Girard City

• Girard owns no treatment plant and no wells - it buys finished water from four different MVSD members (Niles, Youngstown, McDonald and Trumbull County), all of it originally the same Meander Creek Reservoir water, and…
• Meander Creek Reservoir runs about seven miles long across 2,010 acres with 40 miles of shoreline and holds roughly 11 billion gallons; MVSD owns 5,500 acres around it, enclosed by 35 miles of fence, reforested with…
• A billing dispute turned into a water rate: when Niles worked out that Girard had been undercharged about $1.6 million since 2020, Girard customers absorbed a 16% increase to pay it back - and the rate is supposed to…
• Trihalomethanes in Girard's distribution system averaged 69.5 ppb in 2024 against an 80 ppb limit, with individual samples as high as 89.4 ppb - the tightest margin on any regulated contaminant in this batch.
• Girard still owns the two dams at Girard Lake, bought for $2.5 million in 1995; ODNR called the lower one unsafe in 2007 and the city is now under a five-year ODNR deadline to fix the upper dam, with work targeted for…

Source: meanderwater.orgcityofgirardoh.govtribtoday.com

• 1926Mahoning Valley Sanitary District formed to develop and manage the Meander Creek Reservoir supply.
• 1932MVSD began delivering treated water to its member cities.
• 1962Girard's Water Pollution Control Facility built at 945 South State Street.
• 1995The city bought the two Girard Lake dams for $2.5 million.
• 2002Girard completed a CSO Long Term Control Plan proposing to eliminate every combined sewer overflow except the one at the treatment plant.
• 2007ODNR declared the lower Girard Lake dam unsafe, citing eroded sections, maintenance issues and inadequate spillway capacity.

Source: meanderwater.orgdam.assets.ohio.govvindy.com

How it is treated

Girard treats no water of its own. It is a satellite distribution system within the Mahoning Valley Sanitary District, buying already-finished water from Niles, Youngstown, McDonald and Trumbull County - all MVSD systems drawing from Meander Creek Reservoir and treated at the district plant at 1181…

Source: cityofgirardoh.govmeanderwater.orgcityofgirardoh.gov

Water pressure

Not published. Neither Girard's CCR nor its water department page carries a psi figure, pressure-zone count, or storage description. The earlier draft's claim that the city…

Source: cityofgirardoh.govcityofgirardoh.gov

$6.94 per 1,000 gallons

Girard bills water and sewer together on a bi-monthly cycle, with sewer charges driven by metered water use. In October 2024 council set the in-city rate at $6.94 per 1,000…

Source: tribtoday.comcityofgirardoh.gov

Source: cityofgirardoh.gov

EPA compliance record

Lead at the tap: 90th-percentile result 0 ppb in 2025 (action level 15 ppb).

EPA record: no health-based violations since 2015.

1 violation of any kind logged since 2020, 1 of them paperwork (monitoring, reporting, public notice or consumer report).

EPA compliance record · Mahoning Valley Sanitary District (treats the water)

Lead at the tap: 90th-percentile result 0 ppb in 2025 (action level 15 ppb).

EPA record: no health-based violations since 2015.

Recent and current work

• Girard WPCF plant improvement project · 2020 · completed
  Completed May 2020. Eliminated or minimized use of the secondary-treatment bypass and gave the plant the ability to treat a 12 MGD peak flow through primary…
• UV disinfection and supplemental peracetic acid upgrades · 2020 · completed
  Ohio EPA credits these upgrades with resolving the plant's 2019 and 2020 E. coli effluent violations. Cost not published.
• MVSD Mineral Ridge dam rehabilitation · under construction
  MVSD reports dam rehabilitation work at Mineral Ridge; the environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact were finalized in February 2023 and…

Source: dam.assets.ohio.govmeanderwater.org

Planned or needed

• Girard Lake Upper Dam rehabilitation · $713,900 · 2030 · planned
  ODNR has given the city five years to fix the dams it bought in 1995, or the agency will intervene at greater expense plus penalties. Work includes a new…
• Repayment of Niles wholesale water arrears · $1.6 million · 2024-2028 · planned
  Roughly $1.6 million owed to Niles for underbilled wholesale water covering 2020-2023, to be repaid over four years and funded by the 16% (easing to 12% in…

Source: vindy.comtribtoday.com

Girard's raw-water risk is entirely MVSD's to manage. The source water assessment treats all surface water as inherently susceptible, and names for the Meander Creek Reservoir protection area: row-crop agricultural runoff, eight animal feedlots, oil and gas wells, failing home and commercial septic systems, runoff from new housing and…

Source: cityofgirardoh.govvindy.com

Sanitary

The City of Girard Water Pollution Control Facility at 945 South State Street discharges to Little Girard Creek and then to the Mahoning, Beaver and Ohio rivers (Ohio EPA permit 3PD00010, application OH0025364). Built in 1962 and last upgraded in 2020, it has a 5.0 MGD average design flow and 12 MGD peak hydraulic capacity, and serves…

Storm

About 35.4% of Girard's collection system is combined sanitary-and-storm sewer. One combined sewer overflow remains - CSO 3PD00010003, next to the treatment plant and regulated by the allowable flow to the plant headworks - after the 2002 Long Term Control…

Source: dam.assets.ohio.govcityofgirardoh.gov

Compiled from the utility's own reports and public records, then independently re-checked against primary sources.