Focus on pollution at Wooster Lake

In 2004 Mike Adam of the Lakes Management, with tax payer resources, assembled and gave a presentation to the WLCCA of Wooster Lake, highlighting that 17 pounds of phosphorus per day was dumping into Wooster at a single source point, as was measured by his team in 2003.

Though there are other suspected source points of this polluting and harmful nutrient, this is believed to be one of if not the largest source point: the input from upstream Fischer and Fish Lakes. At that time, 1,200 pounds of total suspended solids were spilling into Wooster were also measured by Mike Adam’s team at this location.

These are the inputs highlighted as “the greatest threat” to Wooster Lake as reported by Lakes Management in their own 2003 Report. What’s wrong is some in Lakes Management and the District 5 county board member have since done nothing to address this ongoing, escalating, real issue.

Rather, they at the request of Bonnie Thomson Carter in 2005 chose to pursue invalid ordinances, providing armchair lawyering and bogus reasons for the rules, including on relying on bogus lake covenants that some had previously recorded at the County Recorder of Deeds Office to give the rules the appearance of being valid.

Never being enforced, the invalid lake covenants were rescinded in 2005 by the WLCCA board. Never being enforced, the invalid lake ordinance was rescinded by neighboring village Round Lake in 2011. With the phony rules being made transparent and dismissed, when will Lakes Management focus on its real priorities and begin to mitigate the real threat in Wooster Lake: the ever-increasing, high levels of polluting phosphorous?

Kirk Denz

Ingleside