Lake George Park Commission, Lake George Association promise a restoration of collaboration in combating invasive species, as LGA plans to drop lawsuit over ProcellaCOR use
By Zachary Matson
The leaders of the Lake George Park Commission and Lake George Association (LGA) in a joint interview Tuesday promised to work together in battling invasive species on the lake, seeking to turn the page on a contentious fight over using an herbicide in the lake.
The reconciliation comes after more than two years of fighting over whether to use ProcellaCOR in Lake George to kill invasive Eurasian watermilfoil. It also marks the restoration of long-standing collaboration between the state agency charged with managing the lake and the LGA, a well-heeled organization devoted to its protection.
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“You can mentally take the last two-and-a-half years and forget about them,” said Ken Parker, chair of the Lake George commission. “We are going forward.”
John Kelly III, chair of the LGA board, said the LGA planned to drop its current lawsuit against the Lake George commission, Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Environmental Conservation. That suit sought to stop the state from using the herbicide this summer and appeared to be the first suit in the Adirondack Park to make a claim under a new state constitutional right to “clean water” and a “healthful environment.”
After a judge rejected the LGA’s request, a contractor on June 29 released the herbicide into two bays in the lake’s northern basin, the first chemical control of an invasive species in Lake George.
Sharing results
The LGA on Tuesday also released initial results from its own monitoring of the herbicide’s effectiveness and impacts, which included a more robust analysis than carried out by the lake commission. That monitoring was conducted by the Jefferson Project, a water-quality research program with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Those results confirmed the commission’s finding that the herbicide could not be detected in the water column within 24 hours of its use, but it could be detected in small quantities in lakebed sediments. The chemical byproducts the herbicide degraded into were also detected. The LGA shared its results with the lake commission and plans to do the same with its continued data collection.
“This is all about looking forward and working together in and around this new science and new data,” Kelly said.
Most of the milfoil in the two treatment zones had been killed when divers returned for a plant survey 30 days after the herbicide treatment, but a dense milfoil bed on the northwestern edge of the treatment zone in Blair’s Bay continued to persist. Water circulation models from the Jefferson Project suggested that the herbicide moved away from that area as it diluted into the lake, models that could inform future herbicide uses.
“The application worked pretty much as planned,” Parker said. “The LGA science going a little deeper than ours. That’s why we have joined back together to share what it did, what was it supposed to and how those answers line up.”
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Next steps
Kelly stopped short of saying the LGA would support future applications of the herbicide in the lake, outlining three areas of research he said the association still wants to undertake:
- Determining whether there is any significant regrowth of milfoil;
- Observing the long term response of native plants in the treatment areas;
- Monitoring the continued breakdown of the herbicide’s degradants.
The LGA and Jefferson Project also collected plant samples and are planning to study whether the herbicide affected macroinvertebrates in the treatment zones, a critical component of the lake’s food web. Kelly said the LGA wanted to see those outstanding questions answered before determining whether to back ProcellaCOR as a continuing tool in the fight against invasives in the lake.
Parker and Kelly also agreed it was important to document a formal strategy to fight invasives in the lake going forward, something the LGA had called for before the agency deployed ProcellaCOR.
The fight on Lake George may have made the two small herbicide applications on the lake the most watched and evaluated uses of the herbicide anywhere, and the leaders said the lessons they have learned could also benefit other Adirondack lakes.
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“Nobody has studied the effects of ProcellaCOR as deeply as we have on Lake George,” Kelly said.
I am glad to see adults acting like adults and working together finally as they should have been the whole time, but there are a lot of questions that i for one am still not seeing answers for. I am also not going to forget the past two years of misleading and deceptive leadership from the LGPC whose legacy will now be tide to this chemical application unfortunately. Dave Wick, who made misleading and untrue comments in the press and during community events throughout this whole process, rushed this application into the lake on a worse conditions possible weather day, and the whole board who made the poor management decision to not listen the LGA (even tried to discredit them), and their science, in the first place. What this data shows is that the LGA what right all along. LG is not the type of lake this chemical was made for, it didnt work, it would spread based on the lake movement, impact areas of the lake that are deeper with less sunlight, and not magically break down into nothing within 24 hrs.
Here are the questions we still need to hear from both organizations:
1. Procellacor and degradants where found in the drinking supply of residents in Blairs Bay. Why has this not been announced to the public or in any data?
2. Procellacor and degradants where found in the La Chute river flowing into VT. Why has this not been announced to the public or in any data?
3. There was a swimmer in the water in Knight-Jeliffe Bay during the application, less than 10 feet away, and was given no warning by the LGPC to not be in water at time of application, even though it very clearly stated on manufacturer label not to be. Why has this not been addressed and the topic pushed aside rudely by Ken Parker at recent LGPC meetings?
4. Most importantly is it safe to swim and drink this chemical everyday for the next ten years? Safe for adults, kids, fish, invertebrates, the overall lake ecosystem. Im just not seeing that in this data yet, and dont trust the chemical company telling me it is, would you at this point?
There a lot of legitimate points made in this article by the AE as well, https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/vermont-denied-an-herbicide-permit-procellacor-for-largest-lake I wish we had taken the VT approach from the beginning of this process.