Lake Delhi residents outline ‘plan forward’

About 150 Lake Delhi residents met Friday night to begin charting a course to restore the lake that emptied July 24.

“We're behind where we hoped to be right now, to be honest, but we still hope to complete the dam by the end of 2011 and be boating on the lake in 2012, God Willing,” said Jim Willey, president of the Lake Delhi Recreation Association, the private entity that owns the dam.

Concrete action to rebuild the flood-breached dam that formed Lake Delhi had been on hold while state-appointed task forces studied its failure and formulated recommendations on how it should be rebuilt.

In recommending that the dam be rebuilt, the Lake Delhi Recover and Rebuild Task Force said “unambiguous public ownership and control of the dam” should be a precondition for the allocation of public funds to the project.

Much of last night's discussion at the Delhi Fire Station centered on the best way to transfer ownership and management of the dam from the Lake Delhi Recreation Association to a public entity that would be able to take advantage of state and federal grants and disaster recovery assistance.

A Lake Delhi municipality makes the most sense, according to Willey, who said, however, that the decision would be up to Lake Delhi residents.

Association members volunteered to serve on committees to study the pros and cons of the three leading options for public entity ownership of the dam: incorporation as in independent city, annexation by the nearby city of Delhi and assigning ownership to the trustees of the Combined Lake Delhi Recreation and Water Quality District, which already levies taxes to operate the dam.

Becoming a city, Willey said, would enable residents to take advantage of government disaster assistance while retaining the greatest degree of autonomy to make decisions affecting the lake.

However, he said, residents will have to become more unified than they were in 2005 when an attempt to incorporate the area as a city failed by a vote of 540 against to 302 in favor.

Had that measure passed, Lake Delhi residents would have had much less difficulty and uncertainty in their efforts to recover from the catastrophic dam failure that drained the lake and shrunk the value of their property.

The three committees were assigned to report their findings at a meeting to be scheduled next month.

Willey also outlined other key elements of what he called the “plan forward.”

A request for proposal for an engineering firm to design the rebuilt dam should be available soon, and an archaeology study will be required to secure the necessary permits, he said.

The initial estimate of $6 million to rebuild the dam does not include the costs of those studies or a fish ladder that the Department of Natural Resources will require, Willey said.

Nor does it include the estimated $4 million cost of refitting the dam to generate electricity, which remains a key element of the recovery effort, Willey said.

The source of those funds has yet to be determined, Willey said, but could include a Delaware County bond issue or tax increment financing district. “We do expect to get help from the state,” he said.