Grafton property owners sued over sewer repairs

The Lorain County Prosecutor’s Office has filed 18 civil lawsuits against Grafton property owners.

Each of the suits seeks an abatement of nuisance and permanent injunction forcing the landowners to repair sanitary sewer laterals.

The Aug. 6 filings said each of the landowners were sent letters seeking voluntary compliance to fix the sanitary sewer laterals but the owners had neither responded to the letters nor fixed the laterals.

If the defendants in the cases do not fix the laterals, the suits request a Lorain County Common Pleas judge to allow the county commissioners to enter the premises and repair the laterals themselves with the cost of the repairs being assessed as a lien against the tax duplicate of the land.

County Prosecutor Dennis Will said the county engineer is tasked with inspecting these lines periodically and when they are broken the law says the owner must repair them.

“They give them four or five notices which is probably over a period of six months, or so,” he said. “After that if they don’t get it fixed then the (engineer) comes to us with a complaint and we file an action to force (the owners) to bring it into compliance.”

This process is outlined in a resolution passed by the Lorain County commissioner in 2014, which is attached to each of the suits.

Will said these sorts of repairs are often required with septic systems.

While this group is made up of homes in Grafton, Will said these actions are often taken in the county’s townships.

“All the townships have some kind of compliance program and they work it through the county engineer to get those inspected,” he said.