Amish refuse to adhere to state code

Two outhouses at a school are currently collecting waste in plastic buckets.

EBENSBURG, Pa. (AP) — Members of a small, isolated Amish community are refusing to follow state code in their handling of waste from a school’s two outhouses, citing their religious convictions.

The Amish property owner said he is even willing to go to jail to defend his beliefs. Local officials aren’t eager to go to that extreme, but are in a quandary over how to assure the laws are applied uniformly and the raw sewage doesn’t contaminate water supplies.

Waste from the outhouses has been collected in plastic buckets, then dumped onto fields. The county is demanding the Amish install a holding tank and contract with a certified sewage hauler for disposal.

A district judge last month found Andy Swartzentruber, on whose land the outhouses sit, and school elder Sam Yoder in violation of state sewage disposal law. They have until Tuesday to pay more than $500 each in fines or to appeal the ruling.

“I’d rather go to jail, and abide by our religion,” Swartzentruber told The Associated Press one recent afternoon while taking a break from tilling a field.

Local officials say putting the men in jail won’t solve anything.

“That’s a huge sacrifice. I believe in their sincerity,” said William Barbin, attorney for the Cambria County Sewage Enforcement Agency. “But I still have to find a way to solve the problem.”

Judge Michael Zungali, who issued the initial ruling, said he hasn’t decided what to do if the farmers don’t comply — but might impose community service instead of jail time.

Swartzentruber and Yoder represented themselves last month in court, where Yoder also said he would not pay the fine or appeal, county officials said. Because the Amish do not have phones in their homes, Yoder could not be reached for comment.

The men are members of the Swartzentruber Amish, one of the Christian sect’s most conservative groups. Their only Pennsylvania settlement is the one here, about 70 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Home to 30 families, the Swartzentrubers relocated to Ebensburg from Ohio about a decade ago. It is a relatively recent community compared with the much larger and more well-known Amish population in south-central Pennsylvania.

The Swartzentrubers number only about 8,000, or fewer than 5 percent of the roughly 220,000 Amish in the United States, according to Donald Kraybill, an Amish expert at Elizabethtown College. More than half of their settlements are in Ohio.

While all Amish shun the modern world, the Swartzentrubers are known for their more austere restrictions on technology, more severe limits to interaction with the outside world and more rigid notions of the separation of church and state, Kraybill said.

Yoder and five other Amish men laid out their beliefs in a handwritten letter to the sewage enforcement agency in January.

“We feel this sewage plan enforcement along with its standards is against our religious [beliefs],” they wrote. “Our forefathers and the church are conscientiously opposed to install the sewage method accordingly to the world’s standards.”

Other than the sewage issue, local officials say relations with the Swartzentrubers have generally gone well, other than the occasional citation for not having warning markers, like orange triangles, on their horse-drawn buggies.

Permit disputes with the Amish are most common in areas where they are relative newcomers, but usually get resolved, said Herman Bontrager, an insurance company executive from Lancaster County who is a member of the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom.

“The position of not wanting to abide by code and cooperate with legal authority, that’s a pretty rare position,” he said. “Most Amish find ways to do that.”

Among the Amish, church guidelines can be interpreted differently from congregation to congregation — and how disputes are resolved can also differ greatly from community to community, Kraybill said.

“There’s a lot of different outcomes — sometimes accommodations on both sides, sometimes someone goes to prison,” he said.

Kraybill said he was unaware of any similar dispute over sewage disposal in Ohio. In Morristown, N.Y., the Swartzentrubers are involved in a court fight over state building codes.