New records reveal Maumee officials knew of illegal sewage dumping for decades

Records show the mayor, city council and administrators denied knowledge as untreated sewage was pumped into the river.

MAUMEE, Ohio — For years, the City of Maumee pumped untreated sewage into the Maumee River during heavy rains – a practice that violates the federal Clean Water Act. But newly obtained records document years of internal awareness about the practice – offering new insight into who knew about the discharges and when.

State investigators interviewed more than a dozen current and former city employees, some under oath, as part of a joint criminal inquiry by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division. Those records, obtained by WTOL 11, show that the city’s illegal sewage discharge practices spanned decades and were well known within the city’s public works and sewer departments. Though the investigation was run by the criminal investigation division, no criminal charges were brought.

But as public attention mounted in 2020 and 2021, key decision-makers at the top of the city’s government – including former Mayor Richard Carr – repeatedly claimed they either didn’t know the sewage dumping was happening or didn’t understand it was illegal.

Now, with the city issued state orders to clean up its system and millions committed to infrastructure upgrades, those conflicting accounts raise questions of accountability and oversight in a city that had long promised environmental stewardship.

A long-running practice, quietly accepted

City sewer employees told investigators that bypass pumping – the use of portable and permanent pumps to divert sanitary sewage into stormwater drains – was a regular response during rain events. The Birch Street pump station, which was designed specifically to send untreated sewage into the storm system to avoid basement flooding, had existed since the 1970s.

Joe Mikolajczyk, who joined the sewer division in 1999 and became superintendent in 2020, described a system where portable pumps were deployed as often as 6–8 times per year, sometimes ahead of forecasted storms. 

“We didn’t hide this,” Mikolajczyk told investigators. “Everyone in the city knew about the SSOs (sanitary sewage overflows).”

Mikolajczyk said the city reviewed overtime logs to estimate how many unreported discharges occurred. Those overtime reports, he said, were shared with council, and purchase approvals for portable pumps appeared on council agendas for years.

Former assistant superintendent James Harding and longtime equipment operator Brian Shook told similar stories – that field crews routinely operated pumps without documentation and that senior supervisors knew sewage was being discharged to the river to prevent backups.

Carr: ‘I didn’t know’

But Richard Carr – who served on city council starting in 1989 and was mayor from 2013 to 2023 – told a different story.

In a February 2023 interview with BCI and federal EPA investigators, Carr distanced himself from the sewer system’s operation entirely.

“I really don’t know anything about the EPA,” Carr said, according to the transcript. “I really didn’t know it was wrong to pump sewage to the river.”

Carr emphasized his role as a part-time, ceremonial figure who signed documents without reading them and left regulatory issues to department heads.

According to the interview, “Mayor Carr opined it’s not the mayor’s responsibility to know what’s going on in the city. According to him, that is the responsibility of the City Administrator or Department heads. Mayor Carr told investigators that he answered all of our questions honestly.”

When asked if he had ever heard of the Birch Street pump station, Carr responded, “No.” Asked about the city’s MS4 stormwater permit, Carr said he’d never seen it and didn’t know what it required. And while he acknowledged signing the city’s annual EPA reports, he said he didn’t read them – only that they were handed to him after council meetings.

Carr told investigators he became aware of the decades of unreported discharges only in 2020, when Mikolajczyk raised the issue and insisted the city report it to the Ohio EPA before accepting a promotion to superintendent.

Still, Carr insisted that no city council members or elected officials had any prior knowledge of the pumping practices – a claim sharply at odds with multiple interviews conducted by state investigators.

Who knew – and when?

State records paint a far more complicated picture of who had knowledge of the illegal discharges.

Tim Pauken, council president from 2018 to 2021, said the issue was brought to his and Carr’s attention by Mikolajczyk and City Administrator Patrick Burtch in 2020. He described being “naive” about how long the practice had gone on but affirmed the city took immediate action once notified.

Joseph Camp, former Public Service Director, said bypass pumping had occurred for years but insisted he only learned of it shortly before his 2020 retirement. Still, he acknowledged that council had to approve pump purchases and said, “Everyone in the city knew.”

Larry Gamble, another former Public Service Director, said he saw the portable pumps in use during storms and assumed city leaders – including the mayor – understood why they were there.

Richard Krieger, a former city administrator who served for 20 years, said plainly: “Elected officials were fully aware of the problem.”

Even Brian Shook, a front-line worker, said he worked 28 straight overtime hours on one occasion running the pumps and believed administrators “had to have known,” given the budget approvals, overtime logs and frequency of use.

Systemic failure or strategic silence?

Despite dozens of opportunities over decades, no one reported the discharges to the Ohio EPA – until 2020. The city had once operated under a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, then transitioned to a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit. The MS4 prohibits sanitary sewer overflows entirely.

Several interviewees referred to a supposed 1994 agreement with the Ohio EPA that released the city from reporting duties – but no one has been able to produce that agreement, and the Ohio EPA says it has no record of it.

Carr, when asked by investigators why no one ever reported the SSOs earlier, said: “It’s not the mayor’s responsibility to know what’s going on in the city.”

What happens next?

After the city self-reported the violations in 2020, the Ohio EPA issued enforcement orders requiring Maumee to submit a full sewer system evaluation and remediation plan. The city has since committed to more than $80 million in repairs and launched a controversial inspection ordinance aimed at identifying illegal residential connections.

Still, the question of accountability remains. While no criminal charges were filed as of publication, investigators documented a pattern of widespread institutional knowledge, poor documentation and repeated failures to act.

None of the politicians interviewed are still active in Maumee politics but the city continues to deal with the consequences of what happened – and didn’t happen – during their time serving the city.