Posted on August 8, 2018
The Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee has been looking into strategies for cleaning up the lake for more than a year and a half. Next Monday, those strategies will finally be presented to city council in the form of a $19.2 million proposal.
At its meeting Monday afternoon at the Mitchell Recreation Center, the committee prioritized what it plans to ask for in the city’s 2019 budget. The budget issue at hand is one that would require the city to approve spending for the first two steps of Fyra Engineering’s proposed plan to clean up Lake Mitchell.
Altogether, the price for the two steps that the committee has decided are vital for getting the lake’s phosphorus levels back to a healthy state and maintaining those levels indefinitely includes the actual costs of putting the regulatory measures into effect, contingency costs and a 10 percent engineering fee.
In theory, the city wouldn’t be paying the entirety of that $19.2 million. While proposed Step 1, at around $11 million, is more costly than proposed Step 2, Fyra representatives told committee members that they could get up to 60 percent of Step 2 — about $4.8 million — funded by grants, which could be applied for after the entire process is further along.
While committee members debated some of the finer points of the lake’s future, they ultimately determined that what was most important at that particular meeting was determining how to tell the city council why they’ve landed on the solution they have.
“Originally, we were (told), ‘Find the solution for our lake.’ And we’ve done that, in my opinion. We’ve found a solution,” Committee President Joe Kippes said. “As far as how we pay for it, which I guess will be the next question, I’m not sure how to answer that, and I’m not sure that I’m even being asked that right now.”
The general consensus from committee members was that they will need to emphasize that they feel it’s important to accomplish both Step 1 and Step 2, and that phosphorus readings in hotspots in the lake suggest that just doing one of those steps would not have the lasting effects that the committee wants.
“Even if we did dredge the lake and kept the numbers down, what’s coming into the lake would carry enough phosphorus that (would) still give us the problem we have,” Kippes said. “That’s why, I guess, we felt that if we’re going to do it, we probably have to pursue both of those. Doing just one of the two … might improve our numbers, but the ultimate test is the visual: if you drive by the lake and it’s blooming, you fail the visual.”
Committee members unanimously approved a motion to present their findings to the council in a way that lumps Steps 1 and 2 together as one big step. They said that if the council plans to undertake Step 1, it should be prepared to take on Step 2 as well. Step 1 primarily consists of dredging the lake to get the current sediment out of the lake, while Step 2 is focused more on engineering structures in and around the lake that would keep the phosphorus levels from rising back to where they are now, before the potential dredging.
Source: The Daily Republic
