Brandt Sewer Project
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Brandt Sewer Project Information OFFICE OF COMMISSIONERS OF MIAMI COUNTY |
Brandt Sanitary Sewers –Project Narrative – May 5, 2010
Currently the unincorporated village of Brandt, located in southeastern Miami County, has no central sewer service. Approximately 110 residences and businesses in Brandt utilize on-site wastewater treatment systems (Septic Systems) that are regulated by the Miami County Health Department for residences or Ohio EPA for businesses. Due to the age of the properties, most of the sewage systems were constructed prior to many of the modern rules for wastewater disposal that exist today and most of the systems do not meet current requirements. Replacing the antiquated systems in most cases is not an option as most of the lot sizes are not large enough to allow for modern on-site wastewater disposal systems to be installed.
Brandt is currently unsewered, but the County Commissioners, through the County Sanitary Engineering Department, have designed a central sewer system to service Brandt, which is located in Bethel Township. This project is being conducted at the request of the Township, the County Health Department and Ohio EPA to abate a long standing environmental hazard, where inadequately treated wastewater has contaminated the local stream, an un-named tributary to Mud Run, which in turn is tributary to the Mad River.
The Brandt area’s failed septic systems and the major impact that they have had the local stream have been well documented by the OEPA, the local Health District, and a round of sampling that this office conducted on the village storm system. That sampling indicated that the village storm sewers are conveying raw sewage during times of dry weather directly to the local stream that flows along the north side of Brandt.
Bethel Township has also recently completed an Income Survey of Brandt, which demonstrates that more than 60% of the households in the target area are Low to Moderate Incomes, as defined by the Ohio Department of Development.
Currently the project design is complete and the OEPA PTI has been received. This project will be constructed in two phases with Phase 1 being bid on June 10, 2010 and Phase 2 scheduled to bid toward the end of 2010.
Finally, this project is part of a regional sewer system. The project serves residents in Brandt (Bethel Township) through a new part of the Miami County Regional Sewer System with wastewater treatment at the Clark County Southwest Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant under an inter-county agreement between Miami and Clark Counties. By obtaining a sewer contract with Clark County, Miami County did not need to construct a new membrane bioreactor treatment plant in Brandt, a far more expensive option. The sewer system will also allow for future extension to serve other unsewered areas of Bethel Township that are experiencing failed septic systems.
Brandt Sanitary Sewer Project
Public Meeting at 6:30 PM January 14th , 2010 at Bethel School to discuss project and conduct Question and Answers
- We sampled the Storm Sewers and the associated discharge to the creek in the summer of 2007 and found that chemically and biologically Brandt’s Storm water looks exactly like raw wastewater.
- Project will be complete and operational in early 2012.
- The service area is depicted in display board available for viewing after the meeting.
- The OEPA governs businesses, churches, non-residential and their policy has been immediate hook-up for all properties that they regulate.
- Funding is as follows:
- We have $490,000 in OPWC grants
- We’re applying for $600,000 of CDBG Water and Sewer Grant money
- We expect to get County’s full 2010 allotment of CDBG Formula money in the amount of $174,000
- Township Revolving Loan in the amount of $950,000
- We expect to make up the difference with 0% loans from OEPA Water Pollution Control Loan Fund which we’ve applied for
- We’ll hopefully be using County’s CDBG CHIP and Water and Sewer Block Grant (assuming a successful application this year) money in 2012 to pay for tap fees and assessments of LMI owned/ occupied house holds (43 LMI occupied households in Income Survey). Application information will be sent out by County’s Economic Development Office by Nikki Reese in late 2011.
Answers to Common Questions on Sanitary Sewer Retrofit Projects
Questions have been answered jointly by Pat Turnbull – Miami County Sanitary Engineer’s Office & Jim Luken – Miami County Health District.
1. What are the various agencies involved with this project and what are each of them responsible for?
The Miami County Health District is responsible for all on-lot residential treatment systems. They are the legal permitting and monitoring body for on-lot treatment systems. In addition, once the public sewers become available they govern how the existing on-lot systems should be taken out of service and how the individual home lateral must be run to the sewer main. The Health District is a separate political entity from the Board of County Commissioners. It is governed by a Board of Health, who are appointed by elected officials from the cities, townships and villages in Miami County, excepting Piqua, which has its own separate health department.
The Ohio EPA is responsible for monitoring stream quality and when large amounts of untreated wastewater ends up in drainage ways can order the responsible governmental entity, in this case the Miami County Commissioners to run public sewers to correct the problems resulting from multiple on-lot system failures. They are also the permitting and monitoring body of non-residential on-lot treatment systems.
The Miami County Sanitary Engineer’s Office is a department of the Miami County Commissioners. The Miami County Sanitary Engineers Office has designed, will construct, own, and operate the collection system. They conduct these duties under the Ohio Revised Code for all unincorporated areas of the County. The tap fee, which serves as the permit to install the sewer service, will be included in your assessment amount. The plumber or homeowner should contact Sanitary Engineering to schedule the inspection of the connection from the house lateral to the mainline.Why must all properties in the Brandt area be a part of the Sewer Project?
Under the Ohio Administrative Code Section 3701-29-02 (M), which the Miami County Health District enforces locally – “Whenever a sanitary sewer system becomes accessible to the property, a household sewage system shall be abandoned and the house sewer directly connected to the sewerage system.”
Furthermore, based upon discussions with the Miami County Health District, most of the lot sizes in the proposed service area of Brandt are too small to install on-site sewage treatment systems that would meet modern Health District Guidelines for a new leaching septic field. In addition, most of the existing systems have been in existence for more than thirty years, well beyond the normal useful life that the Health District has seen for such systems to adequately treat a household’s waste water.
2. Why aren’t the properties between Brandt and Clark County on U.S. 40 being made part of the project and being forced to hook in to the sewers?
The Brandt area sewage will be pumped from the east side of the intersection of U.S. 40 and S.R. 201 through a forcemain to the Clark County line. That forcemain system has not been designed to easily pick up most of the houses on U.S. 40, thus the sewer is not accessible to the properties. A significant additional cost would have been borne by the project to install the necessary forcemain taps and grinder stations along U.S. 40 to make the sewers accessible for those properties and would have required that the assessment amount be more than the currently proposed property assessments. If a property along U.S. 40 needs, or desires to tie onto the forcemain in the future, each property would be responsible for paying capital recovery charges, since they are not being assessed now. In addition, they would have to install a tap, run a line from the forcemain to their house, and install a grinder pump system. This cost would be at least as much (and perhaps quite a bit higher) than the proposed assessment that the properties that are being included in the project at this time will pay.
3. Who is responsible for installing what and what is all the tap fee and assessment money going to be spent on?
The Brandt Sewer Collection System will be constructed by a General Contractor after the project has been publicly bid. In addition, the General Contractor will also construct individual grinder stations that are necessary for a few properties that couldn’t be served easily with gravity and the small diameter forcemain from the grinder station to the gravity sewer mainline.
In the case where the property will be served with a gravity line from the house, the homeowner will be responsible for either hiring a registered plumbing contractor to run a gravity line from the edge of the roadway right of way to their house. A homeowner is permitted to install the house sewer line himself only on his own house. They are still subject to all of the installation standards and must obtain the installation/inspection permit ($30) from the Miami County Health District. In the case of a grinder pump connection to the gravity sewers, the homeowner will run the gravity line to their grinder station pit and run electric from their house to the Grinder Station.
The Engineer’s Estimate for the construction project at this point is $2.7 million and an additional $400,000 has been spent on Engineering. Approximately $1.2 million of grant money is expected to be secured for the project; the rest of the project will be funded through 0% interest loans to be paid back over 20 years. The Assessments and Tap fee money will be utilized to pay for the debt service on those loans.
4. What is the actual environmental problem that the sewer system will be remedying?
According to Health District records, complaints from property owners, and conversations with Ohio EPA, currently many, if not most, of the on-lot septic systems in the project area are not adequately treating the wastewater prior to leaching or discharging the effluent. According to the Health District this is due to a couple of factors, primarily the lack of a sufficiently sized disposal area and a system that has exceeded its useful life. Furthermore, many of the systems that have failed over the years have been tied, illegally, into the Brandt Storm Sewers, County Drains, and farm tiles that surround the area. The tiles then discharge the untreated sewerage at their various outfalls into the ditch that runs through Friendship Park. This was further verified in the sampling that the Sanitary Engineering Department conducted in the summer of 2007 of the Brandt storm sewers which revealed that the storm sewers during dry weather conveyed water high in biological and chemical contaminants that are most commonly associated with raw wastewater.
5. I believe that my system works fine and I would like to be exempt from the project, how do I seek an exemption?
If you are currently located on a 10 + acre lot and located in an agricultural district as defined under Ohio Revised Code Section 929.02 you are exempt from the project and the assessment. I’m not currently aware of any property that has been included in the project area that meets that definition. If you believe your property qualifies for this exemption, please contact the Miami County Auditor’s office at 937-440-5925 for more information.
If you are not located in an agricultural district, but believe that your house and on-lot system is located on a suitably sized parcel, and that your system is performing well, you may seek an exemption from the Miami County Health District, please contact them at 937-440-5460 for more information. The criteria for granting variances from the rules are two: You must prove that connecting to the sewer will create an undue hardship (not just expensive, but very expensive relative to a leach field repair) and that there will be no health hazard created as a result of granting the variance. If the Miami County Health District deems that you are exempt from tying onto the public sewers, you will not have to pay a tap fee or hook into the sewers, however, you will still need to pay the sewer assessment for your property because having the sewers available is still a benefit to the property.
6. Once the sewer project is complete, how long do I have until I’m required to tie onto the sewers?
The Miami County Health District requires that residential discharging systems, systems that discharge directly to a creek or other surface drainage way, systems that are malfunctioning, or systems that have been illegally tied to storm sewers or drainage tiles, must tie onto public sewers immediately after they become available. The Health District gives residential properties that are functioning properly and have subsurface leach lines three years to tie on. In the case of Brandt, the Health District will expect immediate hook-up, but people who believe that they have a properly functioning leach field may contact the Health District for a three year waiver application.
The Ohio EPA requires that all commercial, institutional, churches, and generally all non-residential properties must tie onto sewers immediately after they become available.
7. There are people in the project area that simply can not afford this project, is there some form of governmental relief that these people can seek?
The County is in the process of applying for grant money to be utilized in aiding the people that fall into an income range that the Ohio Department of Development defines as a Low to Moderate Income Range. Families that are living in a house they own (not renting) that fall into the proper range will be eligible to get their assessment, tap-fee, and hook-up charges paid for by grant dollars. The Miami County Economic Development Department will be sending out grant application information regarding this process if we’re successful in obtaining the grant, in the summer of 2011.
8. What is usually included in the cost of the physical hook-up to the sewer?
Your contractor (or yourself if it is your own house) will include the following tasks in his price:
1. Purchasing the inspection permit from the Health District ($30).
2. Digging, installing, bedding the new building sewer line from the house to the tap near the street.
3. Any plumbing changes necessary inside the house.
4. Pumping, crushing, and filling the old septic tank and/or drywell.
5. Putting the backfill over the line and old tank.
You do not have to remove the old leaching lines.
9. Can I connect my sump pump to the new sewer line?
No. Sump pumps and downspout drains may not be connected to the new sanitary sewer system. Conversely, any laundries drains that bypassed septic systems must now be connected to the new sanitary sewer system.
10. Will I have to pay for an operational permit from the Health District in the future?
No.