Door County Environmental Council Column

It has long been the policy of the Door County Environmental Council (DCEC) to support and initiate programs and projects that will maintain and improve the water that flows around and below our unique peninsula. It has been our mandated priority that we make water quality our number one concern and to bring this sustainability issue to county residents in every way possible.

Recently, DCEC sponsored two brainstorming sessions with sanitation service people: one in Southern Door and one in the Town of Liberty Grove. These meetings were intended to find acceptable solutions to problems facing the updating and inspection of failed systems in all of Door County.

Some common agreements came out of both of these meetings. One mutual consensus voiced was that correctly operating and maintained private wastewater systems are a much more acceptable method of serving wastewater needs than municipal systems that are allowed minimum standard discharge under Wisconsin statutes. This was reinforced by comments from the county sanitarian.

It was brought out at the Liberty Grove meeting that the town recently had documented 70 percent legally failed private systems in a selected portion of the town. (Bear in mind that a legally failed system may not be presently contaminating, but the chances of that occurring in the future are high.)

A local town board reaction, or possibly the motivation for the homeowner system exam, was the formation of a sanitary district encompassing the entire town of Liberty Grove.

While this may be a viable tool in expanding the Sister Bay municipal system, there are those who fear that it will also give the impetus to form a municipal system in the small hamlet of Ellison Bay.

As with all of the other small communities in the county (you can name them) each time a wastewater system is expanded or put in place out of a “seemed” necessity, commercial development of un-anticipated proportions takes place and the character of that village is lost and changed forever.

The people of Liberty Grove town will need to watch carefully the development that is planned or anticipated under the new sanitary district determination, especially with the town board members serving as its sanitary commissioners.

It’s your township; take care of it.