Property Owner Seeks Solution To Runoff Going Into Lake Wawasee
Property Owner Seeks Solution To Runoff Going Into Lake Wawasee
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Property Owner Seeks Solution To Runoff Going Into Lake WawaseeA development near Crow’s Nest Drive apparently has at least one property owner concerned about the runoff going into Lake Wawasee.
Attorney Andrew Boxberger, representing Jim Marcuccilli, 9324 E. Woodys Lane, on Lake Wawasee, went before the Kosciusko County Commissioners Tuesday to talk about some issues that are happening near Marcuccilli’s home with the development on Crow’s Nest Drive. He said they wanted to work with the Commissioners to help come up with a solution.
Boxberger provided some photos to the Commissioners, taken in September, and a video demonstrating what happens when there’s a rain event in the area. The photos and video show the amount of silt going into the lake.
Crow’s Nest Drive has been taken over by the county as a county road.
“It appears that the road doesn’t maybe have the proper guttering and stormwater prevention. There probably needs to be some retention to be able to prevent this silt from going into the lake. It’s caused a significant issue for the homeowners in the area,” Boxberger said.
Still, to this day, he said a significant amount of silt has gone into the lake. The silt has ruined the beaches for a number of homeowners downstream.
“We want to try to figure out a solution with the county, with the developers, whomever, to help resolve this issue because it’s a significant issue to the lake and a specific issue to these property owners,” Boxberger said.
After showing the Commissioners the video, he said, “Obviously, there’s a huge issue here and it’s a county road, so we’re hoping the Commissioners would be interested in working with us to resolve this issue.”
He then introduced Dr. Jerry Sweeten, with Ecosystems Connections Institute, who studies water for a living.
Several years ago, Sweeten said he was asked to meet with the Wawasee Area Conservancy Foundation to look at Lake Wawasee because WACF was concerned about the water quality of the lake, particularly with emphasis on sediment and nutrients.
“I can tell you that for Indiana lakes, there is very little good scientific understanding of our glacial lakes. But yet they bring so much value to us economically and just from having a place to recreate,” Sweeten said.
They set up an experimental design for Lake Wawasee where there were automatic water samplers and a very detailed and robust assessment system in place, he said. They just finished their fourth year. It includes testing water coming in from each tributary, as well as testing water in the lake.
“We have learned more about Lake Wawasee in the last four years than anybody has learned about a glacial lake in Indiana simply because they had the vision to understand that the science needs to be in place to understand how lakes work and how to protect them and to sometimes to restore them,” Sweeten said.
In the case of lakes, sediment and nutrients, particularly phosphorus, “is the death of a lake over time. This process can happen very gradually and chronically, and, at some point, that lake will reach a tipping point and become one of the lakes that you may be familiar with that will have excessive algal blooms. Sometimes harmful algal blooms. I’m not suggesting that Lake Wawasee is at that tipping point, but it’s clearly showing a pattern in that direction,” Sweeten stated.
He said he recently helped WACF acquire the lake basin to be designated as a national water quality initiative basin through the Department of Agriculture. It’s going to bring $1.2 million to cost share with farmers best management practices and to help and assist in reducing the amount of sediment and nutrients that enter Lake Wawasee from the surrounding watershed.
“It is the first basin in Indiana to get that designation. So we’ve worked very hard to understand what’s going on in the lake. We’ve worked very hard with WACF to help them acquire resources to help build partnerships across the basin to help protect the lake,” Sweeten said.
In his professional opinion, he said the Crow’s Nest is “the most dramatic situation I’ve ever seen. The sediment that is entering the lake through the drain is huge. We haven’t measured it because we haven’t been contracted to do it, but we know with sediment comes phosphorus. That’s the way nature works. If you see muddy water, there will be phosphorus attached to that sediment. And anything that increases phosphorus and sediment in that lake is going to cause it severe consequence in terms of water quality,” Sweeten said.
He said he always argues for controlling water. “Water management is serious business, whether it’s agriculture, watershed, whether it’s an urban environment, whether it’s a development, giving careful consideration to how do we manage the water to minimize the amount of water that goes from point A to point B is critical because we know that water is going to go downhill. It’s always going to go downhill, and with it, it’s going to be carrying lots of things that can dissolve in it or sediment and nutrients plus anything else in an urban environment that might be coming down a storm drain,” Sweeten said.
He said nature tells us when we got it right or wrong, “and this time we got it wrong and we need to take some corrective action” on the development. He said there should have been a significant retention basin at the bottom of the hill where the water is coming down.
“The system that has been designed is simply not large enough to handle the volume of water that will come down through that addition,” he said, adding that the problem won’t go away without some sort of remedial action.
Sweeten suggested the county take a look at its ordinances that are place in protect the lakes as they could be “significantly better” to protect the lakes from the developments that inherently will occur at the lakes.
Boxberger said they wanted to bring this problem to the Commissioners’ attention and maybe get a feeling from them of their willingness to work with them to try and resolve the situation.
Commissioner Cary Groninger said over the last week or so, “we’ve had multiple conversations about this.” He said they’ve visited the site and talked to the county department heads about what could be done. “I know the state agencies and IDEM have been involved with this as well,” he said.
Groninger said they’ve talked to the developer as well and appreciated the additional information and photos.
“We’re still trying to work through this to try to come up with a good solution because we realize that these lakes are a huge asset to our community. We want to make sure we can maintain them for years to come. We’re just trying to find that balance of what we can do to create something that works for everybody,” Groninger said.
Boxberger said they’d like to be a part of those conversations, especially Sweeten with his expertise, to try and resolve the issue.
Groninger said they’d probably put some type of committee or group together as they get further along and will reach out. Right now, they’re just in the information-gathering stage, but they’d let them know.
