“My wife told me last night she didn't want to live here if the lake wasn't here.” – David Wilmot
When David and Ann Wilmot bought their home on the shores of Burton Lake nearly 30 years ago, they did so because they viewed the lake as an asset.
“We love the lake, we use it for everything, from filling the pool to irrigating the garden, and fishing and photography,” David said. “It’s just something everyday that we use.”
He added, “It kind of came up real quick here, with what they’re deciding on doing. I’m just not 100 percent sure why they’re going the route that they’re going.”
On July 12, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Water Resources, which has regulatory authority over dam safety in Ohio, ordered Geauga County Commissioners to breach Burton Lake Dam due to “serious safety concerns with the integrity of the dam’s spillway.”
“The impoundment of Burton Lake Dam must be lowered and the dam must be breached to protect downstream areas from a potentially catastrophic dam failure,” DWR Acting Chief Rodney Tornes said in a July 12 letter to the commissioners, which included his chief’s order.
The county was given until Aug. 27 to permanently breach the dam, which is located in the southwest corner of Burton Township.
“We are working with ODNR on a timeline for the permanent breach,” Laura Weber, sanitary engineer for the Geauga County Department of Water Resources, told the Geauga County Maple Leaf in a July 30 email.
Two weeks ago, at the July 17 commissioners meeting, she called the Aug. 27 deadline “unrealistic.”
Weber said in her email the county has retained the services of Hess & Associates Engineering Inc., a Newbury Township-based civil and environmental engineering firm, for the project.
“There is a lot that goes into a dam removal,” Weber previously told the Maple Leaf. “It’s not just as simple as their (DWR) order makes it seem.”
She explained engineers must study the current condition of the dam as well as downstream impacts of its removal.
“Other regulatory agency involvement thus far has included the Ohio (Environmental Protection Agency) and Army Corps of Engineers,” Weber said in her July 30 email. “We are planning to have a community meeting to discuss this project and answer questions. That date will be set sometime in the next few days.”
Weber said concerns about the poor condition of the dam — which was constructed in 1952 when a developer dammed a tributary to Bridge Creek — date as early as 1976.
Over time, the land, which includes a small water treatment plant, became the property and responsibility of Geauga County.
“It does look like there was a history of some issues with the dam and we’ve done work out there with the spillway,” she told county commissioners July 17.
That work includes a rehabilitation of the dam in 1998 as well as the installation of an inverted rock filter downstream of the dam in June of this year, after a downstream homeowner reported cloudy flow in the water channel.
Wilmot said he would like the roughly 120 homeowners be given a chance to fix the dam — despite a $3.5 million cost estimate — similar to the 1990s, when he worked with the then county commissioners and R.W. Sidley Inc. to shore up the land under the dam.
“It was fine and it didn’t cost anybody anything,” he said. “So, for them to just go and do what they’re doing like this doesn’t make sense. I don’t see why, if you got some contractors in there to do what we did with it for nothing, that it couldn’t be fixed for a whole lot less.”
Wilmot believes the county would like to sell the property to The Nature Conservancy, which he said has been buying up all the surrounding property.
In July 2017, the conservancy paid $2.6 million to buy the nearby 282-acre Snow Lake Preserve from the Holzheimer family, grandchildren of the property’s original owner.
Snow Lake, which covers 32 acres, was carved by glaciers 10,000 years ago and is strategically located in the heart of the Cuyahoga Wetlands complex, according to Terry Seidel, the conservancy’s director of land protection in Ohio.
The preserve is nestled among the conservancy’s 376-acre Lucia S. Nash Preserve, Punderson State Park, Geauga Park District’s Burton Wetlands Nature Preserve and Fern Lake, which is owned by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
As water flows through these lakes and wetlands, it is naturally purified, eventually emptying into Bridge Creek, which flows into the Akron watershed, a patchwork of 18,000 acres the city owns and manages to protect its reservoirs — LaDue, East Branch and Lake Rockwell — downstream.
“I heard through the grapevine that what they wanted to do is buy this property — the land, the lake — and they realized there was a problem with it,” Wilmot said. “The county wanted to sell it. Well, they couldn’t sell it with the condition it was in, so the easiest thing for them to do is eliminate the lake and the dam, and sell it to these people, if that is what’s going on.”
An email sent to Seidel regarding the conservancy’s interest in Burton Lake was not replied to as of the publication deadline for this week’s issue.
Geauga County Administrator David Lair said the county commissioners do not own the lake itself, only own the property where the dam is located, which is also where the small community sewage treatment plant is located.
“The problem as I understand it is that to fully rebuild the dam to meet current ODNR requirements would run well into seven figures,” he told the Maple Leaf. “Maintenance of the dam is not necessary to continue the proper operation of the sewage treatment plant, so that is not a cost that should be borne by the customers of water resources.”
Removal of the dam and lake will have a negative impact on the homeowners financially, Wilmot said.
“We always figured we could sell our home for the same reason we bought it,” he said. “It’s on the lake, it’s the last house on a dead-end street and the benefits you get from a lake, if you’re a photographer, if you’re a fisherman, if you’re a kayaker, a boater, a gardener . . . let’s face it, water is valuable and to have a nice supply of it in your backyard, with all the other benefits that go with it — the wildlife is killer around here and I hate to think about what’s going to disappear — I’m surprised that EPA and ODNR would be so quick to jump at this thing like this.”
Added Wilmot, “My wife told me last night she didn’t want to live here if the lake wasn’t here.”
