Village receives $176k grant to continue water line replacement

• By Reilly Dixon
• Published: February 13, 2025

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The Village of Yellow Springs announced earlier this month that it received $176,246 from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to continue the yearslong work of replacing aging water lines throughout the village.

“We’ve replaced about 80% — over 6,000 feet — of our galvanized pipes,” Village Manager Johnnie Burns told the News earlier this week.

According to Burns, the remaining 20% of lines are mostly located in the older part of town — along Davis, Stafford, Elm, Phillips and the several college streets — and that the Village will soon apply for $2–2.5 million in additional state funding in the coming months to finish the job. 

The recent $176,246 grant comes from H2Ohio, a collaborative initiative between the OEPA and other state agencies that Gov. Mike DeWine launched in 2019 to address water quality issues that impact Ohio’s waters. State money has gone toward reducing algal blooms, abating water pollution, conservation efforts and improving municipal water infrastructure. H2Ohio’s budget for the 2024–25 fiscal year is $270 million.

Though the Village began the work in 2021 to replace its long-deteriorating water mains and galvanized service lines — the kind that can increase risks of lead poisoning — Burns noted that the Village had previously discussed undertaking this project since the early 1980s.

The Department of Development began funding the line replacement project in late 2021 by contributing more than $1.6 million to the effort.

While the overall goal of the project has been to update the galvanized lines to preempt further deterioration and prevent any lead-based contamination in the Village water system, Burns added that his public works team has not detected any unsafe levels of lead thus far.

‘Unrelated’ water main breaks

As Burns told Village Council members during his manager’s report at the group’s Monday, Feb. 3, meeting, the recent rash of water main breaks — six since the Jan. 21 Council meeting — is unrelated to the ongoing galvanized line replacement project.

According to Burns, the recent rapid thaw from mid-January’s below-freezing temperatures is the culprit.

“When the freezing earth begins to thaw, limestone — which a lot of our water mains sit directly on top of — tends to shift, and when it shifts, the pipes move with it,” Burns explained in a follow-up interview.

He added that although ductile iron — one of the primary materials in our underground water infrastructure — isn’t as flexible as other materials, it can be repaired quickly by the public works team. He noted that once crews identified and excavated the precise location of the six recent breaks, their repairs were consistently expedient.

Addressing local residents, if pooling or bubbling water is observed at any location, Burns said villagers are to call the Village’s nonemergency line — 937-767-7206 — and apprise dispatch of the situation.

Once crews arrive on the scene, Burns cautioned, they will typically redirect traffic until the job is complete. Vehicles, he said, must find a different route around the excavation site.

“‘Local Traffic Only’ doesn’t mean, ‘I’m from Yellow Springs, so I can drive through a construction site.’ We had multiple cars just go around our barricades and almost get hit by backhoes,” Burns said. “‘Local’ means you live in one of the driveways we needed to block off — those are the people we can work around.”

Burns also urged local residents to sign up for CivicPlus, an opt-in service that allows the Village to directly message villagers with nonemergency information, such as street closures, utility work, event information and more.

“CivicPlus allows us to give you a heads up about local projects and repairs — everybody should sign up,” Burns said.

ED. NOTE: 

In the Feb. 7 print edition of the News, the above article originally misquoted Village Manager Johnnie Burns when he described local residents ignoring road closure signs. No cars have “[gotten] hit by backhoes” in doing so. Burns clarified that some have almost gotten hit.

In the same article, the News stated that the $176,246 grant would finance the completion of the remaining 20% of the ongoing water line improvement project. Burns said that the Village will have to seek out an additional $2–2.5 million in grant funding to finish the final 20% of the project.

The News apologizes for the errors.

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