Spring showers bring more than flowers.

Each spring brings a new crop of lake junk – the flotsam and jetsam from windfall, ice, and winter storms, set afloat when the water starts to rise. Our prevailing wind is almost always from the southwest, so the debris gradually makes its way to the north shore, and much of it funnels into the north arm. Submerged logs are the most frightening. They are hard to see and pose dangerous crash potential.

Past cleanup days cleared the lake. The Debris Removal Program has kept it that way.

Massive lake cleanup days established a clean baseline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the mid-2010s, your Watershed Improvement District began to fund the annual Debris Removal Program. Through this program, citizens have been invited to tow and secure floating logs and marooned parts of broken docks to a collection site at the back of Mokins Slough. Late each spring, the Improvement District’s contractor removed and hauled the debris to an abandoned log deck on Camp Mivoden’s property. Over the years, this has been a successful project for keeping our lake free of floating hazards.

Abuse by a few jeopardizes the Program.

A new problem has emerged. In the last couple of years, people have disposed of entire docks as they update their own. Subsidizing private dock replacement has never been the intention of this program. When it is time to replace, your dock contractor should include the removal and disposal of your old dock in your contract. When, instead, someone releases their old dock onto the lake, they effectively transfer the associated costs to the Watershed Improvement District – to be paid by all taxpayers.

Because of abuse by a few people, the Improvement District Board is considering options:

1. Suspend the project or discontinue it altogether.
2. Search HLWID’s full-shoreline video footage to identify the owners of docks left at the debris removal site. Then, invite the owner to retrieve it or pay for its disposal.
3. Create a dock registry for permanent traceability to owners.

We need your ideas.

We need more ideas to help develop a policy that is fair to all. Ideally, our new process would not be time-consuming or labor-intensive and would not invite new ways to cheat.

Do you have an idea to develop a system that will allow the safe removal of true lake junk but stop the abuse of our system by dock owners or contractors who are dumping old docks into the system? Please respond to [email protected]

Thanks for your help.

Steve Meyer
HLWID chairman