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Officials OK pact for Austintown sewer project
YOUNGSTOWN
Mahoning County commissioners approved a $503,896 contract with a Cleveland-area company for an Austintown sewer-rehabilitation project that will begin a month from now.
Sixty-five percent of the cost of the project, known as the Wickliffe Area Sewer Rehabilitation, Phase II, is being paid for by an Ohio Public Works Commission grant and the remainder by local funds.
The Bedford company will inject a plastic interior lining into more than 13,000 feet of 60-year-old, 8-inch sanitary sewer lines and seal 67 manholes to prevent rainwater and groundwater from leaking into them, said J. Robert Lyden, county sanitary engineer at the commissioners’ Thursday meeting.
The project’s cost will be about 10 percent of that of a sewer replacement, he added.
The commissioners also heard from Carole Bopp, director of the Hope House Visitation Center, 660 W. Earle Ave., who said her agency is struggling financially after the county’s Department of Job and Family Services canceled JFS funding to the center in 2009, seven months into a two-year contract.
As Bopp was addressing the commissioners, Robert E. Bush Jr., county JFS director, left the room and returned a few minutes later, saying he had just called his department’s fiscal officer to discuss the center’s funding. “He’s looking at that issue,” Bush told the commissioners.
Bopp urged the commissioners to follow up on their Feb. 21 letter asking their counterparts in Trumbull and Columbiana counties for regional cooperation to help fund the center, which is now the only facility of its kind in a six-county area.
“I’m getting referrals from all over. ... I’ve had to turn people away, and it’s sad because these families really, really need the help we provide and the safety we provide,” Bopp said.
Founded in 1999, the center serves as a neutral site for exchanges of children between estranged parents and for supervised visits between parents and their children during family crises.
With a $161,000 annual budget, the center is funded by the county Children Services Board, federal Community Development Block Grant money, private foundations and donations, and fees it charges clients based on ability to pay for services.
Bopp thanked the commissioners for their application for a federal Safe Havens grant that would provide her center with $390,000 over three years beginning in October. “We’re confident we’ll get this money,” Bopp said.