounding, it was a way to charge every resident a user fee, even if they hadn’t connected to the system yet.
“That was our way of incentivizing people to connect,” he said. “Basically, you’re going to be paying for the service anyway; you might as well connect.”
Connection fees can cost $3,500 for single family residences, but if people had fallen below the income threshold, the fee would be waived. However, this would have only happened if applicants had responded before January and February 2016.
Health Commissioner Jason Orcena said the UCHD will have to take residents, who don’t eventually connect to the public system, to court as those who are in violation of health codes, which can carry penalties such as fees and jail time. He said the department is working very hard to not put someone in jail because of this.
“Most of these properties do not have a solution to an on-site system,” he said. “We have a long history with a lot of those properties … where we’ve been working with the homeowners for years because they had recorded problems already.”
Orcena said, because the UCHD is dealing with large enough areas villages with this situation, unlike single houses, the EPA had to step in. That led to the need to create one sewage system, as there wasn’t enough space to put a functional on-property, private system for the issue and there was no repair available.
Also at the meeting, the UCHD has entered into an agreement with Kent State University to help develop the Union County Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) through Dec. 31. CHIP is the county’s plan as to address health issues and how they’ll be dealt with. It was originally created in 2013.
Shawn Sech, UCHD director of health promotion and planning, said she reached out to other universities to help facilitate conversations about the plan, and Kent State agreed to take it up with the cheapest offer.
Also discussed at the meeting, the UCHD has accepted a $15,420 grant to go toward an active transportation program involving bicycling from Aug. 1 to July 31, 2018.
In total, there will be 16 bicycles, 16 helmets, 16 bike locks and seven bike racks. There will be five bike racks at Memorial Hospital and one rack each at the Mental Health and Recovery Board and the UCHD building.
Sech said the department originally asked for up to $90,000 because that was the most it could apply for, but it got rejected. If the department would have received that grant money, she said the UCHD would have been able to connect a bike trail from Mill Valley to Plain City. She said it would also provide complete signage and road markers, besides buying the bicycles, racks and other equipment.
“The proposal we were putting in, similar to other projects we had done, the city and county were able to donate the labor,” she said. “We were just asking for the money for the materials themselves and we just didn’t get funded. We knew it was a shot in the dark.”