Trumbull obtains grants for sewers

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

While Trumbull County officials have worked diligently in recent years to provide sewers to the county’s low-to-moderate-income areas that pollute sewage into the environment, they also have spent a great deal of time providing sewers to neighborhoods whose residents are willing to pay the entire cost for them.

Putting those two categories of projects together, the county sanitary engineer’s office received $16.4 million in grant money from the state and federal governments since 1998 — or 50.5 percent of the $32.5 million cost to provide the sewers.

“To have over 50 percent of the money associated with the projects to come from grants — free money — that’s a very good number,” said Rex Fee, executive director of the sanitary engineer’s office.

An annual report Fee’s office generated recently says about $9 million in grants were the result of grant applications from the Trumbull County Planning Commission; the other $7.4 million came from grant applications from Fee’s department.

The engineer’s office also secured $16 million in low-interest loan money during that time.

“We did a lot of work to generate that,” Fee said of the grant applications.

Fee has said the county is building more feet of sewers every year than practically any other county in the state.

One reason is that Trumbull does qualify for a significant amount of grant funding for sewers because of the consent agreement signed in 2007 by the county and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency that indicates the county must abate sewage problems in a variety of “unsewered areas of concern” by specific dates.

The percentage of the cost being paid for with grant money is all the more impressive given the list of projects completed in recent years that didn’t involve any grant funding, such as sewer projects completed in 2007 for Henn-Hyde Road and Devon Drive, both in Howland Township, Fee said.

The greatest challenge in future years will be to stay on schedule in building sewers in low- to moderate-income areas such as Meadowbrook, just west of Warren, along the Mahoning River and North Leavitt Road in Warren Township.

The project is on order for completion of $12 million in sewers to serve 600 homes by 2015. That project may need to be moved back to 2020, however, Fee said.

Payment history for water customers in that area suggests there could be problems collecting the capital charges for new sewers, Fee said. If residents don’t pay their capital charges — the monthly fee for their portion of the construction of the sewers — the cost falls to other customers, Fee said.