Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

we also live in a rural community and do not have city sewers. however i do not believe there is anything you can legally do against the mayor or the village. you probably have already done this but get someone knowledgable about the issue out there to come up with a solution. you may not be the only one with the problem. if it is a problem that affects more than you perhaps you can get the village to act towards a solution. good luck - i wish i had a solution for you.

I live in a community with separate storm and sanitary sewers, have a storm sump pump with battery backup, and last spring when we got ANOTHER 500 year rain, it came in so fast and furiously that when the power went out our battery back-up couldn't keep up with it and I wound up having to buy a generator to get the main pump going, and it ran continuously for 3 days!!!!

So to start with, even with a municipal sewer system there is no guaranty you won't get back-up from the kinds of rain events we've seen in recent years. As a layperson from an engineering standpoint, I don't even know if the experts would know for sure what to plan for, and you are talking an ungodly amount of money to build a system anyhow.

From a "legal" standpoint, when you kenw that you purchased a home with no municipal storm system, you "moved to the problem", and unless you can prove that there is something that the municipality is doing that is contributing to the problem (ie. causing excess run-off from public property to yours.....), you are pretty much on your own other than to call a plumbing contractor and have a second sump installed. Get battery backups and an emergency generator.

This is not to say that an expert might find that the municipality may have some culpability in the situation. Perhaps resulting from municipal public works or approval of a nearby development that changed how water flows above (or below) grade onto your property. There are some laws and ordinances that are supposed to prevent diverting storm water, but attempting to prove that would probably vastly exceed the cost of a second sump and pump system. Now if your neighbors have similar problems, the group of you can start talking about something together. Otherwise, unless there is more to this picture, again my best thought is that you are the proud owner of property that needs to have its storm water management system evaluated for current conditions.