Can you live in a tree house?
County Management
The enforcement action taken by the Gilpin County Commissioners Tuesday – technically they were sitting as the Gilpin County Board of Health – was a reminder of how difficult enforcing even the simplest regulation can be.
The particulars in this case were clear enough – somebody built a tree house in one of our subdivisions, and was attempting to live in it.
Now pretty clearly tree houses – at least of the sort of rather primitive construction that went into this one – aren’t allowed under Gilpin County’s building codes.
The problem is that using building and zoning regulations to get changes made is a long and cumbersome process. We have one case in the south end of the County, for example, where a building was illegally erected, and years later we are still trying to get the owner into compliance.
So in this case, in the interest of public safety, the decision was made to go forward with this case as a violation of our ISDS – Individual Sewage Disposal System – regulations.
Just as I suppose it’s theoretically possible to build a tree house that would comply with building regulations, one probably could build a tree house that would have an adequate ISDS system. Maybe somebody could even come in and request a variance to use a chemical toilet.
But in this case, there was apparently no waste disposal system at all. And that’s a real problem – for the neighbors especially, but in more general terms for everyone in the County.
Gilpin County’s ISDS regulations are very strict; another action taken at Tuesday’s meeting was approval of a timeline for revising them. But, if anything, those regulations are likely to become even more stringent.
One of the reasons is that increasingly, not just local neighborhoods but what we call the “downstream users” – communities like Westminster and Arvada that depend on Clear Creek for their water supply – are becoming concerned about potential pollutants which could be moving through the thousands of ISDS systems up here and into the streams. The Commissioners are concerned about their views, because the potential exists that at some point the County might be forced to move to a centralized sewage treatment system, such as the large – and expensive – system the cities paid for down Clear Creek below Black Hawk.
But mostly, of course, the Commissioners are concerned about the effects on public health right here in Gilpin County.
It’s imperative then, that our ISDS regulations – and enforcement – address both these local and longer-range concerns.
So the procedure approved at Tuesday’s meeting outlines a nearly year-long process where the Commissioners and staff will strive to make sure that all points of view are represented in whatever regulations are adopted.
That adoption, if it happens, probably won’t take place until next October. That’s a long time away, and really hard to think about right now when the ground is frozen solid.
But we need to get started now, to make sure that the regulations we adopt will be both stringent and sensible, and address all the potential situations that might arise. Like someone building a tree house…