FEATURE FLOODING, POLLUTION, SPRAWL AND FRAGMENTED GOVERNANCE
Northeast Ohio’s water systems are death by a thousand drops for its poorest residents By Hannah Lebovits IN NOVEMBER 2013, CLEVELAND Water and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District split up the water and sewer bills being sent to their customers. The effort was framed as an attempt to eliminate confusion. In July 2014, a series of storms overwhelmed the Shaker Heights stormwater sewer system to a point of disrepair. It would eventually cost the city $1 million to fix. In May 2017, Cleveland Heights residents found out that the city’s compliance with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) consent decree could quadruple their sewer bills. The cost to avoid “Sanitary Sewer Overflows” would come out of customer’s pay checks. In July 2019, the Sam’s Club and Walmart stores near the border of Parma and Brooklyn flooded. In this case, the flooding was unique: It hadn’t rained there at all. In February 2020, a Cleveland woman named Pat showed me an outstanding sewer bill, desperate for help. The bill was up to $132, and she was starting to consider not paying the water bill so she could pay a bit of the sewer one. Hoping to avoid becoming another one of Cleveland’s 50,000 or so shutoffs, or one of the more than 10,000 homes on which the water department has placed liens in recent years, Pat was looking for assistance. “I keep trying to talk to someone,” she told me. “When they were all in one bill, I could manage it. This is too much. I don’t know what to do.” It’s hard to imagine a connection between those things, separated by years and miles, beyond the fact that they all involve water. But they are connected, largely through Cuyahoga County’s Manifest Destiny charge to develop every square mile of land, which has altered the amount of water that moves across the area, and the impact this water has on larger systems. Rain behaves differently, lands differently and drains differently in an area nearly 100-percent developed compared to one that was 26-percent developed
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five decades ago. We’ve taken Cuyahoga County and turned it into one big parking lot. But that’s just part of the problem. Cleveland and its inner-ring suburbs were built prior to the establishment of best practices for water and sewer planning. Wealthier communities in the outerring, many of which are at higher levels of elevation, have benefited from community planning efforts that have shifted the burden to other areas. Climate change has ushered in a new era of storms and overwhelming snow melts. And the federal government has significantly
| clevescene.com | September 9-15, 2020
reduced its role in supporting urban infrastructure. These changes have resulted in higher fees, increased flooding, more pollution, and a disproportionate effect on the area’s low-income populations. And no one’s really in charge of fixing it.
A Fragmented Governance System The issue isn’t being ignored, per se. There are countless public officials across the county working on aspects of this and the negative
effects. But no one is truly in charge, because too many people are. There are three primary elements of the water system in Cuyahoga County: what comes out of your faucet, what goes down your drain, and what gets collected from the natural environment. Cleveland Water, the largest supplier of the water that comes out of your faucet, draws its service from Lake Erie. For most Cuyahoga County residents, the water that goes down your drain is processed by Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. The liquids that end up in the stormwater system are generally
