Lake Garfield Working Group October Meeting
Lake Garfield Working Group November News The Lake Garfield Working Group (LGWG) held its monthly meeting at the Monterey Town Hall on October 15. The topic of milfoil mitigation dominated the agenda with a review of the season’s harvesting and a look towards funding for future endeavors.
To date there have been four separate sessions of mechanical weed harvesting done by diver-assisted suction harvesting (DASH) conducted by New England Aquatics. The first session, in June of 2015, paid for by the Friends of Lake Garfield, removed one-tenth of an acre of the first noticeable patch, which a survey the previous year estimated to be two and one-half acres. In 2016 an alarming growth of milfoil raised the question as to whether the use of milfoil-targeting herbicide, used in other local lakes, would prove more cost effective. Out of a desire to avoid the use of herbicides as well as the costly maintenance of weed control incurred by the Lake Buel Tax District, $50,000 was appropriated by town vote for continued mechanical harvesting.
A significant reduction in the patches of milfoil in 2017, possibly due to milfoil eating weevils introduced in prior years, brought welcome relief. That September, following the growing season at the time of least growth, 341 ten-gallon bags of milfoil were harvested and delivered to Gould Farm for composting over the course of thirteen days, at the cost of $22,000. This year, jumping ahead of the growing season, the first DASH session was in early May, paid for with $15,000 previously budgeted by the select board. Currently, as we come to the close of the 2018 season, the report from New England Aquatics indicates that starting September 19, seventy hours of DASH was conducted in two acres over the course of ten days to remove 682 ten-gallon bags of milfoil from the densest patch located north of the narrows, paid for with the remainder of the original $50,000. The full report from New England Aquatics will be available on the town website under the “Departments/ Lake Garfield” page.
Recognizing that the continued growth of milfoil will be as constant as the weeds of a garden, the LGWG is currently attempting to define the costs and benefits of controlling this invasive plant at the same time as we look to help the town determine how these efforts can best be funded.
An additional item on the LGWG October agenda concerned the matching grant submitted by the town to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection for the funding of a surface water catchment to mitigate phosphorous runoff into the lake. On October 19 we were informed that the MA DEP had not awarded us the grant, but that they would be conducting a meeting at 2 p.m., November 19, to inform us how best to resubmit the grant for next year.
The next LGWG meeting will be held on Monday, November 19, at 7 p.m., at the town hall, and we encourage all interested parties to attend.
— Steve Snyder, Chair Lake Garfield Working Group