The first public meeting for the Otsego Lake Watershed Protection Plan is scheduled for Wednesday, Aug. 27 at Glimmerglass State Park.
Otsego Lake watershed municipalities, the Otsego Lake Watershed Supervisory Committee, along with other partners in the community, are working together to prepare the plan, which is intended to address changing water quality in the Otsego Lake. The meeting is slated for 6-8 p.m. at the Lakeview Pavilion.
The watershed municipalities include the village of Cooperstown and the towns of Otsego, Springfield and Middlefield.
According to a news release, the water quality changes are due to climate change, invasive species growth and pollution in the lake.
Bertine McKenna, the chairperson of the supervisory committee, said the committee’s role is to design ways to protect the components that contribute to clean water and minimize harmful algal blooms.
The supervisory committee applied for a $750,000 state grant to carry out a nine element plan, requiring a match of a couple hundred dollars. McKenna said it takes some years to put together the plan.
“That plan will identify all the aspects, including tributary work, ditching, plantings (and) testing water,” McKenna said. “It’s a complex process of identifying all of the factors that affect the health of the water.”
Otsego Lake is the village of Cooperstown’s source of drinking water. The plan will include required data, public meetings, questionnaires and other sources of information to identify problems and discover paths to solutions for them.
Three public meetings are required, McKenna said. At the first meeting, the basic components of the nine element plan are set to be reviewed, which is based on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s nine-element framework for establishing watershed-related plans.
To gain approval from the state Department of Environmental Conservation, different guidelines must be met, like identifying pollution sources in the watershed, naming the management practices needed to best obtain water quality goals and detailing the financial and technical help needed to implement these management practices, among many others.
“Wednesday night will be to get public input on the vision for what we want to accomplish, the issues that they believe are complicated or challenging for them, and then us educating them that it’s more than the lake,” McKenna said. “It’s ditching, it’s the tributaries that flow into the lake, it’s what plants do you plant, it’s what fertilizers you use, so there are multiple components to making it safe.”
In 2022, the lake had its first harmful algal bloom, which is dangerous to people and animals, which McKenna said inspired the committee to examine other lakes and its approaches, which was to implement a nine element plan.
Water testing at the lake, at different depths, has already begun, she added. This is modeled to see what the best management practices are for lake health.
McKenna said the Otsego Lake is the headwaters of the Susquehanna River, and “if we aren’t clean here, they aren’t going to be clean downstream.”
Once a “clearer picture” is established, the next step would be to apply for additional grants to “do the fix,” she said.
She added that there is a “parallel course” to the process that the committee is working on, including tasks like septic review, some pond analysis and pesticide work with the Department of Transportation.
“These are just examples of many, many things we are doing in parallel to developing the plan,” McKenna said. “We’re not just sitting and waiting, we are also investing and making fixes now.”