As spring nears, Delmont looks to stormwater, sewage projects

As the region thaws out in anticipation of spring, Delmont officials are working on a variety of upcoming borough improvement projects.

The main focus of road work this summer will be Greensburg Street, where street committee members are planning to address stormwater issues.

“We walked the street on March 5 with (engineers) Morris Knowles and Associates and we saw — big surprise — that there’s a lot of water under that street,” committee member and Councilman Stan Cheyne said.

Cheyne and public works head Bill Heaps said several of the catch basins along Greensburg Street were best described as “jerry-rigged.”

“There are holes cut in the tops of pipes, and storm water goes into them,” Cheyne said.

Water regularly wells up and creates puddles in several areas along the street, such as the entrance to the small plaza containing a vape shop and Fox’s Pizza.

The project will be the first undertaken by the borough’s recently formed stormwater authority.

“Whenever Morris Knowles comes back with a list of improvements, certainly council can weigh in on that, but ultimately it’s the stormwater authority’s money that will be put into a project,” said Cheyne, who is also a member of the authority board.

Authority projects are funded through a fee assessed to all property owners in the borough, and it was formed in large part because unfunded state-mandated stormwater projects, part of Pennsylvania’s pollution reduction requirements, have pulled significant funding from the borough’s annual budget.

“Even though this isn’t a pollution reduction project, the purpose of the fee is to collect funds for projects just like this,” Cheyne said.

Borough council also voted unanimously at its March 11 meeting to apply again for a Pennsylvania Small Water and Sewer grant of $500,000 for sewage work along Tollgate Lane.

Borough engineers Lennon Smith Souleret said the Tollgate sewage lines, installed more than three decades ago, were not built to handle the the flow they receive.

The work is necessary due to the discovery of several Grade 5 defects — the worst kind on the 1-5 grading scale — as the lines lay close to area houses, sometimes within 10 feet.

Applications for Small Water and Sewer grants are due at the end of April. The borough’s application was not chosen for the program’s 2023 round of funding.