Town Airs Law Mandating Septic Pump-Out

A proposed local law requiring that septic systems be pumped out at least once every five years will have a public hearing April 5, less than a month before its provisions must go into effect.

Virtually every Bedford resident will be impacted by the new law, designed to safeguard the Croton Watershed’s supply of clean drinking water. The septic requirements extend to the other northern Westchester towns in the watershed as well as all of Putnam and four towns in Dutchess, all of them under orders from Washington to minimize the adverse affects of storm-water runoff.

Bedford’s town board scheduled the April hearing at its regular meeting Tuesday, following a public information session on the law. County Legislator Peter Harckham, chairman of the county Board of Legislators’ septics subcommittee, and Jeffrey Osterman, the town planning director, discussed the law with a score of residents who turned out for the town hall meeting.

, scheduled to take effect May 1, applies to Bedford’s 6,300 residential and commercial septic systems. It spells out maintenance standards for so-called separate sewage-disposal and on-site wastewater systems, largely septic tanks but including any facility that treats, modifies or disposes of what the law calls “septage”: sewage, waste or other offensive materials.

Technically, the law requires a costly “inspection” of each septic system at five-year intervals. Under a deal negotiated by Harckham’s subcommittee, however, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation agreed that just pumping out a septic tank constituted an inspection. That’s because a pump-out technician is required by law to report “any evidence of exposed or discharged septage onto ground surface” to the county health department.

Osterman called the deal a “major benefit for all of us,” since inspections are “very complicated, very time-consuming and therefore expensive.” Harckham put the cost of an inspection at $700 to $1,000 vs. $300 to $350 for a pump-out.

The other watershed localities—all of them so-called MS4 jurisdictions required to meet federally mandated standards governing Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems—also must adopt local septic laws.

Once the laws are in place, towns will monitor and enforce the septic pump-outs while any problems uncovered during the pumping would fall to the county for remediation. Property owners who have septic systems but who refuse to pump them out within the five-year schedule would first receive a warning letter, allowing 30 days to remedy the violation or be subject to a $200 fine on day 31. Thereafter, the fine could be levied every two weeks that the tank remains unpumped.

Still at issue in Bedford is just how to bring what Osterman called “at least 6,300” systems into the five-year pump-out rotation. While the law takes effect this May, the state stipulates only that all tanks must be purged at least once by May 2016. As the planning director noted, that could allow schedules ranging from a phase-in of one-fifth of the systems each year through 2016, a likely solution, to waiting for the final year and bringing all the tanks into the system at one time, which some observers deemed both unwieldy and unworkable.

The health department is creating the county’s septic database. “We now have a database [under construction],” Harckham said. “We have every septic system in Westchester mapped.”