Minnesota Amish seek OK from appeals court to ditch septic systems

The Swartzentruber Amish community returned to the Minnesota Court of Appeals after an affirmative decision by the US Supreme Court.

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (CN) – The Minnesota Court of Appeals on Tuesday heard arguments in a long-running dispute between members of an Amish community in southern Minnesota and state and regional regulators who say the community cannot refuse to use septic tanks to process wastewater and install greywater.

The case, which has been in the US Supreme Court since it was first filed in 2017, centers on a dispute between several members of Fillmore County’s Swartzentruber Amish community and government officials with the county and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Ammon Swartzentruber, Menno Mast, Amos Mast and Sam Miller sued government agencies after the county took enforcement action against them for failing to install septic systems. They argued that given their religion’s prescripts against the use of most post-industrial technologies, the requirements violated their First Amendment right to religious liberty.

Sewage systems are used to treat wastewater and gray water — water left over from tasks such as laundry, dishwashing, and bathing — without connecting to larger sewage systems. The MPCA has argued that since plaintiffs have indoor plumbing, using mulch tanks for wastewater treatment is insufficient to protect local groundwater.

The Amish argument for religious freedom made waves at SCOTUS, which dropped the case in light of the Fulton v. Philadelphia Supreme Court remanded to the Minnesota Court of Appeals for consideration.

In Tuesday’s arguments, plaintiffs’ attorney Brian Lipford clarified that his clients reinstated all of their original claims in light of this decision. Lipford said the Fulton decision put the onus on the government to prove that enforcing its sanitation system requirements was in a compelling state interest.

“It’s important to note that there is an admission in the factual records of the case that no harm was done by the Amish,” Lipton said. “The government needs to show a direct causal link for the damage, which it doesn’t have.”

He noted that the Amish have lived in Fillmore County since 1974 without incident, and if the court ordered them to do so, they were prepared to meet any testing or sanitation requirements placed on their mulch tank systems for gray water processing.

Deputy Attorney General Christina Brown, arguing for the MPCA, said that while the government has not proven a specific disease inflicted on others by Amish graywater, the facts of the case showed they put other Fillmore County residents at risk. “Due to the nature of biodegradable mulch,” she said, the trash cans would likely experience “a high failure rate” no matter how much work the Amish put into them.

“The water flows straight down, and there’s no magical compressive power of mulch,” she said. The mulch, she said, also probably wouldn’t prevent bacteria from flowing into the groundwater and mixing with water from other sources.

Judge Francis Connolly expressed skepticism about this argument.

“That’s your problem, not the Amish’s,” he said of the problems of determining which groundwater belongs to whom. “It seems to me a tie goes to the bishop.”

Also controversial were the government’s estimates of the amount of gray water produced by Amish households without treatment facilities. In its briefing, the county estimated that households were producing at least 100 gallons per day and likely much more. The Amish disputed this characterization, saying the government’s estimate was based on speculation only and that by their own estimates they used approximately 30 gallons of water per day.

Brown noted that the county and MPCA have not been able to obtain more accurate data on Amish water use, in part because they are only allowed to inspect graywater systems once with prior notice.

Lipford, meanwhile, said the Amish only resisted government requests for inspection when officers attempted to search their homes.

Read the top 8

Sign up for the Top 8, a roundup of the day’s top stories delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday.

You might also like

Comments are closed.