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MINUTES ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF HEALTH October 22, 1998 Board of Health Minutes Transcription completed by Patsy L. Bateman 3 October 22, 1998 Once you start declaring public health nuisances or once a determination is thought to be a public health nuisance, that requires the government to make some kind of response and this does not. This empowers the government to make some response, but doesn’t require a response. One thing different about this rule, this rule suggests a BOH remedy. The present draft of the Water and Sewer Boundary Agreement uses the same terminology and comes to the same conclusions that your rule does. It then goes on to say that the final decision to use any particular means or tools for rectifying particular adverse public health condition remains through the zoning regulations or other land use ordinances with the governmental entity or entities having jurisdiction (planning) over the area where the adverse public health condition exists. Water and Sewer Boundary folks are thinking that how you fix it once it exists, is a land use decision as opposed to a Health Department decision. If you adopt this rule, I’m not sure what will happen. They haven’t seen it that way. In fact, the group has devised a set of “tools” that can be used for fixing one of these adverse public health conditions. Those tools are not in the boundary agreement yet and they are not in your rules, but they range from doing nothing to actually running public water and sewer and the idea will be that which tool you use to fix the problem will depend on where the problem is and again the idea is, that under no circumstances would the determination of a adverse public health condition automatically mean a public sewer or water fix. It may be that some other fix would be appropriate. In fact, when you start talking about the examples in the University Lake Watershed, etc. you would almost never have a public sewer fix for that problem, which is what the Brookefield problem is. Elected officials don’t think public sewer is the answer in some of those situations, in fact they believe the cure is worse than the problem. By putting public sewer in to correct a problem, they believe it will generate additional problems that are bigger than the problem you’re curing. Ives -- Perhaps the three of you (Paul Thames, Ron Holdway, Geoff Gledhill) could come to some rough understanding and be put into writing under the responsibilities section. Summers -- It strikes me that the Board of Health is responsible for public health rules, not planning and zoning. Gledhill -- That’s right, but, the Board of Health doesn’t have the authority to say you can run public sewer. What you run the risk of doing is the same thing that is now going on with public health nuisance. If you say to somebody, you have an adverse public health condition in your home, you have to fix it and they can’t fix it, then what are you going to do? That’s the dilemma you have with the present statute. You can declare public health nuisance and you can declare public health emergencies, but if you do declare those, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to kick them out of their homes? If the only solution is to run public sewer, you have no way of making that happen. The Board of Health may be forced into a situation it doesn’t want to be in is the point I make. You have the power to kick them out, but you don’t have the power to fix it. Brown -- Asked a question regarding Carden’s Mobile Home Park on Highway 70. This was an old mobile home park that had serious septic problems and this came before the Commissioners last year and asked to be connected to the sewer line across the street that was run to a business located there. Our water and sewer policy said no, the mobile home park could not connect to that. In that case, those people I think are having to move. Gledhill -- That’s right. They’re not having to move right away, but if one of them does move that home cannot be re-occupied. To my knowledge, Orange County has never made an imminent hazard declaration except in the Piney Mountain situation (for privately owned homes). Under the present rules an existing system that’s failing for the most part, gets to stay and you fix it as best you can. If you adopt this set of rules, you will up that bar. The Board of Health will put itself in the position of perhaps not being able to do that. You will definitely put yourself in conflict with the elected officials thoughts, at least the task force’s thoughts about how to deal with this situation. They recognize that the factual determinations are Health Department determinations