Source Policy

What counts as an acceptable source

For any statement about what is legally required, permitted, or prohibited, we require a primary source.

• The government agency with jurisdiction — state environmental or health agency, county health department, municipal board of health.
• The published regulation or code itself.
• A university extension publication, for technical rather than legal statements.
• A federal agency publication, for technical guidance.
• Official published guidance from the authority that administers the requirement.

What does not count

• Another contractor’s website.
• Another septic information site.
• A trade association summary, unless it reproduces the primary source.
• A news article describing a regulation.
• A forum post, however knowledgeable.
• Our own recollection of how a requirement usually works.
• A model code, where the question is what a specific jurisdiction adopted.

What we record for every source

Our source registry is a typed data structure, not a prose bibliography, so that every regulatory claim on the site can be traced to a specific record and audited automatically.

• Jurisdiction the source governs — never broadened.
• Name of the issuing authority. Never a summariser.
• The canonical URL on that authority’s own host.
• The subject it supports.
• The single proposition it establishes, written to match the source rather than paraphrased.
• Whether that proposition is a binding rule, official guidance, a service the authority operates, or an inference drawn across sources.
• The date the source was accessed, and the published effective date where one was available — recorded as absent rather than guessed where it was not.
• The date the record was last reviewed.
• Which routes on this site rely on it, checked in both directions against what the pages actually render.
• How it was retrieved — read directly from the authority’s host, or confirmed through material indexed from that host.
• Verification status — verified, authority-confirmed, pending, or stale. Only the first two may back published copy.

Current status, stated precisely

The registry holds sixteen records across six jurisdictions, drawn from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the published Massachusetts regulation, the Barnstable County Department of Health and Environment, the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, the New York State Department of Health, the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

None of them is marked verified, and that distinction is doing real work rather than hedging. Direct retrieval of government hosts is blocked in the environment this site was built in: every attempt to open mass.gov, epa.gov, the Suffolk County site, the Minnesota agency sites and the New York health department site was refused. What was available was a search restricted to those official hosts, which returned their own indexed material along with the canonical URLs.

So each record is marked authority-confirmed: the issuing authority and the URL are confirmed, and the proposition comes from that authority’s own published material, but the page was not opened and read line by line in that session. Every one of those statements is published with the authority named, the jurisdiction stated, the access date shown, and a link to the source, so you can check it in a way you cannot check an unattributed summary.

How a sourced statement appears on a page

Regulatory statements are not woven into the prose where they would be indistinguishable from our own opinion. They are rendered in a distinct block that always carries four things.

1. A label saying whether you are reading a requirement, official guidance, or a service an authority operates.
2. The jurisdiction the statement actually applies to — which is frequently a single county, not a state.
3. The proposition as recorded in the registry, not a tightened-up version of it.
4. The issuing authority, a link to its own page, and the date we accessed it.

What is still unresolved, and therefore unpublished

Five subjects remain open. They are listed here rather than filled in with something reasonable-sounding, because the gap is the honest answer and a homeowner acting on a guess is worse off than one who knows to call.

• Town-level requirements above the Massachusetts state floor for the fifteen Southeastern Massachusetts communities we cover — this would need retrieval across fifteen separate municipal sites.
• The 2023 Massachusetts regulation changes and precisely which Cape Cod towns they reach. Barnstable County publishes on this; the substance was not retrievable, and summarising a page we could not read is the exact failure this policy exists to prevent.
• Point-of-sale inspection requirements county by county in the Minnesota market. The state agency confirms these differ locally, and two counties were surfaced — but publishing two out of eight would imply the other six have no requirement.
• What licence or certification is demanded in Massachusetts of the people who inspect, pump, design and install. We have this for Suffolk County and for Minnesota; the Massachusetts equivalent is still open, so the contractor page tells Massachusetts homeowners to confirm it locally.
• Current effective or revision dates for most cited sources. One was surfaced. The rest are recorded as absent, which limits how confidently we can assert that a rule is current.

What would move a record to verified

1. Direct retrieval of the authority’s own page from an environment that is not blocked from reaching it.
2. A reading of the full text, not an indexed extract of it.
3. The published effective or revision date recorded from the page itself.
4. The proposition re-checked word by word against what the source says, with no tightening and no extrapolation.
5. The claim still scoped to the jurisdiction the source actually governs — a county source never licenses a statewide statement.
6. A review date set, after which the record is flagged stale and the audit fails until it is re-checked.
7. The automated gate re-run, which fails the build if any rendered claim has no registry record behind it.

What we publish regardless

• How septic regulation is layered — state, county, municipal, special-area.
• Which categories of work commonly require a permit, stated as a general pattern to confirm locally.
• How to identify who has jurisdiction over a specific property.
• The exact questions to ask that authority.
• What to settle with a contractor in writing regarding permits and inspections.
• Facts that hold regardless of jurisdiction — such as design flow being tied to bedroom count.
• What to do when records and physical reality disagree.

Technical versus legal statements

It is worth separating these. How a drain field works, why a failed baffle damages it, what compaction does to soil structure, and why surge loading is harder on a field than steady flow are technical matters that do not vary by jurisdiction.

What varies is what you are required or permitted to do about them. We are comparatively confident on the first category and deliberately silent on the second until a source is verified.