Annual fee considered for septic inspections

By Kevin O’Brien

Owners of private septic systems in Marathon County may one day have to pay a small annual fee to help offset the county’s costs for ensuring proper maintenance of their systems.

Representatives of Conservation, Planning and Zoning (CPZ) last week presented a proposed special assessment fee for the state-mandated maintenance of private onsite wastewater treatment system (POWTS). CPZ staff, who oversee the regular maintenance checks, pitched a couple of options to the Environmental Resources Committee, which took no action.

CPZ director Laurie Miskimins told the committee that all 21,000 private treatment systems in the county need to be inspected every three years, and the cost of those inspections – about $144,000 per year – is paid for entirely by the property tax levy.

“We do not have a revenue stream that pays for that,” she said.

CPZ does charge a $650 permit fee to those installing new and replacement POWTS, and that money adequately covers the staff time needed to review applications, do three on-site inspections and other administrative work, Miskimins said.

At least 25 other counties around the state charge fees for maintenance inspections, she said, and CPZ has come up with two different options for assessing a new fee in Marathon County.

The first option would be to add a special assessment fee, projected to be $6, onto landowners’ annual property tax bills. In order to enact this type of fee, Miskimins said the county board would need to adopt a preliminary resolution outlining all of the affected properties and any payment plan options. The county would also need to notify

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the owners of all 21,000 septic systems and hold a public hearing before the board makes a final decision.

Miskimins said the county’s tax bill software, Ascent, is set up to easily add a line on tax bills for the special fee, so it wouldn’t take much work to implement the fee. At $6 per POWTS, the fee would generate $126,000 in annual revenue that would be used to offset the cost of administering the maintenance program.

This revenue would not completely cover the entire $144,000 in CPZ costs, but Miskimins said it would be a starting point that would ensure the department is not overcharging POWTS owners.

A second option would be to issue an invoice to landowners once every three years, which is how often a maintenance check is required for each POWTS. The fee for three years would go out with the approximately 7,000 notification postcards sent to landowners each year.

However, the disadvantage with this method is that Ascent is not set up to issue this type of invoice, so CPZ would likely have to manually track who is supposed to get an invoice every year before a software update could be implemented, Miskimins said. This option would be more labor-intensive, she said, which would require an annual fee of $7.50 ($22.50 every years) to cover those additional costs, Miskimins said.

Administrator Lance Leonhard said the county could ask the Wisconsin Department of Revenue to handle collection efforts for those who did not pay the fee, but getting enrolled in that collection program takes time.

“It would be a lot more work for us than adding a single line to a tax bill,” he said.

ERC member Marilyn Bhend, who is also town clerk for the town of Johnson, asked how often the fee would be changed and who would be in charge of approving increases in the future. Leonhard said the fee would be added to an appendix of fees that will be attached to the annual county budget, and the county board would have to approve any increases in order to cover the actual cost of administering services such as POWTS maintenance.

“We are not in the business of overcharging fees for service,” he said.

Right now, POWTS owners who fail to follow through with the maintenance requirements every three years are sent notices before they are eventually referred to the county’s corporation counsel for possible citations. Miskimins said this happens for about 20 to 40 system owners per year.

Shad Harvey, CPZ’s land resources manager, said around 814 final notices have recently gone out to landowners who have not had their systems checked this year as mandated.

Supervisor Allen Drabek, who represents the rural area between Edgar and Athens, suggested bringing the fee proposal to the Towns Association to get feedback from town officials and the public.

“I have some constituents that wouldn’t really be happy about this,” he said. “They don’t like fees much.”

Supervisor John Robinson, however, said the county board needs to consider how much it wants taxpayers to subsidize the POWTS maintenance program when the benefit primarily goes to individual landowners. The property tax levy amounts to just over 25 percent of the county budget, he said, and overall revenues are “not keeping up pace with inflation,” so supervisors need to consider raising or adding fees to offset the cost of serving individual residents.

“This is clearly a service to the property,” he said.

Leonhard echoed these sentiments when talking about the county budget, which is in the process of being prepared for 2025.

“Your shared revenue (from the state) and your tax levy is not growing fast enough to do all the things you want to do,” he told supervisors. “My message is going to be very stark on that.”

ERC chairman Jacob Langenhahn said the POWTS maintenance program could be considered at least partially a public service, since it helps prevent raw sewage from seeping into the groundwater and flowing into ditches. He said he doesn’t want “to shut the door” on the fee idea, but he thinks the committee would be acting too quickly if it tried to enact the fee in time for the tax bills going out in December.

“I don’t think we implement this for the 2025 budget,” he said. “I think we should have discussions on this again in June of 2025.”

Landfill rezoned

Despite objections from several town of Ringle residents, the committee voted 7-1 to recommend rezoning the county landfill property to H1-Heavy Industrial. Supervisor Jay Schoenborn was the only one to vote against the motion.

The committee had the option of recommending a special use zoning district to accommodate the natural gas processing being done at the landfill, but a majority of supervisors opted to rezone the property as H-1 instead.

Four town residents, including the town board chairman and fire chief, spoke against the H-1 designation, citing concerns with traffic and fire safety, frontage road access and unknown hazards if the renewable energy company, Viridi RNG, decides to do something else with the property beyond gas processing.

Also speaking against the H-1 designation was town attorney Lee Turonie, who raised concerns about the validity of the county’s petition to rezone the property.

“Don’t give us heavy industrial please,” he asked the committee.