Whitewater: City, DNR share continued restoration plans for Trippe, Cravath lakes

By Chris Spangler

Extra chairs were needed to accommodate Whitewater residents who packed the common council room for a Saturday morning update on restoring Trippe and Cravath lakes.

Nearly 70 citizens attended the community meeting led by Whitewater Interim City Manager John Weidl, Parks and Recreation Department Director Eric Boettcher and state Department of Natural Resources lakes biologist Heidi Bunk.

The gathering provided information on the overall project, the current state of the lakes, fish stocking plans and the management of cattails and vegetation. An hour was spent answering the public’s questions.

Boettcher noted that the lake projects began July 8, 2019, with Cravath Lake having been drawn down fully after the first season. Siphons added over the spillway in the summer of 2020 enabled the continuous drawdown of Trippe Lake during the past year.

Both drawdowns were complete in August 2021. Dredging took place Jan. 12-Feb. 27, 2022.

“The hard part about this dredging project was, since it was mechanical dredging, we could only dredge as long as there was frost in the ground,” Boettcher told attendees. “At the very end of February, we had to pull everything out because the ground became too soft …”

Both lakes were refilled this past spring.

“We started up the second week of June, and it took quite a while to get them refilled to where we are right now,” Boettcher added.

He said that at the end of August, the lakes were close to being refilled; however, the statewide drought has kept the water levels a little below normal.

He showed aerial photos of the lakes after dredging, noting that a total of about 60,000 cubic yards of material were removed from the lakes.

The disappearing frost led to a few areas not being able to be dredged, including one in Cravath Lake and locations closer to the dam and the west shore on Trippe Lake.

“A lot of the vegetation you see is a lot of cattails, and there is additional vegetation,” Boettcher said. “As you recall, we didn’t start refilling until June of this year. A lot of that vegetation had already grown. Some of that vegetation is not even aquatic plant life, so next year and the year after, those are going to die off, along with some cattails.”

During a September boat trip with Bunk, he said, they saw improvements in the lakes.

Boettcher reported that in September, the DNR stocked 300 and 350 10- to 11-inch Northern Pike in Cravath and Trippe lakes, respectively. 

Fish stocking is continuing through the end of this month and possibly into early November, with each lake receiving 100 4- to 6-inch bluegills, 600 2- to 3-inch Crappies, 500 3- to 5-inch yellow perch and, for feeder fish, five to 10 pounds of Golden Shiners.

Large-mouth bass are anticipated to be stocked next fall.

Boettcher said that the city plans to undertake a burning program on the lakes in January 2023. 

Coontail a problem

Taking the microphone, Bunk noted that the lakes are filled with a lot of algae and coontail. In fact, coontail makes up 91.38% of the frequency of occurrence in vegetated areas.

“That is a plant that isn’t rooted; it floats around in the lake. It is native, but you have too much of it in the lake,” she said. “And it is a plant that is frozen out by drawdowns.”

A lot of coontail was in Trippe Lake in particular, she said. 

Bunk explained that during the drawdowns, there was a cracking of the lake sediment as it dried out.

“Seeds that were in the sediment would have a chance to get bare and again be stimulated to germinate once the lake refilled,” she said.

Native plants seen on the recent boat tour included long-leaf pondweed, wild rice, softstem bulrush, smartweed, yellow water lilies and cattails.

“Right after our refill, we built a spect of full assemblage of five plants we expected for next year, so we are very curious to see what it will look like that summer,” the lake biologist said.

Talking further about cattails, Bunk said many were established while the lakes were drawn down.

“In other drawdowns that the state has participated in, it takes a while for the cattails to die back. If the water is deeper, they die back quicker. If it’s shallower, it takes a bit longer,” she said.

Thus, Bunk said, she and Boettcher would be focusing management efforts on cattails in three feet of water or less.

She pointed out that cattails do serve a function, however. They not only provide a windbreak to allow the native submersed plants to establish, but also use phosphorus to reduce algae blooms, create wildlife habitat, stabilize lake sediment and, when growing along the shoreline, deter geese from nesting there.

She said that in addition to the burning in January, cattail management methods for spring include cutting, as well removing potential bogs.

“The higher the water is, the faster the cattails will recede,” Bunk said. “But the flip side of that is that the higher water levels also will cause these bog islands to break off and float around.”

She noted that the goals of the restoration project are to improve the navigational depth for boating, clarity of water, wildlife habitat and fishery, and prompt a shift in the aquatic plant community.

“A lot of these goals are either met or on the way to being met,” Bunk said. “The lakes have improved …”

Audience questions

After the presentation, the city and DNR officials took questions from the audience for about an hour-and-a-half.

Responding to a question from a Cravath Lake property owner, Bunk said that cutting cattails that are attached to sediment is considered dredging, while those that break off into a floating bog may be pushed toward shore and removed from the water without a permit.

Weidl said that the city will create a mechanism for people who see floating bogs to report them so the city can remove them.

Another attendee asked about the logic of not dredging in front of Cravath Lakefront Park, “because that is what’s being used.”

Boettcher said the idea of dredging was to get a navigational channel through the lake “because if we don’t do that, sediment will keep continuing to deposit into the lakes.

“The other issue is we would have loved to dredge more than what we did, but the simple matter of the fact is that it’s very expensive to dredge. So we wanted to dredge more, but this is the amount that we could dredge initially,” Boettcher added.

A lakeshore property owner asked why such a small width of the channel was dredged, and said he would be losing six to eight inches, if not more, of shoreline due to the weeds.

“Keep in mind this was never a project meant to go shore to shore to make it five feet deep,” Bunk said, adding that the idea was to “give back the recreational value of these lakes to the community.”

As for shoreline plants, she said that some will take a while to die back if the water is less than three feet.

A man asked how long it might be before the dredged areas are filled back in with silt.

“What I understood was that you were digging this channel so that the new flow of water would continue to clean the lake out …,” he said.

He also said that the city has “glossed over” the goose problem in the parks and along the shore.

Boettcher indicated that the city has not had to spray down sidewalks to remove goose droppings as much as in the past.

“Obviously, geese are always going to be an issue. There are things that we will do in the future to help with that problem,” he said. “One is next year, we want to bring back our hunting program. The other thing is next year, we’re looking at other things, like  goose roundups and other things like that to help eliminate some of those geese, and also other measures as well.”

The questioner said he felt the most simple solution would be strategically placing swan decoys near the shore to keep the geese off of the land.

“It’s disgusting every day,” he said of the goose droppings at Cravath Lakefront Park.

Boettcher said the city would look into the swan decoys and other ways to deter the geese.

The officials also were asked why they opened up fishing, but not hunting, on the lakes this year.

Boettcher said that he does not control the fishing season, and that the hunting season is up to the DNR. 

The questioner said that he had talked to the DNR a couple of times and he was told it was the city’s decision.

Weidl said he would talk to the DNR official and get an answer.

“We just recently bought a place on the lake. We’re in Trippe condos on the hill so we could have a view. And … there is none,” a women told officials. You’ve taken this from a lake to a marsh. And if now we are going to be a marshfront, we shouldn’t be paying lakefront taxes anymore,” she said to some applause.

“You have taken our beautiful lake with our beautiful view — both lakes — and taken it down to looking at a whole bunch of weeds,” she added.

Responding to the woman’s query as to how long it will take to get her view back, Bunk said that before the project started, the lakes were not very useful for fishing or boating.

“Aesthetically, you might have liked the look, but they were not functioning very well, she said of the lakes.

She re-emphasized that the plants growing in four or more feet of water will die back quicker than that in three or less feet.

“We’re like two football fields or more from what used to be water,” the woman said in response, pressing Bunk for a restoration timeframe.

Bunk said that it is all dependent on rainfall.

Another attendee later asked the same question.

…The lakes are healthy in the dredged area; they really are,” he said. “However, …, in your professional opinion, how long before this problem that we’ve just gotten rid of will come back? The sediment is going to come back into the lower pond especially.”

He acknowledged that in reality, the lakes always are going to be marshes, and asked what people want them to be in the long term.

“Once you get back out into the areas down by where the creeks actually come into the lakes, it’s a different area. But I think they should be embraced instead of fighting them all the time,” he said. “I agree … the lakes look awful right now, but over time, they will improve. But what’s the long-term plan here because this isn’t going to go away. It’s going to come back. It’s just a matter of time.”

Bunk said that essentially, the projects are going against what nature intended, and she estimated that they should last 10 years were they left alone.

“But there are things you can do,” she emphasized, citing winter drawdowns, managing aquatic plants for diversity and best management practices in the watershed. 

An attendee asked whether the city would be cutting weeds on the north shore of Trippe Lake next spring. 

Bunk said she is working with Boettcher to figure out what the city can do with the budget it has.

“Whether or not the city will have the money to do everything that everybody wants, that’s not my call,” Bunk said. “But in terms of permitting, I’m not looking to have every last piece of cattail removed because that would not help the native plants in the lake be re-established.”

“Was the DNR’s plan from the beginning to take a lake and turn it into marsh and charge the city millions of dollars?” an attendee asked. “Because that’s what we feel has happened.”

Bunk responded “no.”

Another person pointed out that people need to wait to see how many weeds or plants die off.

“I think that everyone’s got to wait at least for another year,” he said. “You go out there and there’s water in there right now, and that brushy grass will not live in water. It will die. You’ve got to wait another year and you’ll see a big difference.”

He added, “You’ll have a lot of wasted money trying to fight these weeds that are already going to die.”

Another member of the audience asked why the city couldn’t simply raise the water level in order to kill off the weeds.

Bunk explained that the water levels are set by the operating orders for the dam, taking into account flooding downstream and a minimum flow. 

Another attendee asked whether the intent of the project was to get the lakes back to the state that they were prior to the dredging.

“In the immediate future, we do want some of the cattails to remain so that the native aquatic plants in the water have a chance to establish,” Bunk said. 

“We want native plants to support the fishery. We want native plants to make it more diverse and … easier to navigate. We need to balance that with the aesthetic and recreational desires of the public. So what I am envisioning is, over time, letting them recede, first of all, through water levels; second, through burning; and third, through some selective cutting,” Bunk said.

An East Clay Street resident asked whether there would be an opportunity to have a controlled spray of chemicals to kill the lake weeds. He also asked about the use of drones for spraying.

Bunk said that the best method when applying chemicals is to first cut the weeds before spraying. However, while that is the most effective, it also is the most labor intensive.

“Aerial spraying of material that’s up and not cut (has) limited effectiveness,” she added.

Weidl said that he would look into the cost of using drones for spraying.

Responding to a question on whether property owners could cut weeds in the lake themselves, Bunk said that an individual landowner may manually cut 30 feet along the frontage out into the lake 100 feet without a DNR permit. 

The material would have to be removed from the lake.

A woman asked how the 30-foot rule would affect a condominium association with multiple owners. Bunk said that a common lot would be 30 feet and anything over that would require a permit.

After a brief break, Weidl asked attendees to share priorities on which they feel the city should focus as it moves forward with the lakes project.

One man said he would like to see hydro-dredging at some of the primary use areas of the lakes.

Bunk said the city’s permit is for mechanical dredging, and, at the very least, it would have to be amended for hydro-dredging.

Weidl said he would talk to a DNR expert to learn more about hydro-dredging.

A woman asked whether the fire department could do the winter weed burning on the lakes.

Bunk noted that a certified burn boss is needed for lake burns, and few fire departments have a member with that certification. 

Weidl added that burning options was on his list of topics to study, as was a “goose roundup.”

An attendee said that he feels the best use of any funds available for both lake projects would be along the park shorelines.

“The best use of those funds, from my perspective, would be right along the park properties on Trippe and Cravath both, just because we’re going to get the best bang for our buck out of that, not only from our own recreational use, but from driving more people into our community, which is going to help in the long run,” he stated.

Weidl listed the park properties on his idea list.

In response to another question, he said that one of the city’s goals is to get on a trajectory to spend money for cutting weeds and cattails.

“We are working on developing what would end up being an annual expense to, over time, work with the DNR,” he said.

Bunk was asked whether something could be done to deter silt coming into the lakes from adjoining creeks. She said that there might be some federal monies flowing through the county that might help. This was added to the list.

A woman asked whether there had been a study on agricultural runoff and how it affects the lakes. Bunk said the council president would be meeting with the county and will ask about this.

Also suggested were contacting someone about a slow-no wake or motor boats on the lake, and opening hunting.

A woman asked that city and DNR officials meet with lakeshore homeowners and actually walk the land to see what has changed since the dredging. Weidl said he and Boettcher would do that.

Rounding out the meeting, an attendee pointed out that property taxes are figured out according to the assessed property value.

“In my mind, the elephant in the room is there is a referendum coming up next month that is designed to pay for increasing EMS services,” he said. “If that referendum happens to not pass, the city manager and council are going to have to be working hard to figure out how to cut not only discretionary things, but some things that are essential, which I think it needs to be said. If that occurs, there’s going to be less and less discretionary monies to be spent on (the lakes).”

“So this turned into be political now,” a woman commented.

“I don’t think it’s political. I just think it’s just the reality of the situation,” the man replied.

Weidl noted that there will be further updates, the next coming most likely in spring. 

The video of the meeting may be viewed on the city’s website.