City Leaders Address Flooding With County Commissioners

Mentor officials emerged from a recent meeting with Lake County Commissioners believing that the sides are on the same page about working together to prevent a repeat of the flood on July 20.

"We don't want to ever have flooding like that again," council President Scott Marn said.

The meeting resulted in few, if any, definitive decisions, but city council members and City Manager Ken Filipiak are pleased that commissioners agreed to take action regarding the county's sanitary sewer system. Mentor leaders didn't seem so sure that would be possible following a special city council meeting July 31, where residents expressed frustrations from investing in improvements that made no difference when the rainfall hit the city.

"We left the meeting in agreement that there needs to be more work done in discovering the sources of the inflow and infiltration in the system," Filipiak said, "that Lake County has to lead that charge and the city will assist in any way possible."

Filipiak said he's most concerned about subsections of the county system immediately north and south of Bellflower Road and east and west of Route 306. The Bellflower is especially under capacity, with most of the reported flooding coming from that area. Filipiak wants the county to add capacity to the system or figure out how to get water out of it, but hopefully both.

"These two subsystems are underperforming and have for quite some time," the city manager said.

Commissioners did not return messages from Mentor Patch regarding flooding.

Marn and councilman Bruce Landeg, who also attended the meeting, admitted discussions contained a bit of tension in the early stages. The talks felt more productive "once we got past the tension of Mentor saying, 'you guys own sanitary sewer' and they said, "parts on private property aren't our responsibility." 

Filipiak believes the city has passed on the concerns of residents connected to the antiquated sanitary sewer system.

"I think we got across the level of urgency that we've placed on this in a way that the county better understands than they have in the past," Filipiak said.