Middleburg Heights Mayor Matthew Castelli has a theory about what residents expect from a mayor. "When it's sunny outside, you don't get calls from your residents saying, 'Hey, mayor, thank you for that beautiful sunny day.' But when there's a huge rainstorm, for some reason everyone thinks that you control the weather."
He offered the idea as a joke, but the expectation behind the joke is real. When a storm backs sewage into a basement, the question lands on city hall first, and the honest answer usually involves pipes, creeks and neighboring communities that no single city controls.
That reality framed a plenary session at the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative U.S. Water Leaders Summit in Cleveland on Thursday, where leaders from the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) and one of its member cities described how the region is responding to aging infrastructure, rising costs and a wetter climate.
Across the session, each speaker kept returning to the same idea: the work gets done because a regional utility, its more than 60 member communities and the residents they serve are working on it together. Utilities and cities elsewhere can borrow a lot from how NEORSD and its member communities collaborate.
Regional from day one
John Gonzalez, NEORSD's senior manager of communications, traced the arrangement to the district's founding in 1972 as a regional utility with a plain mission to protect water resources and serve the community.
Being regional from day one, he said, meant building working relationships with every community it serves.
Nichole Oocumma, the district's chief administrative officer and the session's moderator, put the philosophy in a sentence for the room: Water has no boundaries, so what happens upstream reaches downstream, and no single community, organization or person can carry the load alone.
Abram Creek, where the roads used to flood
Castelli made the idea concrete with a problem in his own city. During big storms, he said, the road along Abram Creek would be covered, and emergency crews could not get to homes without boats. The fix is a set of three large detention basins. By his account one is working, a second should come online within a week or two, and a third is planned.
Kim Colich, PE, the district's stormwater program manager, described how the money and the management are split. Under a partner agreement, Middleburg Heights ran the project and the Sewer District paid for it, an arrangement that she said lets both sides get more done with the dollars they have.
Paying for the work
The funding side runs through shared dollars. NEORSD's Member Community Infrastructure Program, as the panelists described it, directs about $25 million a year of ratepayer sewer money to local wastewater projects through grants. On the stormwater side, 25 percent of all stormwater fees are set aside for member communities to spend on their own systems, projects and equipment. Oocumma framed the $25 million as a way of working together with communities.
Castelli walked through how that stacks up on one project, the Indian Creek Relief Sewer. He put the cost at $12 million, covered by at least $5 million from the district's program, state funds, a $1.25 million federal grant he secured with his congressman, and city money. Project estimates, he added, keep creeping upward.
Middleburg Heights also reaches into private property. The city offers a $3,000 residential grant that began with backflow preventers and expanded to waterproofing, and it requires a home assessment before the money goes out. Those assessments, Castelli said, turned up multiple cross-connections and damaged laterals. He said about 100 homes have stopped calling after heavy rain, and that the city issues roughly $150,000 a year through the grants. Residents understand roofs and paint, he said, and the problems under the ground are harder to see.
Retrofitting a region that was built first
Eighty percent of the service area was developed before Ohio's stormwater regulations, Colich said, which means most systems have no detention at all. The work is retrofit: slow the water down, let it soak into the ground, create floodplain and stop pushing problems downstream.
She described maintenance as its own form of innovation. The district has dedicated inspection and maintenance teams for pipes, streams and finished projects, and more than 40 trail cameras that watch debris racks and record water levels at spots that flood repeatedly. (They also produce, she said, a folder of excellent wildlife photos.) The district is going back to add 60 trees to the Chippewa Creek project in Broadview Heights. Newly restored streams look rough right after construction, she said, and she wants residents to hear that up front so that in 50 years people can say the district did it right.
Asked what future generations should say the region got right, Colich answered in one sentence: "That we relied on the data and science."
Planning for rain that has already changed
Colich spent much of her time on data. The district's regional stormwater program, about 10 years old, covers a 363-square-mile service area and roughly 489 miles of regional system, which she defined as the pipes and streams draining 300 acres or more. Smaller drainage stays with the communities. Staff inspected every foot of those 489 miles and built hydrologic and hydraulic models for each watershed. She said the fixes those plans identified carry cost estimates well over $1 billion on the regional system alone, and that projects are ranked through a risk-based scoring process aimed at the most flood-prone areas.
The rainfall numbers she shared were the sharpest of the day. A gauge at Cleveland Hopkins that has operated for almost 100 years shows a 20-year average of about 37 inches of annual rain in 1960 and about 43 inches now, a 15 to 17 percent increase, she said. The shorter record is more striking.
"Even the 14 years of data we have are showing that our two-year rain event is happening every year," she said.
The gap between old design standards and new conditions is part of the challenge. Colich said the rainfall-probability standards engineers rely on are built from data about 26 years old, so the district also designs from its own 14 years of rain records, collected on 1-kilometer grids every five minutes, along with 120 in-system monitors that measure levels and flows and help calibrate the watershed models.
Communications as infrastructure
Gonzalez made the case that explaining the work is part of doing it.
The district translates technical language, he said, and meets people where they are so residents can see that underground pipes and backyard streams touch their lives.
His examples ranged widely: a Reddit ask-me-anything on a stormwater project, a comic book that uses superheroes to reach middle school students, open houses built around conversation with boards and staff, and walking tours every two weeks at a stream restoration and dam removal site, where Colich, her director and deputy director lead 15 to 20 residents through before construction begins. The district's social channels cover everything "from serious to substantial to technical to trivial, from pop culture to poop culture." Oocumma added that NEORSD's Instagram and Facebook accounts have won awards.
Progress through partnerships
Castelli closed with a motto he borrowed from a watershed partner, progress through partnerships, and a recent example: the Sheldon Road bridge replacement with Brook Park, which involves two cities, the Sewer District and Cuyahoga County Public Works. He said the district is bringing $2.7 million in federal dollars and the county $4.5 million in state money. Projects like this once grew so complex and costly that the can was kicked down the road, he said, and now they are getting built.
Gonzalez offered the other ending. When people look back at 2026, he hopes they conclude the region thought about them, and that the investments were made for the long term with future generations in mind.
