Possible conflict with brew?

HI,

I recently upgraded to Yosemite because I was having some issues in my previous Mavericks installation. To install, my school’s IT guy wiped the SSD and installed a fresh disk image. I have been slowly re-installing applications and testing. Last night I installed brew and it seem to be working fine. I had no problems when I did ‘brew doctor’ and ‘brew update.’ This morning I installed TotalFinder and now when I try to brew I get the following message:

Warning: /usr/local/etc isn’t writable.

This can happen if you “sudo make install” software that isn’t managed by
by Homebrew. If a formula tries to write a file to this directory, the
install will fail during the link step.

You should probably chown /usr/local/etc

Warning: The /usr/local directory is not writable.

Is there any chance that my brew problems are related to Total Finder? In the passed (under Maverick) I had the same thing happen. I would fix the permissions and then for a time all would be good but then the permissions would go wanky again. Any ideas?

Thanks, Daniel