Residents in Ravenna Township’s Chinn Allotment may see some financial relief from a multi-million sanitary sewer project that is coming their way.
Portage County commissioners recently approved $500,000 in ARPA funds for the project and put the project out for bid.
The new sewer system is planned for part of Red Brush Road/Brady Lake Road, Genevieve Road, Plainview Road, Lois Road, Marchinn Road, Woodlawn Avenue, Roselawn Avenue, Rose Street, Wall Street, Mabel Avenue and San Mar Street.
A new pump station will be built on Brady Lake Road to collect and transfer sewage to the Short Street station, which will be upgraded to handle the increased flow. From there, the sewage will be transferred to an existing wastewater treatment facility.
Besides the ARPA funds, helping to fund the estimated $11 million project will be $500,000 from the Ohio Public Works Commission, $925,000 from the Army Corps of Engineers, $1 million from the Ohio EPA H2Ohio Fund, a $4 million principal forgiveness loan from the Ohio EPA Water Pollution Control Loan Fund and $431,250 that the county had left over from a separate water resources project.
The project has been delayed since county commissioners first approved it in 2019. Since then, a project redesign scaled down costs, and the county water resources department now anticipates a two-year project that will likely start early next year.
Bids are due by 2:30 p.m. Aug. 14.
The sanitary sewer project is rooted in the Portage County Combined General Health District receiving “repeated complaints of raw and/or poorly treated sewage emanating from broken clay tiles crisscrossing throughout [the] neighborhood,” according to a 2018 health district report that was two years in the making.
Though Portage County Water Resources Director Dan Blakely said “a lot” of Chinn Allotment residents remain opposed to the project, he suggested that their stall and delay efforts are ill-advised. The EPA’s $4 million grant offer is not open-ended, Blakely said.
“If they delay it, it’s just going to explode the cost significantly higher if we lose that grant. So for us, the timing is really an issue. We can’t slow this process down any more. We’ve got to move forward or the residents are really going to pay for it,” he said.
Allotment residents will be required to tie into the sewers whether they wish to or not, even if their septic systems are perfectly functional.
Fully 255 Chinn Allotment property owners are already looking at big bills. They are expected to shoulder just over $4 million of the estimated total project cost. That translates to about $28,857 to $32,857 for each of the parcel owners, with even higher bills forecast for all homeowners on San Mar Street and Mabel Avenue and for some parcels on Wall Street and Roselawn Avenue.
Add in some $20,000 for grinder pumps that will be required for some homeowners, costs associated with disconnecting current septic systems, thousands of dollars to run pipe from homes to the county sewer line and thousands more for tie-in fees, and the bills quickly add up, residents say.
The ARPA money will help drive costs down a bit, but exact numbers are unknown. And, because some residents own more than one lot, their actual costs will be higher: the costs are figured on a per-parcel basis, not per property owner.
People who own multiple parcels may join them into one, but that only drives up costs for everyone else. The total bill is still there and would have to be divvied up among fewer remaining residents, Blakely said.
The EPA may eventually free up more money for the residents, but awards are likely to be income-based and residents will have to wait until the project is done to even apply for relief.
“Saying there’s a project doesn’t necessarily make it qualified to apply. Once the sewer’s in the ground, it opens up more grant possibilities for them to connect to that sewer. Until the sewer’s built, there’s no way to apply for a connection to a sewer that doesn’t exist yet,” he said.
Well aware that some property owners are already reeling from the anticipated bills, Portage County Treasurer John Kennedy has reached out to state officials. U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and State Rep. Gail Pavliga both provided links to potential funding sources, and Brown shared the information with Chinn Allotment residents at their July residents’ meeting.
Ravenna Township Trustees or the county commissioners would have to apply for the funding, some of which could come in the form of grants and some which could come in the form of no- or low-interest loans. All of the applications would have to wait until final costs are tabulated.
Trustee Vince Coia pledged the township’s support “if it’s in our ability to do that.” Because matching grants sometimes require local government entities to provide half the money for a project, the trustees will have to examine their own available funds, he said.
“We’re trying to help them out as much as possible. When the new fiscal session starts, probably more money will be available next year. We hope so because that will definitely ease the burden for a lot of people,” he said.
County officials are also on board.
“If we can find money, we’ll do what it takes to identify those sources and bring it back to Portage,” Kennedy said.
Making matters worse, since the state is revaluing every property in Ohio this year, property owners can expect their properties to be worth about 30% more than they are now. That, Kennedy said, can translate to property taxes increasing by up to 15% in 2025.
“You put that on top of what they’re already stuck with in terms of the [sanitary sewer] bill, it’s going to be an even larger pill to swallow for the homeowner there. Most of these folks are on fixed incomes,” he said.
BACKGROUND
The PCHD’s investigation started in 2016, targeting 178 of the 297 households in the Chinn Allotment. The assessment, published Sept. 18, 2018, found that 19 were “confirmed nuisances comprised of older obsolete technology such as chemical tanks or leach wells,” 101 had “unknown types” of sewage treatment systems, 24 had “older-style on-site leach trench STS of undetermined functionality.”
The report states that the pipes and drain tiles were privately installed to fix broken conduits in the 1980s. The project, which the report calls an “alleged public utility,” was never turned over to the county for maintenance, and subsequent development in the allotment resulted in multiple lines crisscrossing “the whole area.” PCHD officials were simply unable to determine whose sewage flowed in any given direction.
A PCHD report dated Oct. 11, 2018, indicated that “all [surface] water samples” obtained since 2016 exceeded “acceptable E. coli colony count limits.”
Over the course of several days, “the stormwater inspectors documented the presence of odor, color and other manifestations of raw and/or poorly treated” sewage at 15 of 16 sampling locations. One location was consistently dry, so bacterial water quality counts could not be obtained, the report stated.
PCHD inspectors also found “a large swamp/wetland area” southwest of the Chinn Allotment “that was full of raw and/or poorly treated sewage.” Using Google Earth technology and dye tests, the inspectors concluded that the sewage was passing underground from the allotment to the swamp. The inspectors pinpointed the location of the conduit and determined that water from the swamp flows south toward Wahoo Ditch and Breakneck Creek and enters the Middle Cuyahoga River Watershed below Lake Rockwell.
The watershed includes part of the Cuyahoga River, Fish Creek, Plum Creek, Breakneck Creek, Potter Creek and 132 square miles in Portage, Summit and Stark counties. “Removing raw sewage and/or poorly treated sewage from approximately 297 homes in the Chinn Allotment would improve the Middle Cuyahoga’s water quality,” the PCHD report stated.
That led to the PCHD declaring that unsanitary conditions existed in the neighborhood and to conclude that a sanitary sewer project was “the best solution.”
Acting on orders from the Ohio EPA, the Portage County commissioners on Aug. 12, 2019, cleared the way for the sanitary sewer project, specifying that it be complete within 42 months. That would have meant the sewers would be installed by mid-2023, but county officials sought and received an extension from the Ohio EPA.
“With the original design, the project costs were extraordinarily high, so our sanitary engineer John Vence went back and reviewed the design. We had to go back and tell CT Consultants, which did the design, to go back to the drawing board,” Blakely said.
Blakely’s staff provided CT with some suggestions as to how the project costs could be reduced, and the Ohio EPA granted an extension while CT created Plan B.
Vence said work is likely to start in January 2025 and end in January 2027. The county health department has ordered that all users must tie into the sewer lines by January 2028. That means hiring a private contractor, arranging for county inspections and pulling and paying permit fees.
HEALTH CONCERNS
Though some Chinn Allotment residents expressed concern about perceived cancer clusters in the neighborhood, data compiled by the Ohio Department of Health led Portage County Combined General Health District epidemiologist Olivia Card to conclude that the number of newly diagnosed cancer cases from 2017-2021 was actually below what would be expected.
Laura Young is one of several Chinn Allotment residents who remain concerned about how the sewage that has been seeping into the ground for decades may have affected their well water. She said she knows many people have stopped drinking their well water, but still use it for cooking, cleaning and washing.
Becky Lehman, the health district’s deputy health commissioner, said there is no indication of contamination to individual wells since the sewage nuisance is considered surface water, which eventually makes its way to waters of the state. Wells are considered private water systems that homeowners must test themselves, she said.
Young said she understands that, but counters that the Chinn Allotment situation is atypical.
“The health department does not deny that they have been told over the years that there is a problem. Given the fact that the EPA said the surface water is contaminated, we will be seeking assistance from the health department or the EPA to begin testing all the wells.This is not a new problem,” Young said.
The county health department, the only state-certified well water testing lab in Portage County, charges $60 to test a well. There are two private certified labs in Akron: they charge $35 to $61.
Wendy DiAlesandro is a former Record Publishing Co. reporter and contributing writer for The Portager.