There is a way to keep city sewage out of Mill Creek

The Confederate flag dropped from atop the South Carolina Capitol grounds Friday – a move that few thought ever would happen.

A similarly unfathomable feat occurred here Friday, too.

Mill Creek MetroParks closed its waters to all public access due to human sewage contamination.

It’s the first closure in, well ...

No one is quite sure. No one is sure if the waters first envisioned by Volney Rogers have ever been closed due to a public-health threat.

The Confederate flag dropped after the race-fueled killing of black church members. It was a sudden and unprecedented decision made by political leaders who, even weeks before, would never consider such an act. Some even called it a political stunt to remove a symbol as prideful as it is painful.

Now, the murder of nine citizens is surely not to be compared to a fish kill and a lake closure.

But what can be comparable is the political will and courage to fix a decades-long ill and flaw.

Is Friday’s Mill Creek lakes’ closure its Confederate-flag moment?

Are the current conditions of such an atrocious degree that holding onto a belief, a practice, a policy that your forefathers created is simply and purely inhumane? South Carolina said so.

The public outcry of the Mill Creek incident shows that it can be.

But the political response shows otherwise.

The Mill Creek problem is a Youngstown city problem first, and Mayor John A. McNally said it won’t be fixed for some 20 years.

To be clear, the fix carries a steep price tag – $146 million. The fix includes two core actions – double the size of the city’s sewer plant and build a $48 million pipe and culvert system to carry the sewage out of Mill Creek.

The work could be done now. It’s paying for it that needs the 20 years so as to gently introduce the new fees onto Youngstown residents.

And this is where the irony, the sadness and the political paralysis kicks in.

The sewage problem is not unique to Youngstown.

Many Ohio cities are dealing with the same situation. Our system was designed in 1913 by a rich city built on industry that was inviting environmental consequences it did not care to know about.

It’s wrong to say the environmental consequences were unforeseen. Mill Creek’s father, Rogers, was crushed by the sewer-system plans and predicted its impact. He was right. Public swimming was banned just 10 years later due to the contamination.

That wealth is gone, too. The rich city that created the problem is now home to the poorest core of residents in the county. Heck, on the South Side, you’ll find one of the poorest ZIP codes in the U.S. They all will be asked to pay for this mess.

While we ask the poor to fund this fix, here’s just a sampling of what government has or will spend around them:

We will spend $18 million on a new Interstate 680 highway interchange just 1.5 miles from the Western Reserve Road interchange.

We are about to spend $3 million for a roundabout at “Five Points” in the same Western Reserve Road area.

McNally in 2012, as county commissioner, pushed through a new bed tax of $500,000-plus per year to fund economic development at the Western Reserve Port Authority. The current county board wanted to disband the authority.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, who wants to help the Mill Creek fiasco, found $5 million for local mindfulness work.

We’re spending millions around the Mahoning Valley and state on shuttering viable school buildings in pursuit of a single-campus flavor of the day.

That’s just a sampling of what’s been spent without even looking hard. All of them are viable projects in some capacity.

But they are niceties that border on foolish so long as we keep Mill Creek the toilet that it is.

They also are real dollars – unlike the current funding scheme. The city and the federal government already have punted on this funding fix several times due to the reality of Youngstown residents paying for it. They just did so in 2002. The city’s population in 2025 and in 2035 will not be dramatically more financed than it is now. Odds are, the city and the funding plan will be further depleted either in population or in wealth.

For further funding help, I think the city and the state should earmark pending dollars to a sewage fix.

When the downtown hotel opens, all of those tax dollars generated by the project should fund the fix. To see a bed-tax dollar from there fund the port authority would be a shame.

A few million in grants will come in to pay for a new downtown amphitheater and park. All tax revenues from that venture should be directed to clean the Mill Creek waters that park will share.

These are all bold moves. But all are very doable with the same political might that brought down a controversial flag.

Oddly, our state and federal leaders just issued news releases in recent months to announce that they would start working together. Well, this seems like a good “Item 1,” because it’s unrealistic to think the poorest of our poor will fund a fix that is clearly beyond their means.

McNally, by holding to his “this-is-the-best-we-can-do” line, is merely kicking the can down the road like other mayors did to him.

When Youngstown industry disappeared, it affected an entire population.

When Youngstown wealth vanished, it affected an entire population.

Closing Mill Creek Parks’ waterways is not a Youngstown problem. It affects the entire Valley.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.