GREENSBORO — Members of the Greensboro Association Lakes and Environmental Stewardship team, (Stew Arnold, Chris Steele, Jed Feffer and JoAnn Hanowski, met with visiting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation personnel (DEC), and Orleans County (OCRND) in Greensboro and Greensboro Bend recently to visit sites on Caspian Lake and the Lamoille River.
Greensboro is located at the headwaters of the Lake Champlain Basin and maintaining the water quality is the goal of maintaining or improving the water quality in Lake Champlain. Dollars for the completion of these projects comes primarily from EPA.
The first stop of the tour was the Caspian Lake Beach where the group heard about the recently completed Lake Watershed Action Plan (LWAP) and studied the new beach kiosk that summarizes water quality concerns in the Caspian Lake watershed. The LWAP provided a prioritized list of projects that could be done in the watershed to prevent phosphorus, the major water pollutant from entering the Lake. These projects include improvements to roads, lake shore properties, stream side and wetland buffers.
New to the beach is the boat decontamination station which will help prevent the spread of invasive species into the lake. The new decontamination station will have a hot and pressurized wash station which is required to kill zebra mussel larvae. The 30 year long greeter program that has been operated at the Caspian Lake boat launch was recognized as having the positive result of no invasive species in the Lake.
Caspian Lake also has a Lake Wise program that assesses a property’s lake friendliness in terms of compliance of structures, impervious surfaces, septic and shoreline conditions to a standard. The group was able to walk to a recently completed project that was done as a result of a Lake Wise assessment. The project corrected a depression in the shoreline that was channeling surface water into the Lake.
The last stop on the Greensboro portion of the tour was a Stream Wise assessment project that was completed on the Lamoille River in Greensboro Bend. Stream Wise, like Lake Wise, is an assessment for land owners that have property adjoining streams in the watershed. Following an assessment last summer, a land owner chose to plant a grass area next to the stream with trees. Four hundred trees were planted in the spring of this year and the landowner is removing the invasive species Knotweed from the bank of the river.
The Greensboro Association is a 90-year-old organization that is committed to the protection of water quality in all of Greensboro. Information can be found at GreensboroAssociation.org.
