The Kansas Small Flows Association (KSFA) has one prime objective for onsite professionals in the Sunflower State: providing education and training. With no state requirements for licensing or continuing education, KSFA works to keep contractors and regulators up to date and promote the proper use and installation of septic systems.

Executive Director Charlene Weiss has been involved with the group since it formed in 1997, serving time on the board of directors and terms as president, vice president, secretary and treasurer. After 25 years as a regulator at the county level, Weiss became executive director of KSFA in 2013. Jessi Woods is a board member and past president.

What do you offer in the way of training?

Weiss: We try to be the educational source in Kansas. It’s a hard thing to do when you don’t have regulations that require regulators, much less installers, to attend classes. We have 85 members; it has been as high as 110. It’s almost 50-50 between contractors, a couple who are both installers and pumpers, and regulators, with some manufacturers and engineers.

We have 14 courses. In the past, we’ve offered them when counties ask us to do training for their contractors. We have talked about changing that a little bit.
In October 2014, we received a $43,500 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 319 fund through the Kansas Department of Health and Environment to educate regulators. We’ve trained about 35, including a two-day soils workshop, the National Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association (NOWRA) conference, and regulators could get scholarships to attend educational sessions at our annual conference. We’ll be doing another soils workshop and have one additional class to set up.

Woods: The two-day training materials were provided by NOWRA. In January 2015, we paid for five contractors to attend Certified Installers of Onsite Wastewater Treatment Systems (CIOWTS) training and sit for the exam provided by the National Environmental Health Association. Four of them passed the test that was conducted at our annual conference
in February.

We are hoping counties will adopt CIOWTS as a form of licensing and would allow our educational programs to be continuing education for that.

Where does the regulatory power reside in Kansas?

Weiss: With the counties. The state has minimum standards, Bulletin 4-2, from the early 1980s. Most counties have their own codes that refer to Bulletin 4-2, which has not been revised since 1997. There is one county and several cities that have no local regulations. The state regulates those entities as necessary.

The counties I worked in were fairly active and more advanced as far as not being afraid to look at alternative systems. Several years ago I was on a committee to rewrite the Kansas Environmental Health Handbook. We tried to cover everything from the original EPA manual from 1980 and update it to add alternative and advanced treatment systems.

Does it work?

Weiss: That’s a good question. In many counties, the population is so sparse that it’s not critical. The counties that have codes, a lot of them read the same. That makes it more consistent. Contractors have a harder time than anyone. They may work in four or five counties and something might be a little bit different in each.

I’d guess that about 25 percent of counties require some type of licensing or permitting for contractors, but not many require continuing education. It’s hard to get the word out to contractors about KSFA when you have county-by-county regulations, and we have to rely on counties for names and addresses. If they don’t license them, they may not even have that information.

In the counties where I worked, we’d have 50-some licensed installers, but there were maybe 10 or 12 who did most of the work. It’s hard to require continuing education and things like that for people who very seldom put in a system.

There has been a loss of some funding for counties.

Is that having an effect?

Weiss: There had been funding from 1990 until 2011 for the Local Environmental Protection Program. (LEPP provided grants to local governments for regulating wastewater and water systems. It was cut in 2011 through a budget veto by Gov. Sam Brownback.) The money received was based on population, so some counties only received $7,000 a year but that was enough for them to at least have one sanitarian to administer the code.

To get the funding the code had to meet Bulletin 4-2, and to keep the funding you had to have someone administering the code. At one time, 100 percent of the counties had some kind of code. With the loss of those funds, there may still be an existing code in a county, but it may not be administered.

That’s one reason why KSFA was interested in NOWRA’s lobbying efforts last year and even contributed to it in hopes of some federal monies coming our way through the state.

What would be your ultimate goal?

Woods: We’ve always wanted some sort of a common state-licensing program. We realized after a couple of years of trying to get there, because of the way things are set up, that was not going to be a very effective way to get it done. That’s when we started going county by county, connecting with the bigger counties first, trying to get them on board with our educational programs and CIOWTS certification and hoping they would adopt our programs and it would trickle down.

Weiss: There are installers that are very active in our association, and I think that is a key. We need more of them to be active. They can help spread the word.

Kansas provided guidance last year for local governments covering graywater reuse for single-family homes. What has been the reaction?

Weiss: I served on the state committee to get feedback from regulators and help write the specifications. They are fairly restrictive. Kansas has been very conservative. I don’t know that there’s anybody who has used them yet.

It will be a long time before you see a sprinkler system for graywater that you may have in other states. Everything still has to be subsurface, so really about the only way you can do anything is with drip irrigation. That’s pretty difficult. There are also only certain times of year you can do it, not when the ground is frozen, so you’d have to have a storage tank to be able to hold
the graywater.

But at least we have something that we didn’t have before. A separate graywater system for watering your landscape, even though it’s subsurface, would not have even been discussed, probably. All of us on the committee felt it would be so much easier if you were building a new house. It would be really difficult to try to meet the specifications with an existing home.

Looking out a few years, what would you like to see?

Weiss: I’d like to see our association double in size. When you see states that require contractors to have licenses and continuing education, it seems like it helps the state associations. But even if the counties required it, that would be a big boost to our association and allow us to offer a lot more training and have a crowd where we have to turn people away. That would be awesome.