Group meets to discuss Lake Delhi dam reconstruction

When water damaged or destroyed much of Monticello's Walnut Acres Campground, owner Chip Smith immediately blamed the Lake Delhi Recreation Association for not adjusting the dam quicker.

“The only thing they're worried about is keeping that lake at its optimum height. They don't care about anything else,” Smith said.

The Lake Delhi Recreation Association privately owns and operates the dam which broke last month during a flash flood.

The flood dumped as much as four feet of sand on some parts of the campground. Crews have spent the past few weeks trucking tons of sand off the campsites. Smith estimates he's lost more than $120,000. However, a former Monticello City Council member confirms the area used to be a sand quarry before it became a campground.

About one hundred people gathered at the campground on Sunday afternoon to show support for a plan to sue the Recreation Association. No one from the Lake Delhi area attended the event.

“We don't have a voice down here. So, that's why I stood up and said, ‘We're going to start doing something,'” Smith said. “If they could responsibly control that dam up there, we would be behind them, but they can't.”

Smith and many of the people at the meeting think the privately owned dam should either remain broken or instead become public property.

“The DNR should be involved or the Army Corps of Engineers. Somebody should be monitoring it,” Fred Iben of Monticello said. “Somebody has to step in and take a little more control up there.” Iben built the campground in 1980 and owned it until 1995.

“If they did rebuild the dam, I'd want it to be bigger and stronger and more for flood control,” Bob Tighe of Monticello said.

The president of the Recreation Association, Jim Willey, has not ruled out turning over control to a government agency. Willey says members are looking forward to learning what Governor Chet Culver's recently created Lake Delhi dam task force will discover.

“We are open to whatever that future structure might be, as long as there is somebody that will take responsibility as we've been doing,” Willey said.

But, Willey thinks it's unfair to blame the association for an act of Mother Nature.

“The rain comes from a much higher authority than us and it'd be difficult to sue who actually created the rain,” he said. “These citizens have put their own private dollars in to maintain the public waters of Lake Delhi. That's something that should be appreciated, not criticized.”

Wiley says the Recreation Association has always cooperated with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and spent more than one million dollars in the past five years to maintain and improve the Lake Delhi area.

Now, it's up to the legal system to determine whether anyone or any organization could have done anything to prevent the disaster.

Back in 2002, another group of people in Monticello also tried to sue the Lake Delhi Recreation Association after a similar flooding situation. A judge ruled the association was not responsible.