Part of the grant funds to help property owners connect their homes to a new sewer system being planned for Marion Township will be used to replace a failing water main from the 1970s.

Wendy Leslie, the county’s Community Development Block Grant coordinator, told the commissioners at their Wednesday meeting that the water line has been patched repeatedly over more than four decades and is “getting close to an emergency situation.”

She said Marion Township officials have attempted to find emergency funding to replace the water line, but to no avail.

Leslie supplied the commissioners with photos of water shooting into the air from a past failure in the pipe.

She asked the commissioners to approve using $73,769 from a fund that will assist low- and moderate-income property owners with the costs of connecting their homes to sewer main lines to pay for the replacement of the water line.

“Our only answer was to modify some of these sewer fundings to ensure they are going to have water,” Leslie said.

This is an excerpt from a larger article that appears in Thursday’s Butler Eagle. Subscribe online or in print to read the full article.