AUSTINTOWN — Recent local news stories about water problems usually carry a Boardman headline, but Monday’s meeting of the Austintown trustees had an undeniable theme.

Yes, flooding and drainage issues happen in Austintown too, and township officials heard all about them from several residents. On Wednesday, Township Administrator Mark D’Apolito discussed the issues in greater detail.

“In recent years, we have had many larger-than-average rainfalls. All of our engineering standards are based on 100-year floods and now we get that 100-year rainfall every spring,” he said. “We build our systems’ capacities to what the weather experts and engineers tell us they need to be. When that capacity is exceeded, the systems aren’t going to work as they should.”

But the rainfall can affect roads and yards in more ways than might be expected.

On Cumberland Drive, in the middle of the road, there is a pothole. It’s there because of a natural spring that has formed beneath the surface, and the soft clay there makes the asphalt much less stable.

D’Apolito said the township has hot-patched the site multiple times already. But neighbors along the street want a more permanent fix. The only solutions, however, are to simply resurface the road — it is on this year’s paving schedule — and retouch it in three to five years, or undertake a much more exhaustive and expensive project that D’Apolito said is unlikely to really solve the problem, and could even make the street worse.

“The only thing we could do is come in and try to do some underground retention or diversion and the cost to do that is extremely expensive,” he said. “Resurfacing the road is more cost effective and generally more effective for a problem this size.”

Three years ago, a similar problem occurred on Country Green Drive. The township excavated that portion of the road, digging a hole below similar to a swimming pool, and filling that with rocks and substrate of decreasing sizes — starting with fist-sized rocks at the bottom and working up to fine milled material right below the surface. Within each layer of that substrate are perforated pipes that will pull the rising water from the underground aquifer away from that spot and down the road or out to a nearby stream.

“That has helped, but in the long term all we’ve done is probably shift the water down the road,” he said. “The hazard here is that it’s forming the center of the road, so if we do that and don’t do the full width of the road, we’ll just force it somewhere else and create a whack-a-mole situation to the side or down the road, then you have additional spots that are compromised.”

The other problem is that the Country Green project cost $300,000. Given the increased costs of materials and labor since then, the same job could cost as much as $420,000 today.

D’Apolito said it would only cost $40,000 to resurface that one-eighth to one-quarter mile section again in a few years, meaning the township could do that nearly 10 times.

“We could resurface that road many times before we’d come close to choking out the aquifer. And with groundwater, there are just no guarantees,” he said.

BOULDER CREEK

D’Apolito expects better success with a sinkhole elsewhere in the township.

On Boulder Creek Drive, a stream diverted by a headwall on the property empties into a pipe then follows an unnatural path behind other properties on the road and then into the catch basin at the right of way along Wilcox Road. A sinkhole has emerged in the right-of-way there.

D’Apolito said it happened in fall or winter, and the township fenced it off and tried to obtain an emergency grant from the Ohio Public Works Commission.

“Unfortunately, they determined it was a maintenance failure, not a design failure, because the pipe underground had reached the end of its useful life,” D’Apolito said.

After waiting through the winter, Austintown has contracted with Cortland-based Z-Tech to have the section of pipe under the road in front of 6041 Boulder Creek Drive replaced and piped over to the next catch basin.

D’Apolito said there remains a section of pipe in the side yard along 6041 that carries the stream into the township’s collection system, but that pipe cannot become the township’s responsibility because it is largely a convenience factor for the homeowner that was installed by the original builder. He said the township has neither the statutory authority — the right to execute the work on the private property — nor the budgetary authority — a source of funding appropriately dedicated within the ballot language of approved township levies — to dedicate to the project.

“We’re tied especially to ballot language, and road funds don’t work on an inflow project,” he said. “If it happened on the other side of the street in the field, I could possibly reach into the road funds because if the outflow clogs the catch basin, the whole system fails there. On an inflow pipe, though, it’s the resident’s responsibility when it’s capturing water from the backyard. We stick to the repairs that affect the roadways.”

The contract with Z-Tech is for $35,500.

BARRINGTON COURT

Michael Beudis of Barrington Court said he is concerned about how the houses around him are routing their downspouts. In particular, the house behind him on Birchwood, which Beudis said he believes is abandoned, has caused flooding issues in his backyard.

But the problem for Beudis is the fundamental principles of the riparian doctrine that governs waterflow laws. Riparian doctrine refers to property rights based on land ownership adjacent to water. The overall concept is known as prior appropriation, which means “first-in-time, first-in-right.”

“The downhill property has to accept water from the uphill property,” D’Apolito said. “So, if your topography is generally below that of your neighbor, you cannot build a dam along your property to force water back to their house. But you can convey it to your neighbor downhill.”

Colton Masters, Director of Environmental Health for Mahoning County Public Health, which oversees downspout permitting, said the concept effectively means that downspouts and yard drainage systems simply cannot force naturally occurring water to go where it would not normally go on its own.

“We get calls about it all the time this time of year,” he said. “If they are existing downspouts, it’s a civil matter, unless someone is intentionally trying to pump water where it wouldn’t naturally flow.”

Again, Masters said, the problem really comes down to more water coming from above.

“We’re seeing heavier rains and it’s overwhelming the systems that were never designed for this volume of water,” he said. “If it’s downhill from the property, there’s nothing that can be done from our end, and if there’s a vacant house, there’s nothing we can do to go after anyone. If they try to proceed civilly a court would say the same thing.”

PINE TRACE

On Pine Trace, a years-old dilemma is cropping up again for Martha Redginger.

A pipe that runs through a township easement connects Inwood Drive and Pine Trace Drive to the township stormwater system.

On the surface above that pipe water is gathering in Redginger’s back yard. She said it happened several years ago and the yard had to be dug up.

At that point, a 24-inch pipe meets with an 18-inch pipe, which in turn feeds back into another 24-inch pipe. But township officials said the pipe is only carrying water through and is not causing water to back up.

D’Apolito and Zoning Inspector Dominic Moltchan said the issue is one of simple grading, which means it is effectively Redginger’s problem to fix.

“Somehow the developer or homeowner added grates, but that’s not something we’re required to maintain,” D’Apolito said. “Our collection system exists to make sure roads don’t flood. We convey water from property owners all the time where we have capacity to do so. The water there is not making it into the grates. In an older home with an older yard, you have erosion and it’s no longer going to be graded how it was when the home was built.” D’Apolito said the best solution to the problem is to install French drains to guide the excess water into township catch basins.

D’Apolito said it is also important to note that conveying an easement does not necessarily convey responsibility to the township to maintain it.

“There are many undedicated easements on the property, usually just because the developer put the easement there but never completed the process of transferring it to the township for maintenance.”