Union County Health Department Health Commissioner Jason Orcena, left, congratulated Al Channell, right, for serving as president of the board of health for 10 years at a meeting Wednesday. Channell said he’ll be in town for another “seven days and a woo, as we refer to it in the military,” before he moves to Dayton. He said his greatest accomplishment in his position was renegotiating the lease and getting construction work done for the health department’s building. A new board president will be decided at the next health department meeting.
(Journal-Tribune photo by Jacob Runnels)
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The Union County Health Department (UCHD) is looking at changing how it inspects and assesses septic systems.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the board of health agreed to review the rules behind its operations and maintenance procedures for its septic system assessment and inspection program.
UCHD Health Commissioner Jason Orcena explained that in 2016 the UCHD developed a way to identify any visible failures on all 8,094 septic systems in the county, in accordance to how the state wanted it done.
He said the board expected to complete the assessments by 2020, but has only analyzed 5,296 systems so far.
“We knew it would be an aggressive time frame to get it done in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019, so we gave us four years,” Orcena said. “We thought in four years, we’d do it under our old pattern if everything went smoothly.”
Orcena said the process was delayed because the health department took opinions from the public on how the process should be changed.
In the spring of 2017, UCHD suspended its assessments because of public complaints. The board took many of the suggestions made by the public at town hall meetings. Some of the changes included sending postcards to warn residents about an upcoming assessment, use of company vehicles and implementation of an online tool to track public systems assessed.
“All of those slowed down progress, but I think the big message is ‘That’s OK,’” Orcena said. “I would rather have a program that takes us another five years to implement that the community is, if not in favor of, is not adamantly opposed to. We still have to implement this program.”
Orcena said because of the changes UCHD needed more time to assess all the systems or hire three more employees just to handle the workload. However, he said the department couldn’t do the latter because of the unexpected expenses of implementing the changes residents suggested.
Orcena said the UCHD is “fairly confident” they can complete the inspections in three years, “if nothing else changes.” He said that would give the health department time to work on the inspection cycle process and handling all of the new data from the assessments.
Also at the meeting, the board of health raised questions about how to deal with its monkey business.
Marcia Dreiseidel, director of environmental health at the UCHD, told the board that at 5 p.m. Tuesday, a UCHD sanitarian visited a house on Storms Road to investigate a nuisance complaint that alleged sewer surfacing.
“She found five lemurs that were jumping at the door when she got there,” Dreiseidel said.
The board then discussed how the health department would handle this case of exotic animals at a residence. Officials questioned if the matter would be something for the UCHD or the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
Orcena said lemurs are prohibited under the county board of health’s rules, but he wondered if those rules or if state laws actually applied.
“The state rules always trump local, unless they carve out an exemption,” Orcena said. “There is an exemption in the state dangerous and exotic animal rules that speaks to local ordinances being more stringent, but whether or not that applies to local board of health has to be reviewed.”
After a day of consulting with the department’s legal team, Orcena said on Thursday that the UCHD does not have jurisdiction over this case. He said it will be handed to the Ohio Department of Agriculture to see if the owner of the lemurs has a license for them.
The health department has had a ban on owning exotic animals like lemurs on its books since 1999, but the state law changed in 2012 to allow the ownership.
Also at the meeting:
– Al Channell was honored for serving as the president of the board of health for 10 years at his last meeting before retirement. By the next meeting, a new board president will be selected.
-The board of health signed a lease agreement that will move its facility remodeling project forward. Orcena said the board must wait for the Union County Commissioners to sign it before continuing.
The next board meeting will be held at 7:30 a.m. March 20.