Carlisle is currently facing a potential “doomsday scenario,” to use one resident’s phrase, that could eventually render the picturesque village center uninhabitable. Septic systems are failing. Wells are set too close to leaching fields. The drinking water — at Town Hall, the library, and the school — keeps setting off alarms for contaminants.

This situation is not new. But no one wanted to talk about it — many still don’t — until a professional car detailer came to town and tried to reopen Ferns, the village center’s general store.

The store had served as the town’s beating heart for more than 180 years before it closed in 2025: a meeting place for both seniors and middle schoolers, an outpost for cyclists, and the only place in town where you could get a jug of milk.

The car detailer and his wife, Ben and Amy Pirri, who moved to Carlisle during the pandemic, thought it would be simple enough to buy the store and reopen it. “We’ll just turn it back on,” Ben Pirri recalled thinking.

But it wouldn’t be so easy. A series of increasingly gross discoveries over the past year led the Pirris to realize that there was no hygienic way to dispose of sewage from Ferns and that the whole village center suffered from similar problems.

Amy Pirri demonstrated how easy it is to open a hatch that leads to water outside of the waste water treatment site in Carlisle, on Sept. 24. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

A Halloween display featuring the long wait to open Ferns is seen in Ben and Amy Pirri’s front yard in Carlisle. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

It is practically a matter of town pride that there is no public water supply or sewer system in Carlisle. Residents use backyard septic systems and wells just like their forebears. If you live on a farm, with a few acres of land, that’s fine. But in the village center, where some lots are the size of three basketball courts, aging septic tanks and wells are packed in next to each other.

The Pirris were astounded by what they discovered: The good people of Carlisle had perfectly preserved their colonials, but were contentedly living with the risk that the contents of their toilets might seep into their wells.

“Like it’s really disgusting,” Ben Pirri said. “It’s bad for you.”

The ambition of the Pirris’ project has grown. They are now trying to solve Carlisle’s sewage problem, not merely reopen its beloved general store — and improbably they seem to have devised a workable plan.

Have they been welcomed as heroes? Not quite. Their efforts have created a controversy, and they now find themselves contending with a particular strain of Carlisle NIMBYism. If they fix the sewerage, their critics say, won’t developers build more housing? And what about the town’s character?

“Carlisle is the town that Carlisle is because it doesn’t have public water and public sewer,” one resident wrote on a web forum where the concerns run to dozens of pages.

Ben Pirri has a different take. “The Romans figured this out a long time ago,” he said. “When you have density, you can’t put your [expletive] there. You gotta take it somewhere else.”

Buildings along the rotary in Carlisle were viewed through the window of Ferns. Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

Angus Beasley, a builder who owns the buildings on either side of Ferns, has watched this all with a sense of déjà vu. When he moved to town many years ago, he embarked on his own project: restoring a prominent historic home in the village center that had deteriorated to the point that it looked like “a haunted house,” he said.

He spent 12 years battling town regulators and concerned residents about, among other issues, where to put the home’s waste water. “Gridlocracy” is how Beasley describes Carlisle governance. A seemingly infinite number of volunteer committees find ways to veto and override each other until virtually any development or infrastructure project grinds to a halt.

“There were times when I felt like I was in a tragicomedy,” he said. “Why,” he asked, practically calling out to the sky, “are you always no? Could it ever be ‘yes’ or ‘how might we?’ You guys design robot dogs and you own Cape Air and your kids are all Harvard cum laude.”

He’s not alone. A wildlife conservancy dropped plans to buy property in town after neighbors threatened to sue. A foundation withdrew a grant to build pickleball courts when the town couldn’t get its act together. According to Beasley, Carlisle once hired a consulting firm for master planning, but the firm ultimately threw up its hands, fired the town as a client, and gave the money back.

Beasley fears his friend Ben Pirri will face a similar fate.

Pirri, 34, drives a $315,000 Porsche — one of many cars he owns — and didn’t go to college. He was once kicked out of Catholic school because, as the principal put it, “Ben, you did what you did in front of the bishop.” His company, which controls a growing empire of car detailing and maintenance businesses, is called No to the Man Brands.

These facts foreshadow some important points. Pirri is not your typical Carlisle guy. He also possesses the self-made entrepreneur’s conviction that he alone can fix it.

Last year, he and Amy signed a contract giving them an exclusive option to buy Ferns from the landowners. They expected to reopen it in 2026. “We had no idea what was coming,” he now says.

The first sign of real trouble came on Aug. 7 last year, when Stephen Sousa, a Brookline-based restaurant architect, toured the shuttered general store at the Pirris’ invitation.

They envisioned turning Ferns into a high-concept café and meeting place with a full kitchen, indoor and outdoor seating, and a store carrying gourmet goods and staples.

The plan struck Sousa as ambitious, but plausible, until they looked at the bathroom. This is the “not super sexy” part of restaurant design, Sousa said. You have to inspect the toilets.

Pirri opened the door to the market’s only bathroom and Sousa stepped inside. What he saw in the back corner looked like a toilet, but also not quite. The proportions were off; there were some unexplained, extraneous bits.

They went down to the basement to see what was underneath. Pirri opened the door to a utility closet. Shoehorned inside, they found a metal apparatus the size of four refrigerators strapped together.

What the [expletive]? Sousa thought. He took out his phone, snapped a picture of the machine’s label, which included the word “Clivus” and a phone number, and walked outside. When Pirri caught up with him, Sousa looked vexed and was tapping at his phone.

What are you doing? Pirri asked.

“I’m calling these Clivus people to figure out what the hell this is,” Sousa said.

The answer was that it was a composting toilet, the kind of thing you might find on the Appalachian Trail.

Ferns had a composting toilet, they soon learned, because there was not enough space on the property to process waste water through a septic system without contaminating nearby wells. Septic systems work by leaching liquid waste into the earth and relying on dirt to filter it. On small lots, there’s just not enough dirt. To make matters worse, Carlisle is built on fractured bedrock that can hasten the waste water’s journey from septic system to well.

As the village’s septic systems age and leak, the situation is worsening. If left unaddressed, it could become “deadly” in the next few decades, said Susan Murcott, a waste water expert and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Like, to property values?

No, she said, “to human beings.”

By the spring, the Pirris were still just trying to open their general store — not save the whole town. To run a proper café — with seating for dozens and a full kitchen — they needed a real septic system and bathrooms, not just their Clivus toilet.

Ben and Amy Pirri sat on the steps at Ferns Market in Carlisle.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff

They looked into using the earth underneath a neighboring park as their leaching field, but an environmental engineer determined it wouldn’t work. They asked about hooking up to the nearby police station’s septic system, but it wasn’t big enough.

Then there was the “moonshot” option, as the town administrator, Ryan McLane, called it. They could try to run 2,100 feet of pipe from Ferns to a town-owned waste water treatment plant connected to the public school, but only if it had enough unused capacity to handle Ferns’s output. McLane wasn’t sure it did.

At first, this option sounded implausible; it sounded like a full-fledged municipal infrastructure project.

Now desperate, Ben Pirri went to Town Hall to meet with Carlisle’s health director, Kelli Calo. He walked up to her desk on the second floor and asked her the key question.

Did the plant have enough unused capacity to take on Ferns’s waste water?

“Yeah,” Pirri recalled her saying, though Calo denies she did. “Since the illegal dumping stopped in March, there should be plenty.”

Here our story takes a strange turn, one that dragged the Pirris — and, for a time, the Globe — down a rabbit hole, trying to pin down whether this illegal dumping actually occurred.

It is a fact that from November 2025 to March 2026 the amount of waste water flowing through the school’s plant mysteriously spiked, according to the plant’s data. By the time the spike abruptly ended, approximately 750,000 gallons of excess waste water effluent had flowed through the plant and into a nearby leaching field.

Town officials and the private company that operates the plant say they can’t definitively determine what caused the spike, but they insist it was not illegal dumping.

Calo, the health director, said she’d never even heard of the idea of illegal dumping until the Globe contacted her about it. Pirri, for his part, stands by his recollection of Calo’s remark and also says he attended a meeting with town officials in the spring where illegal dumping was openly discussed.

Regardless, the ultimate conclusion of this strange side quest was twofold: There’s enough capacity at the school plant to accommodate Ferns’s waste water — and perhaps, the town of Carlisle is not the most fastidious manager of waste water matters.

The Pirris kept mum about the alleged dumping during a May 27 Board of Health meeting about their sewage problems.

The meeting was tense anyway. The Pirris pitched their plan to save Ferns: hook up to the school’s plant.

“So outlandish,” proclaimed Patrick Collins, the board’s chair who is himself a waste water engineer.

“Is Carlisle town center not somewhat in crisis?” Ben Pirri said. “Do we not need a better solution for waste water in town? You don’t think so?”

Then Collins shot down a proposal they weren’t actually making. “The idea that a waste water treatment plant will ever be built in Carlisle in our lifetime is such a pipe dream,” he said.

The meeting inflamed one of Ben Pirri’s deepest insecurities. “I’ve always wanted to get older because I feel like everyone’s always been like, ‘Get out of here, kid. You’re not old enough. You don’t know enough,’” he said. Now here was an authority figure — The chair of the board of health! A waste water engineer! — telling him his plan was a “pipe dream.”

“Challenge accepted,” Pirri recalls thinking.

On Aug. 11, he showed up at the town’s public Select Board meeting and caused a little scandal. The school’s plant, he said, was underutilized, so much so that, at times, the plant’s operators had to shovel in dog food to keep it running. Now, he said, the town had an opportunity to save Ferns and “determine whether a town-owned asset could help address a town-center need,” he said.

He asked the Select Board to pay for or at least subsidize his study. It would cost $55,700. The Select Board balked, so he decided to pay for it himself. He had a Dodge Viper he could sell.

Then he returned to the matter of the winter spike. He presented a report with a graph showing the effluent anomaly. The cause, he said, may be “illegal dumping,” which caused a bit of controversy in town and added to the sense among some residents that he’s nothing but a you-know-what stirrer.

Meanwhile, another front had opened in the struggle over Ferns. Some townspeople reacted with alarm to the idea of installing sewer pipes in the village center. “From my perspective,” wrote one resident on the web forum City in the Woods, “any attempt by the Town to provide either water or sewer to private lots should be viewed as a beachhead that the state will utilize to override local control.”

The Pirris embarked on a charm offensive to win over the skeptics. “Fair questions,” Amy Pirri wrote in response to a later message on the forum. From August to October, she issued repeated assurances that their goal was only waste water reform, not to overhaul Carlisle’s restrictive zoning.

Then the Select Board, as the builder Beasley might put it, sicced the committees on them. On Oct. 1, the chair of the Select Board called Ben Pirri and told him he needed to form a committee. The committee would study sewer issues and the Pirris would have to recruit one member from almost every other town committee to serve on it.

McLane, the town administrator, rejects the idea that Carlisle has a particularly bad case of NIMBYism. “To change the character of a village that has existed for 200 years is a worthwhile conversation ... but to have that conversation go quickly would be surprising,” he said.

The Pirris are playing nice. They are dutifully forming the sewer committee. But they have also taken their case to the public.

Using some advanced AI software, they have combed through Carlisle records and extracted the many alarms and warning signs about the town’s water. “This problem didn’t start with Ferns,” they wrote in a slickly designed graphic they blasted out on social media on Oct. 9. At the public library, the graphic said, levels of nitrate exceeded drinking-water standards in 2016. At Ferns and Town Hall, E. coli was found in the wells in 2021 and 2023. The Globe separately found that E. coli was discovered in the school’s well last fall.

Facilities director Stephen Connearney then asked ChatGPT, “How does E. coli get in a sealed 400 foot deep well?” ChatGPT listed waste water infiltration as one possible source.

The Pirris sense that town opinion may be shifting in their favor. They have received an outpouring of support on social media. People really want Ferns to reopen, and more residents are expressing openness to their sewer plans. The library committee is now interested in hooking up to the school’s plant, and some homeowners are wondering if they could join.

The Select Board has softened its stance. The members recently agreed to hold a Town Meeting next month. The subject will be whether town funds should be expended on the engineering and design plans for sewer pipes to connect the village center with the plant.

On Nov. 16, the question will be put to a townwide vote.

Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.