Poland residents seek help in plugging flooding woes

July 31, 2010 at 12:08a.m.

By Ashley Luthern

poland

Like many village residents, Roschelle Strollo is frustrated.

Her house on Windemere Place doesn’t get water in its basement, but rain forms pools in an open ditch that borders her property, posing a safety hazard for neighborhood children, she said.

“Every time it rains, our two front yards connect across the street with water,” said Strollo, whose husband, Gregg, related the problem to village council July 20.

Strollo’s property has become a collecting basin for the neighborhood’s water because she still has an open ditch to drain storm water. The other properties have pipes underground, which individual homeowners installed at various times.

“One by one, homeowners have closed the ditch, so now we’re collecting everyone’s water, and we’re flooding,” Roschelle said, who has lived there for 12 years.

An open ditch can expand or contract with the water, making it the best option for water control, said Russell Beatty, village street commissioner and police chief.

“The problem to owners is they don’t look aesthetically pleasing,” Beatty said.

The village is about one-and-a-half square miles and flooding is problematic throughout because much of the area lies in a floodplain. Most of the storm- water system was installed in the 1950s, Beatty said.

The village street department has an annual budget of $100,000, which covers the cost of three employees, equipment, salt for roads and repair funds. The majority of flooding complaints are on private property with no easements or right-of-way land, Beatty said.

“I can’t use public money to make improvements to private property,” he said. “It’s really a juggling act.”

Next year, a storm water utility fee, which was adopted by council in April, will collect money that could be used for those projects, said Mayor Tim Sicafuse at the July 20 council meeting.

The ordinance authorized a $3.50 monthly fee, which officials estimate will bring in $70,000 annually.

But the village does not yet have a definitive method to prioritize projects, and the street department has been doing day-to-day operations, including explaining the water system to residents.

“A lot of people don’t understand that the storm water systems are so shallow,” said Tim Clavin, who has worked at the village street department for 17 years.

Clavin and Beatty both said if residents get water in their basement, it’s likely from the sanitary system that travels at least 12 feet underground — not storm water that runs a few feet underground.

Beatty has worked with the Mahoning County Sanitary Engineer’s office to get new bladders installed, which help to prevent rain water from getting in the sanitary drain.

Unlike the village, Poland Township has only a few areas that chronically flood, said Administrator James Scharville.

“You have to look at five years to 10 years ago, and all the extra concrete we put out there,” Scharville said. “We’ve taken a lot of land that used to take water where it could settle, and now we have homes there. ... The water has to go somewhere.”

Scharville said flooding is a countywide problem.

“We have a water problem here in Mahoning County. Can it be solved? Who knows?” he said.

“It will take a lot of effort, a lot of engineering and a lot of money. We have to ask, ‘Are we creating a problem somewhere else?’ Unfortunately, people think, ‘As long as I’m not getting flooded, it’s not my problem,’ and that’s just basic human nature.”

That mentality is what led to Strollos’ situation, Roschelle said. She and Gregg have offered to buy a drainage pipe themselves and work with village administrators to fix the problem.

“We don’t want freestanding water anymore,” Roschelle said. “We want a pipe.”