Proposed creek project hits snag with engineers

A permit is needed to allow machinery to be placed in the creek.
By DENISE DICK
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
POLAND -- What seemed like a simple plan to address flooding has turned into a complicated application process.
Joe Mazur, village council president, wrote a letter this summer to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asking for a permit to remove an island, dubbed Trash Island by village officials, from Yellow Creek and to widen the creek where it narrows.
Trash Island is a small raised area within the creek where debris collects. It's located downstream from the Poland branch of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County.
Though the village doesn't need a permit to cut trees and brush, any activity that results in fill or removal of material from Yellow Creek, including placing machinery into the creek for clearing, requires a corps of engineers permit.
Early last month, two representatives from the corps' Pittsburgh Division met with Mazur to visit the site and discuss the request.
Mazur then received a letter saying more information was needed to process the village's permit application.
Analysis needed
That letter said the permit application must include an alternative analysis to justify the need for the removal and a hydraulics and hydrology analysis to show that the proposed project will achieve the desired result.
Mazur isn't sure where the village will go from here.
"We don't have the money to do all of that," he said. "All we want to do is clear the trash out and widen the creek where it narrows."
A project by the library to construct a concrete, 3 1/2-foot-high, 2-foot-thick and 210-foot-long wall to keep the water out of the building was recently completed.
In August 2004, water streamed into the library bookstore and meeting room. Yellow Creek swells where it narrows and rounds a corner in the village.
The wall starts near the Main Street Bridge and rounds a bend along the creek.
Though the project may help stop flooding at the library, Mazur says it won't help people who live in Green Meadows, a development on the other side of state Route 170, because the development is upstream from the wall.