This sort of surface level ivory tower "nothing that proclaims to be positive for the environment" attitude underpins so, so much of the bullshit that makes us all poorer and worse off.

>You mean to tell me the land of 10,000 lakes might have a shallow water table that might require mounds more often to prevent people poisoning groundwater with their literal shit? The horror.

The "land of 10k lakes" doesn't get it's water from the ground like a desert municipality. They have surface reservoirs and protected watershed areas to keep those clean enough.

The "ground" is effectively the filter. You want it to be full of shit. That's how a septic works. That's how basically all runoff cleansing measures (sand traps, grass buffers, etc, etc) work. You're basically using "nature" as the settling tanks of a water treatment plant. A septic is the same but underground.

The problem is high water table. But as long as the water table permits a septic is great.

>Without hard data about the site I'm probably going to side with the county on that one.

Did you ever think that maybe the reason the dude applied for the septic was because the engineer said "this property is great for a septic, let's do a septic"

Surely this government you think so highly of is capable of exercising judgement.

If not then why give them discretion in the first place?

What about the licensed engineer that must stamp the plans? Surely he is trustworthy? If not then why does the government enforce his license monopoly and force people to do business with him?

>As for your friend wanting to improve the lot but needs to do a lot of drainage fixes, he should lobby his community for property tax abatement to support the drainage improvements

Are you insane or just lying through your teeth. Nobody is gonna add a political advocacy side quest to an already overpriced minor improvement. They'll just bend over and take it and hope to make it up rent or resale.

>It's something we've ignored in a lot of our planning for a long time.

This used to be municipally managed. Landowners built drainage as they saw fit. Municipalities managed stuff like streams and culverts and ditches and whatnot, build flood control dams and holding ponds and the like.

Making it part of the permitting/development process is mostly an exercise in financial engineering (gets the obligation off the municipality) and is worse because you get patchwork of minimum viable solutions (that work poorly) instead of systems that are planned at the municipal or higher level to work well.

>Both of your major examples are probably selfish takes that harm their neighbors to save someone some money.

And peddling things that drive up the viability floor of development so you can feel good about saving the environment isn't.

Enjoy your $3k rent for a 500ft slum. Make sure you complain about "landlords" while you're at it.

You're competing with the person who isn't renting my buddy's ADU because the ADU never happened because the septic upgrade killed it, the minimum viable mound system got put in to save $$ and it has the capacity for the house and nothing more Y'all really served the public interest on that one.