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![A backhoe operator digs up a street in Chauncey so the sewer line underground can be replaced. [David Forster | WOUB]](https://woub.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Chauncey-sewer-project-street-e1731703633733.jpg)
With a $13 million fix, Chauncey is removing one of its biggest obstacles to redevelopment
By: David Forster
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CHAUNCEY, Ohio (WOUB) — Amy Renner has big plans for Chauncey. And some smaller ones too: a coffee shop and a restaurant would be nice. The village has neither.
But even the small things bring challenges. Renner’s biggest nemesis since she became mayor four years ago is the village’s aging sewer system.
The network of clay pipes, installed sometime in the middle of the last century, is brittle and the pipes keep cracking and breaking.
These openings in the pipes not only allow raw sewage to leak out, they allow groundwater to seep into the lines, reducing the capacity of the water treatment plant to treat sewage.
“And so that was limiting our ability to add more housing here in Chauncey or larger-scale businesses, because we couldn’t show that we had the capacity to take on more customers,” Renner said.
But this is about to change.
“It was one of the worst spots in the village for a break to happen,” Renner said.
The sewer system is gravity fed, with the pipes all sloping down to a main line that dumps into the treatment plant. The pipes under Main Street are among the deepest.
“When they went down, it kept breaking in several places. So we had to keep digging, and it just got very expensive very fast,” Renner said. “Within two weeks, you are over a hundred thousand dollars into this fix. And it’s like, OK, we don’t have this kind of money just laying around for fixes.”
“That was really a big turning point for us because it drained our sewer fund,” Renner said. “And it was like, enough is enough. We’ve got to do something about this, instead of band-aiding the problem. We’ve got to PVC everything and just start over.”
But that required millions of dollars the village didn’t have.
So Renner started looking for sources of funding, a process that would take several years of making cold calls, knocking on doors, networking at events, filling out grant applications, and just being an advocate for her tiny village.
“I mean, that is a huge part of it is just talking about it,” Renner said. “And I think that’s really hard for Appalachian communities to do is admitting that there’s a problem and being really vocal about it, and just being outright saying, we need help. And I just wasn’t afraid to do that.”
It all paid off. In late October, Renner presided over a groundbreaking ceremony for the second phase of the village’s sewer replacement project. The first phase began earlier this year.
When it’s all done, by the end of next year if all goes to plan, every inch of clay pipe will have been replaced with PVC.
The total cost: More than $13 million.
The cost to village residents: nothing. The village will not have to raise sewer rates to help pay for the project, Renner said.
Instead, a patchwork of federal and state grants are covering almost all of the cost, and may end up covering all of it.
“They call that braiding funds, just trying to puzzle everything together,” Renner said. “It’s pretty complicated. But it was important to us to not put any burden on our customers, which would be the easy way out. But we decided to just wait and play the long game and try to get as much grant as we could.”
Like many small communities throughout southeast Ohio, Chauncey’s economy was built on the coal industry. And since the demise of the industry decades ago, these communities have struggled to find their economic footing. Meanwhile, their populations thinned, businesses left, infrastructure deteriorated.
But the pandemic, of all things, may have helped change their fortunes.
In her position as executive director of the Athens County Economic Development Council, Mollie Fitzgerald deals with a lot of people looking to bring jobs to their small communities. The first thing she tells them is they need to make sure their basic infrastructure is up to par.
“It’s expensive,” Fitzgerald acknowledged.
Two massive rounds of federal funding during the pandemic followed by the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill provided many communities the means to make improvements they’ve wanted to do for decades but could not afford.
“And I think for the last few years, economic development’s been saying, we’re never going to see this amount of money thrown at us again to help prepare our communities for economic development,” Fitzgerald said. “So maybe that’s why in the last few years we’ve seen a bigger push to improve our water and sewer capacities, expand our utilities, gas, electric, internet, broadband.”
Once the sewer replacement is done, Chauncey may finally be in a position to begin capitalizing on the Baileys Trail System, a 58-mile network of mountain biking trails with another 30 miles planned. One of the two trailheads is at the end of Converse Street, which was once a thriving business strip.
The Chauncey trailhead draws many thousands of visitors a year, but there’s nowhere on Converse Street, or anywhere else in the village, for them to stop for a drink or a bite to eat.
“We would love for them to do that,” Renner said, “but we recognize that we were hindered by the fact that our infrastructure was failing, and that until we addressed that first, how are we going to get small business owners to invest their time and money to bring their business here to Chauncey.”
Asked to describe how she envisions Chauncey five years from now, Renner said she expects to see pedestrians walking down Converse Street, bicyclists riding to the Baileys trailhead, a new public library across from the Village Hall that is now in the planning stages. And she’d like to see that some of the long-neglected homes and buildings along Converse have been renovated into small businesses, including a coffee shop and a restaurant, which surveys of residents show they really want.
“And so, we want them to have that,” she said.
In the meantime, Renner said she’ll continue to be a vocal advocate for the village.
“The more I talk about Chauncey, the more people hear about it, the more people hear about the exciting work that we’re doing, and then they start to get curious,” she said. “And that’s just all we want is to put ourselves out there and just have the opportunity to show how far we’ve come.”