(upbeat music) (graphic pops) - Hello and welcome to "Journal," I'm Steve Kendall.

Recently, the proposal to address drainage issues in the Ten Mile Creek and Swan Creek Watersheds garnered a bit of attention.

Joining us is the Lucas County Engineer, Mike Pniewski to talk about that, discuss what the project was in Lucas, Henry and Fulton Counties, and what's going on with it now and the purpose for it.

So, Mike, welcome to the show.

Thank you for coming on.

- [Mike] Thanks, Steve.

- [Steve] This has been a somewhat issue that got a lot of attention.

- [Mike] Sure did.

- [Steve] It sure did.

And you handled, I thought very well because you were the point person.

You were out there dealing with all the questions.

Talk a little bit about, when we talk about the Swan Creek Watershed and the Ten Mile Creek Watershed, size-wise, we've got a map behind us here, people can see that, but they both are rather large areas.

And we talk about a watershed.

We're not just talking about Swan Creek and Ten Mile Creek, it's every ditch, every creek, any waterway that drains into that.

So it's a pretty extensive network that you're talking about here to manage, maintain, clean, and make it work properly.

- That's right Steve.

I think what a lot of people don't understand when you're talking about a watershed is that, every time it rains and it rains on your house, that a portion of that water goes somewhere so that water will go somewhere.

Sometimes it soaks into the ground depending on the soil type you have.

A lot of it runs into a drainage system.

And you know, that's what constitutes the watershed is, is the drainage system that we have.

So portion of it'll go down your driveway, into the street.

It might go into a roadside ditch or a underground storm sewer and all of those outlet into some sort of drain, or some sort of creek that makes up our drainage system.

And so in the Swan Creek Watershed, you know, Swan Creek itself is about 60 miles long.

It runs from about Delta, Ohio out in Fulton County and runs through Lucas County.

And it comes out right at Owens Corning headquarters in downtown Toledo.

And then you have Ten Mile Creek Watershed, which comes just about, just around Lyons, Ohio out in Fulton County, runs along the northern part of Lucas County and comes out in Point Place.

So where Point Place is in Toledo.

So it's, again, that's about, it's a little bit shorter.

It's about 50 miles, but it's still a pretty major watershed that we have here in Lucas County.

- Yeah, it's Ten Mile Creek, but it's 50 miles long.

But that's how that works.

And so, yeah, and as you talk about that, because I think sometimes people don't understand that they just assume their water, if it goes into their yard, that's the end of it.

And to some degree, that's true.

But eventually, all of that water migrates its way to some lower drainage system, whether it's the ditch near them, the ditch that then goes to Ten Mile or Swan Creek and as you said, ends up in either the Maumee or the Ottawa Rivers, that kind of thing.

When's the last time, because a lot of people are saying, you know, why now?

Why are you coming here now and asking me to pay to clean this?

Hasn't it been cleaned all along?

If it is not, why hasn't it been cleaned 10 years ago, 20 years ago?

Why isn't there some ongoing project?

So why now and when was it last cleaned?

Has the watershed ever been really comprehensively dealt with or not?

- No, it hasn't.

Essentially, the currently under the Ohio Law and the Ohio Revised Code responsibility to take care of our drainage system, other than in a public right of way, is the responsibility of private landowners.

And you know, there's in Ten Mile Creek, there's about 80,000 private landowners and Swan Creek, there's about 50,000 private landowners, and each of them are responsible in their own way, shape, or form to maintain their own drainage system.

And, you know, there are a lot of people that do a really good job of it.

There are some people that don't really know what to do.

And as Lucas County, you know, becomes more and more developed and urbanized, you're replacing a resident that had a very intimate understanding of drainage and what it means in terms of an agricultural type perspective to more of a suburban type perspective, where they have an expectation that the government takes care of that.

When in fact, most of the time for most of these systems, they don't.

So what happens is the Ohio Revised Code provides a system called a petition where a benefiting landowner can essentially petition the government to go through a process to enable the county government, the county engineer's office, soil and water districts to essentially maintain these systems in a way that it's coordinated.

That it's paid for by everybody who uses it through assessment.

And make sure that these systems that we rely on, our drainage infrastructure system that takes away our runoff and our water is maintained in a way that it functions.

And it will continue to function.

So that's what we're trying to do here in both of these watersheds.

- Yeah, and I know that one of the questions that people have had is because some counties have an ongoing maintenance program, it's just you're assessed every year on your taxes and you know, the grade all construction excavator comes along and cleans the major ditches and whatever.

- [Mike] Yep.

- We don't necessarily have that comprehensively in Lucas County for whatever reason.

At least that seems, that's what it appears.

So when people say, well, gee, I've lived out here 20 years, you've never asked me to clean it before, what's the problem?

And you address, some of the people aren't familiar with why that ditch is there, why that creek is there, why there's road drainage in front of house when they come with you to you and say, look, I don't live near a ditch.

I don't live near a creek.

The nearest ditch is a mile away.

My water's not ending up there, at least that's their understanding.

How do you explain it to them?

Yes, indeed, some of your water ends up in that ditch a mile away.

- [Mike] Yeah.

I mean, that's a question that a lot of people have.

Depending on the soil type that you have, there is some proportion of the water that falls on your property that's carried away by some sort of drainage system.

And all those drainage systems will outlet into one of these ditches that are proposed to be placed under petition.

So the issue is, is that it's probably been 50 to 70 years, maybe even more since any of these were really taken care of.

And we're really starting to see the signs of a lack of maintenance.

So primarily, what we're seeing is two things, is one is log jams.

So a lot of the ditches and streams that have a lot of forested corridors because of the Emerald ash borer that killed a lot of our ash trees.

The majority of the trees along those forested corridors at one point were ash.

Over the last 15 to 20 years they've died, and now they're starting to rot and starting to fall into streams.

So we're seeing thousands of log jams that are in these streams that have to be essentially cleaned up.

If they're allowed to continue, they'll move downstream and they'll start causing damage.

They cause log jams, which causes a lot of water to back up and causes a lot of flooding and flash flooding.

If they break, essentially, if a log jam break, you'll get some pretty, basically a dam flood- - [Steve] Like coming loose- - coming loose.

And with all that debris causing a lot of debris and damage.

So a lot of that has to be taken care of to prevent damage and damage to residents.

The other thing that's happening is they're starting to silt up.

We were part of the Great Black Swamp and most of these streams were very shallow streams with big broad flood plains.

And they were, for agricultural purposes, they were filled in.

So most of the flood plains were filled in.

And as a result, when it floods, most of the runoff has a lot of sediment in it.

It drops down into the bottom of streams.

And we're starting to get 1 to 2 feet of sediment that in these streams that need to be removed.

They're not removed, thus, the pipes or ditches that we rely on will fill up and then they won't really function anymore and we'll start getting water backed up, slower drainage, those sort of things.

- [Steve] Well, we come back obviously a lot more questions about this because it's a comprehensive plan that I'm gonna say you put forth, but you're basically the instrument of the government here.

You're not personally saying, I think you should clean this up, but in your role to be a professional, to do your job, it falls on you to be the point person on this.

So we come back and we can talk more about why people are asking questions, how this plan comes together.

And again, we've talked about why it's important, but a lot of things we can cover yet.

Back in just a moment with Lucas County Engineer, Mike Pniewski here on The Journal.

Thanks for staying with us on The Journal.

Our guest is Mike Pniewski Lucas County Engineer, and we're talking about Swan Creek and Ten Mile Creek.

The proposals that are out there to address the drainage issues, the cleaning of those.

And as Mike, as you said earlier, in most cases, unless private landowners have been doing things, a lot of these ditches and creeks have not been touched in 50 years.

And the ones that were done back then, or have been done are by landowners, most likely farmers and people who understand why they're there.

When you have people who have never dealt with that over 50 years, the first time they're hearing about cleaning a ditch, that's an educational situation right there because the ditch has been there, water's been running.

What's your problem?

What's your problem, Mike, why are you coming to me to say I need to clean the ditch near my house?

Or why am I paying for the one a mile away?

How do you explain that to them in a way that they can get a better understanding of the overall, how this whole thing works in concert?

- Yeah, I mean, the way that I kinda explain it is our drainage system is a system and it's like the weakest link where if one person fails to do what they need to do, the whole system fails.

And kind of the analogy I give is, you know, you picture your subdivision streets maintained by the government, but the main road that you go onto is not maintained by the government, it's maintained by the people who live along it.

And so what happens is somebody gets a pothole and in front of their business or their home on the main road, and they don't have the knowledge to fill a pothole.

I don't know how to fill in a pothole, or I don't have the money to fill in a pothole.

Or it's like, I like the pothole because it slows people down.

And the issue is, that eventually the pothole gets bigger, the people next door see someone, well, he's not fixing his pothole, why should I fix mine?

- [Steve] Why fix mine, okay.

- And then you just get more potholes and eventually, the whole system doesn't work anymore.

You can't drive on the road because it's full of potholes.

Our drainage system works a lot the same way.

Without everybody kind of chipping in and maintaining it, the system will eventually fail.

And that's what we're starting to see now.

We're starting to see the signs of failure because of that.

And so you try to impress upon people that if you live on something like that, that you have a responsibility to maintain it for your neighbors so that they don't have issues either.

It's just like people who live upland, like you were mentioning before say, why should I have to pay for it?

Everything else, if we use something, you know, you have a responsibility to maintain it and pay for it.

And, you know, people who live upland, even though they don't see it, even though it isn't in front of their house, they use it.

And this is really the only piece of infrastructure that we all rely on, that we really rely on private individuals to maintain something that we use.

- Yeah.

And one of the things you hear too, and I'm, you know, devil's advocate, all the questions that people were raising was that, well, why should I pay for my neighbors?

And firstly, isn't there money already set aside for this?

And if not, why haven't you been setting money aside or aren't my taxes already paying for this?

Why aren't you using my taxes to do this?

So a lot of questions there, but people say, why am I paying for my neighbors?

Well, and you kind of explained that, that you're all part of this larger system that is interconnected, but you know, the question that they ask will say, "Well, why now?"

And you've addressed that because we haven't done it for so long.

It's like anything else, you can pay me now or you can pay me later and pay me later, has now arrived basically.

And you have people who have never been asked about this before, and that's a difficult thing when they say, "Well, why now?"

"Why me?"

When you look at that, I know you're an engineer, you understand how this all works.

But the average person just watches it sort of work and says, "Well, I don't see a problem with it."

And you've kind of explained how you can explain it to them, but when they say to you, but the water's not standing in my yard, my road's not covered with water, isn't somebody else's problem, why am I paying for the flooding somewhere else?

- [Mike] Yeah.

I mean the issue is, is it may not be happening now, but you know, eventually, if you let the system continue, kick the can down the road, allow the system continue to slowly go into failure, it eventually will reach you.

It's just a matter of time.

And just like anything else in your house, if you have the drip, drip, drip in your drain and you just keep letting it go, you know, eventually, you find out that you have to rip up your floor and you have to rip up your walls because you let something go for so long.

It's largely the same way with our drainage system.

We rely on the system to basically carry the water that comes away to basically, allow us to have the quality of life that we have to make what we have hospitable.

Nobody wants to live in a swamp, you know, for various reasons.

And largely, our drainage infrastructure is what allows us to not have a swamp and to live in a swamp and to have localized flooding, to have, you know, water that slowly drains away.

You know, that causes a lot of other issues.

You know, in terms of sidewalks sinking and driveways sinking.

- [Steve] Roads- - [Mike] Roads failing.

- [Steve] You have the infrastructure under all of those things is damaged by the ground, staying constantly wet.

- [Mike] Right.

So all these things, if you fail to maintain your drainage infrastructure, it'll manifest itself in a lot of different things if you allow it to continue for a long period of time.

The reason why we haven't paid for it is, this is the way the law works.

You know, you can't use regular tax dollars to pay for this and without a petition, there's no ability for the government to come in and to maintain these systems.

So that's why the petition is being proposed to be put in place.

It allows us to be able to maintain these systems.

And the way it works is you don't use general tax dollars because the benefit is only for the people in, who live in the watershed.

- [Steve] Watershed, so- - And therefore the people in the watershed have the responsibility of paying for it and maintaining it and not through general tax dollars.

- Now, one of the things that you had heard is people were talking about this as well, this never would've gotten started unless the village of White House hadn't brought it to your attention.

They're the ones who started this, they're the problem, we're solving their problem.

I think everybody sees it as somebody else's problem.

Now, obviously, someone had to come forward because they were starting to see, just as you described, the effects of the system not being maintained over the years, for whatever reason.

They're not the culprit here.

There's something, the ones that said, look, there's a problem developing and you're the person to talk to, you then are the link in that chain to start this process.

The kind of things that people were seeing and you talked about it, sediment, logs falling, and trees falling in, that kind of thing.

When you talk about addressing that, my guess is a lot of just regular homeowners aren't capable of going out and cleaning that kind of thing out of it, or dipping sediment out of their ditches.

That requires some extensive equipment.

You can't just go out with, theoretically go out there with a shovel and shovel your ditch out.

But probably not the best way to do it.

Not the most efficient way.

So the cost of this, obviously, because people looking at that, I know there was some confusion because people got a postcard and it said, here's an amount, here's what your assessment is, but of course, people gravitated immediately to the largest amount on there.

So explain a little bit about that card.

What was on there, what it meant and what it didn't mean for people?

- Yeah, so what the way the Ohio Revised Code works is that everything is based on terms of benefit and how you proportion assessments is based on terms of benefit.

So the way you generate what the assessment amount is, is you have to determine what each individual property owner's benefit is.

And the way you do that is you assume that the drainage system didn't exist.

So if there was nothing there was no- - You would start with a clean slate.

- Clean slate, no Swan Creek, no tributaries, no nothing.

How much would it cost to build that?

And then once you've determined what that cost is to build that, then you do a whole bunch of factors that the code requires to proportion that benefit to each of those individual property owners.

And the driving force of them is really acreage, the acreage of your property, the land use, you know, are you agriculture, are you commercial, are you residential?

And the soil type.

So if I have sand, you know, you have more infiltrates than clay, which more runs off into the system.

So that has a bearing of how much you generate on your parcel.

And then there's two other factors, one's called remoteness.

So how high are you from the ditch?

Because if I'm lower I get more benefit because I have more at risk of flooding than someone who's higher.

And the other one is use, so how much of the system do I use?

So the further up to where you are- - [Steve] Away you are from the termination point- - [Mike] From termination the more- - [Steve] The more longer your water, the farther your water travels, theoretically, the more you should pay because you're using more of the system.

- [Mike] Beause you're using more of the system.

- [Steve] Yeah, gotcha.

- [Mike] So those are the five factors.

You put them in a big spreadsheet, you know, with the total number and it comes out with a number called the maintenance base.

- [Steve] Yeah, okay.

- [Mike] And that's what that bigger number is.

That's the maintenance base.

So that's, if I had to build the whole system today, that's how much you'd have to pay to build it.

You use that maintenance base essentially to generate assessment.

So when you wanna come out every year to do some sort of assessment, you go to the commissioners and say I want to collect 1% of the maintenance base, 0.25% of the maintenance base, 0.5% of the maintenance base.

So that's how they generate what the assessment will be.

- [Steve] Okay, all right.

Good, well, when we come back, we'll have more questions because we're got a lot more to cover here yet.

But we're talking with Mike Pniewski, Lucas County Engineer about the Swan Creek and Ten Mile Creek Watershed.

Back in just a moment here on The Journal.

You're with us on The Journal.

Our guest is Mike Pniewski, Lucas County Engineer.

We're talking about Swan Creek, Ten Mile Creek in the news because the time has come to sort of pay the piper on cleaning those watersheds.

People will say, well, surely, there must be money somewhere else.

Why are you assessing me?

Aren't there grants?

Can another agency come in and do this so that I don't have to pay for it?

What's your response to that?

Because people always think there's a pot of money somewhere else that's just waiting for you to say, give me those billions of dollars or those hundreds of thousands.

Is there anything like that that, that could contribute to underwriting some of the cost of this?

- Yeah, 10 years ago I would say there wasn't, you know, over the last 10 years there's been a lot more focus on drainage and monies for drainage, but they're very localized and they have to do a very specific thing.

So we've been very successful, the county engineer's office in terms of getting monies to do what we call 2-stage ditches.

You know, restoring floodplains, those sort of things with our drainage system.

And we've done over Ten Miles over the last five years.

And we'll continue to apply for those and try to get monies to be able to do that every year.

But we have, you know, Swan Creek has over 300 miles of tributaries, Ten Mile Creek has 200 miles of tributaries.

You know, there's not enough of those type of grants to continue to do the maintenance that we need to do every year- - [Steve] Or just to get caught back up.

- Just even just get caught back up.

You know, there's monies available and we'll continue to go for them to offset it.

But it's not enough to cover the whole thing.

- [Steve] To do this, to do a project of this magnitude.

- [Mike] Yeah, every year.

- [Steve] Yeah, and because people say, well, surely, there's gotta be a cheaper way to do it.

They're really, I mean, and because we all look at that and say, well, there's gotta be a way to find a way to find it a different way, a cheaper way, a less expensive way.

But this is sort of what this is.

I mean, that's your business.

You know how this works, you know what it costs to bring equipment in, labor, all of that and deal with these kind of issues.

- Yeah, the cheapest way to do it's to do it at scale.

And that's what we're proposing to do.

- [Steve] Trying to do.

- I think a lot of people are afraid of, you know, are we gonna clear cut?

Are we gonna cut down every tree to be able to access it?

The answer's no.

You know, a lot of the stuff along the thing is brush.

So there's a lot of brush.

If it's a large tree, trees have a lot of benefit.

They hold the bank, they do a lot of benefit to try to reduce erosion.

It would be counterproductive if we were to cut down every tree along a corridor into basically clear cut stuff.

Now we will need to remove some brush to be able to get in.

There's ways you can clear log jams with winches and you have trucks behind tree line and you put the winches out.

And for smaller log jams, you can pull those logs up.

Much larger log jams, you're gonna have to cut some localized sections trees just to get access.

But there's ways that you can do it in a responsible way that you're not clear cutting everything to make it happen.

- Yeah.

And you're probably pushing, you know, against the tide a little bit too, because people say, gee, you know, I like all of that.

I like those shrubs along my ditch.

I like that all overgrown and it's habitat and it's beautiful and all of that, but at the same time, there is a primary function for that, that piece of infrastructure, that ditch or that creek, which is to move moderate water away from your property and other people's property.

So it's nice that it might look nice, but there is some function here that needs to be addressed, obviously.

- Yeah, I mean, we like that too.

I mean, it definitely has a very good use, but most of the time, most of these ditches you're like on a 20 to 30 year cycle in terms of clearing them out.

If we have to brush a section, you'll be amazed how quickly it grows back.

- [Steve] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Because you can do it in one year, in the next spring, things are back again and enforced.

They double, seems like they doubled down on coming back.

Right now, obviously, you were having meetings, you were looking at getting final approval for this or final word from the commissioners that deal with this, that's been moved back a little bit.

So kind of give us the status now of where the project is and where we're going in the future with it.

- Yeah, so we held the beginning of the final hearings for this and my recommendation was to postpone.

So Ten Mile Creek will be postponed until March.

Swan Creek will be postponed until July.

The real purpose of that is what we found is that like other people have found, there's a lot of misconception, there's a lot of misunderstanding, there's a lot of need for education and outreach and to try to educate people on what we're doing and why and how we're all tied together.

So we kind of wanted to take a pause and do stuff like this.

And to try to educate the public about what we're proposing, why it's important and why it's needed at this point in time.

The other thing that we're doing is, you know, this tends to be the beginning of budget season.

So it's gonna be election season.

The budgets will be set in 2025.

And it gives us an opportunity to go down to the legislature and make our pitch to try to get some more outside funding to try to help for this.

So there are some grants available like I mentioned before, but we think that with, in terms of the Emerald ash borer, you know, it's more of a regional scope, it's more than just us.

There's probably a lot more people other than Lucas County or Fulton County, - [Steve] Fulton County.

- [Mike] or any of them that have been having to deal with pulling out dead ash trees all over the place.

And it's probably makes sense to set up a fund maybe, with some tax dollars down in the legislature to try to help with some of these things.

- [Steve] Yeah, and that's a good point because as you said, it's not just a local problem, it's a regional problem.

And probably if we looked around the state, we're probably not the only region with tributaries or waterways like Ten Mile or Swan Creek that need addressing this way.

So maybe it's a statewide issue, much like algae in the lake area.

It's a serious issue to deal with.

Your plans then are to probably, as we move along, to hold more meetings to try and talk to people, to do more extensive way of trying to explain to them the whys and the where fors and how much and why it has to be done a certain way, that kind of thing and give everybody a chance to kinda step back a little bit.

Obviously, it's something that needs to be done.

It's gonna happen at some point, it has to happen.

Otherwise, we'll have more serious issues than we have right now.

If there's one thing, you know, if people want to, I know you probably have picked up more than a few phone calls, answered a few more emails, texts and things like that.

But I am assuming that, you know, you're always available if someone has a question or people on your staff to help explain, get better understanding what this project is and why.

- Yeah, we have a website.

If you go to our website, www.lucascountyengineer.org, there's two pages that are devoted to this where there's a whole bunch of information that you can read and look at at your leisure.

If you're in the watershed, you can actually look on your property.

We have a GIS map on your property that identifies all the factors we use to determine what the maintenance base is.

And there's a lot of good information on that website.

Take a look at that and if you want to, if you still have questions, then you can email and call our office anytime.

- Thanks for being here, Mike.

You can check us out at wbgu.org and of course, you can watch us every Thursday at eight o'clock on WBGU-PBS.

We'll see you again next time.

Goodnight and good luck.

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