Acres of Troubled Waters

CELINA - Mercer County officials have come up with a $2 million plan to mitigate flooding near St. Anthony Road in Butler Township - and potentially avoid or delay a lawsuit.

"We got involved to try to make some lemonade out of lemons and go after some grant money to proactively make improvements out there that are both water quality and the perception of risk to flooding. We can minimize that," county community development director Jared Ebbing said Tuesday.

County officials want to purchase 117.19 acres of farmland on which the embarkment is situated - a 9.02 triangular parcel of land at 5530 St. Anthony Road owned by Miesse Gary Trust ETAL and a 108.7 parcel of land at 0 St. Anthony Road owned by Luke Broering Sons LLC.

The county has given a verbal offer of $17,000 per acre, the market value of the lands in question, Ebbing said. The total cost of the land purchase would be nearly $2 million.

Ebbing is confident the county will land a roughly $2 million grant through Ohio Public Works Commission's Clean Ohio Green Space Conservation Program to buy the land and undertake improvements to mitigate or prevent future flood damage to landowners' properties along or near St. Anthony Road.

The project has been recommended for approval by the district Natural Resource Assistance Council and officials anticipate final state approval shortly, according to county documents.

Ebbing said the project would resemble the embankment restoration work undertaken by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources along West Bank Road in Celina.

"There's an embankment that keeps water back from the lake/Coldwater Creek that happens to be on private property now. So we would own that and make the same kind of improvements that ODNR felt necessary to prevent overtopping and further erosion," Ebbing said. "It will involve land acquisition, embankment restoration and some other earthen features to try to mitigate any potential future flooding."

Coldwater Creek at one time used to "continue to go north and go straight into the Beavercreek," Ebbing said. The embankment in question was created in the 1840s to 1850s when Coldwater Creek was rerouted to force the water into Grand Lake, Ebbing said.

"The embankment is the edge, the border of Coldwater Creek on both the Langenkamp (family farm) and the Broering side. On the Broering side it's more pronounced because that land drops down," he said. "So it's truly acting as an embankment."

Over time, erosion lead to divots in the embankment through which water can escape.

"Those divots in your embankment, for the safety of everybody, need to be restored to prevent further erosion," he said.

The project also would restore farmland to its natural state, furthering ongoing efforts to enhance wildlife and water quality in a similar manner that local treatment trains around the lake have, Ebbing said.

Some property owners, most of whom live on St. Anthony Road in Butler Township between Coldwater Creek and the railroad tracks, have spoken out about flooding during the last several years.

Commissioners in June 2020 closed on a Federal Emergency Management Agency Flood Mitigation Assistance Grant with former property owners Randy and Diane Donovan. FEMA agreed to pay 75% of the cost to purchase the flood-prone property at 5248 St. Anthony, raze the structure and forever deed the land as county-owned property.

The couple was compensated 75% of their property's appraised value, according to county documents.