Tim Hicks, watershed inspector for Schuyler County, N.Y., sees the regulator’s role as integral to the onsite wastewater industry. “As an industry, I’d like to see us grow to better serve the public,” he says. “We must be part of the solution, not an obstacle, to repairing problem systems where a regulatory fix is impossible.”
Hicks, who works as inspector-supervisor in the county’s Water-shed Protection Agency (WPA), says his personal wish list includes a more entrepreneurial role for the agency in onsite system monitoring. He lists site evaluation, permit issuance, construction and preclosure inspections, public education, and violation mitigation as traditional roles for regulators.
In Schuyler County, with just over 19,000 year-round residents and about 8,000 onsite systems, the WPA already serves the public in a host of traditional and nontraditional ways. The WPA functions in a small county whose population balloons in summer as tourists and seasonal residents come to visit area lakes.
The water resources are precious, and therefore onsite systems, especially those on lakefront properties, must be managed effectively. At the same time, Hicks sees a need for the county and his agency to be flexible in finding solutions from problem onsite systems.
Unique setting
Schuyler is the seventh smallest county in the state of New York by area (329 square miles) and has the second smallest population. It is in two world-class watersheds: the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay.
“There are different water-quality concerns for each,” says Hicks. The county also touches the southern end of Seneca Lake, the largest of the five glacier-formed Finger Lakes, and surrounds several smaller lakes. “The small lakes are eutrophic,” Hicks observes. “That means they are rich in mineral and organic nutrients that promote a proliferation of plant life, especially algae.” That adds a level of concern for water-quality regulators.
Seneca Lake, on the other hand, is oligotrophic, which means it has a low supply of nutrients. Such lake water is considered to be of a higher quality that supports a greater range of plankton, zoobenthos and fish communities. It therefore requires special protection. Everyone who uses the lakes, for purposes from drinking to recreation, from winemaking to manufacturing, must act responsibly to ensure the resources are well managed and protected.
Making life more complicated, the year-round population of 19,000 expands to as many as 1.5 million during the tourist season. Like the roads, restaurants and everything else, the wastewater collection and treatment infrastructure must handle the spike in people.
Outside of seasonal growth, the county has had just a 1-percent growth rate in year-round residents during the early years of the 21st century. Hicks’ agency issues about 100 permits for complete onsite system installations each year, of which about 10 are replacements for existing homes. Seventy permits for various component repairs are issued in a typical year as well.
Fine-tuning the law
New York’s Public Health Law is the empowering legislation that enables counties to opt in or opt out of various public health programs. Programs from which counties opt out are left to the New York State Department of Health to administer.
“Using the authority Appendix 75A of the Public Health Law, Schuyler County has opted into the onsite program and has taken that program several steps beyond the state-envisioned base level of service,” Hicks says. He points out that his predecessor and current colleague, Jim Howell, started the WPA on its entrepreneurial path.
The county offers all onsite system permit applicants access to an in-house design service. “There is, however, no obligation to use the WPA’s designer,” Hicks says. Land-owners who choose the service can have the WPA’s contracted engineer prepare a system design using site-specific soil information that Hicks or Howell acquire at the site-evaluation stage. “This service is cost-competitive with other counties that offer the same service,” Hicks says.
Recognizing the unique topography, soils and characteristics of the area, the county in 1973 adopted a watershed law that formally transferred all wastewater-related administration and enforcement from the state to the county health department. The WPA is a component of that department.
The law was amended in 1993, and those amendments created a new right for purchasers of property served by onsite systems. “If the buyer or mortgage lender chooses, they can request a WPA inspection of the onsite system,” Hicks says. “The seller cannot refuse the inspection.” The WPA is the only recognized inspection agency. Hicks estimates that half of eligible real estate transactions are run through the inspection process, a fee-supported service.
Three towns in the county front on lakes even more fragile than Seneca, and each has lakefront properties served by onsite systems. All these towns require periodic inspections for all systems and have delegated enforcement to the WPA.
In addition to Hicks and Howell, the WPA has two part-time administrative support employees, Mary Kelly and Lois Hubbel. As a team they also address water well issues and respond to a variety of inquiries from the public.
Creative problem-solving
A few examples illustrate how the WPA approaches unique problems with no ready-made regulatory solutions.
Hicks is now working with a commercial distiller to find a solution for the onsite treatment and management of nonsewage wastewater. As an interim measure, the operation will be served by holding tanks.
Because no local treatment plant accepts this type of waste, the distance to the treatment plant is too great to make a holding tank a permanent strategy. State wastewater regulations do not address onsite disposal of such material, so Hicks and the developer’s engineer are seeking ways to treat the wastewater adequately and then return it to the environment through the soil.
Lakefront residential properties bring different challenges. “Most lake properties have allocated the entire useful surface area of the property,” Hicks says. “If it is not paved, decked, under a house or too close to a well or the waterline, it is often occupied by the onsite system.”
He offers two examples where his office helped define and implement suitable solutions.
The management program at Waneta Lake identified an absorption area that was overwhelmed and discharging to the surface. With no unused land available, the only spot to consider was at the site of the failed absorption area. An in situ repair was proposed.
“The solution we permitted required the excavation of the existing aggregate absorption area and the placement of a suitable sandy loam material,” Hicks says. “We installed Geotextile Sand Filter (GSF) from Eljen Corporation and placed a sandy loam backfill to cover those units. The entire installation was covered with topsoil to support grass, and a SludgeHammer microbic inoculator was retrofitted into the treatment tank.”
In limited space, the work met WPA’s goal of close-as-possible regulatory compliance and the land-owner’s goal of a functioning system.
Providing counsel
On a different lake, a buyer asked for an inspection when he bought his property. The system serving the four-bedroom house consisted of a 500-gallon metal tank discharging to a seepage pit. It was not a regulatory-compliant system, nor was it in violation. The distance to the waterline was 30 feet, and the vertical distance to groundwater was two feet. Hicks could force no remediation action.
Not long after, the same person bought the adjacent property, and an inspection there found similar conditions, but no violation. Hicks counseled the landowner, who recognized the need to protect the lake, which was the source of drinking water for the properties. The owner decided to install a community system to serve both homes.
A two-compartment tank was installed for each house. The effluent was directed to an aerobic treatment unit, and from there, up slope to the backs of the properties, where there was room for an absorption bed. The area was excavated to 40 inches to remove any soil compacted by cars being parked on the area. Gravelless chambers were installed and an aggregate backfill was placed. Topsoil was then placed.
Another house off the water had two separate systems serving different portions of the flow. Both had undersized tanks. When the tanks were pumped for the first time in anyone’s memory (at least 40 years), both experienced run-back. Neither was in violation.
The occupant, an elderly woman, wanted a consolidated replacement system. After getting prices to do the installation, she chose not to install the system. Instead, she opted to reduce water use and balance her use of the two systems. “In these situations, it would be nice to see regulatory-compliant systems installed,” Hicks says. “However, in the absence of a violation, there is no basis to compel this or any other repair strategy — at this time,” says Hicks.
Part of the industry
Hicks sees the onsite industry as similar in important ways to the transportation industry. “The New York Department of Transportation (DOT) is part of the transportation industry,” he says. “It is an infrastruc-ture provider. Its job is to establish the infrastructure that enables users to get from A to B. It also sets minimum maintenance standards for all other county DOTs.”
The New York Department of Health and Hicks’ agency have similar roles in the onsite industry. The health department created the regulatory infrastructure that enables a vacant site to be developed and occupied, with an onsite system for wastewater treatment. “This infrastructure starts with the prescriptive regulations on soil depth, percolation rate, slope restrictions, system types and more,” Hicks says.
“DOT knows it cannot, nor should it, make every road an interstate,” he notes. “The Department of Health, Schuyler County and its municipalities know that not all homes will be served by municipal sewage collection and treatment. We will always have and rely upon onsite systems, and since 1993 this county has been helping landowners manage them.”
The management program identifies systems that must be replaced, but Hicks observes, “There is not always a regulatory solution to the problem. Abandoning the property is not an option, so other solutions must be found.”
These sites present opportunities for Hicks, the designer, technology manufacturers and the installer communities to bring new and innovative technologies to the county. In these situations, the Department of Health’s regional office becomes involved in a waiver process.
The waiver is a kind of release from the strict application of Appendix 75A requirements. “These repair sites allow the landowner and the onsite industry to test-drive a technology that might not otherwise be seen in the county,” Hicks says. This collaborative approach is an example of what Hicks means by being “part of the solution.”
Where terrain and distance rule out big-pipe solutions, onsite system management is a timely and cost-effective alternative. WPA’s management program in three municipalities includes fixed-interval pump-out and inspection of all onsite systems. Hicks recognizes the advantages of consolidated data management and interpretation, and he sees it as a growth opportunity and a good fit for WPA’s resources. A centralized information repository will be an asset to municipal and county government, the real estate community, the service sector of the onsite industry, and the public, he believes.
The 1993 Watershed Law amend-ments required the WPA to establish an inspection protocol for existing systems. Hicks and Howell have completed an onsite inspector-training program and have become certified inspectors. This training and the certification program were developed by the State University of New York at Delhi (SUNY Delhi). “Over the years WPA’s inspection protocol has been refined to include the lessons we’ve learned,” Hicks says.
Blended roles
Hicks and the county government have augmented the traditional permit-related regulator role with a new program that manages existing systems, and they have created an expanded menu of optional services to the public. An inspection service for homebuyers and lenders has found problem systems, which are then repaired. One outcome is the confidence buyers have in the onsite system they will depend on.
Hicks pursued the job because “I felt it offered variety and opportunities for growth.” As the WPA’s service menu grows, so does Hicks’ involvement with the public and with the onsite industry. The WPA has blended into the community and the onsite industry, and Hicks believes both are better for it.
There will always be an explicit regulatory role for the agency and, if Hicks’ vision comes to fruition, there will be an equally well-defined entrepreneurial role for the agency as a part of the industry.
