Happy Labor Day Weekend! The Association team wishes to extend a special thanks to each resident, full or part-time, and your family and friends for making Lake Lotawana a wonderful place to live, visit, relax and have fun. The support you have given the Association team during the spring and summer months has been very gratifying to us. I am especially grateful for the overwhelming support as I near my one-year anniversary as your Executive Director. However, so much more important than accolades for us is the gratitude for each of you; and the safe manner which most everyone conducted themselves during these summer months. Thank you so much!
The lake water quality was tested earlier this week and unless something is emailed and posted on the Lake Website to the contrary, our water quality continues to be good. We intend to keep it that way!
As I look back at what the team accomplishes each week, I am reminded of how diverse their abilities really are; cutting trees after a storm, snowplowing, repairing voids in the roads, sealing cracks in the road, cleaning roadside culverts, mowing, removing limbs and other materials from the lake, removing dead animals from the lake and roads, trimming and removing roadside trees, fixing culverts, repairing the dredge, hauling large pipe for the dredge, cleaning out silt from silt ponds so we have somewhere to pump the silt from the dredge, removing old docks, helping people hoist sunken lifts and other structures from the shoreline, helping new residents with all of the registrations, assisting residents with Water Enforcement Issues and Lake Improvement Board matters. The tasks listed above are nowhere near a complete list of what the Association team spends it time doing to make this community a better place to live and visit.
Since the budget will be the focus of the Ways and Means and myself during the next month, it calls into question the balance of keeping our dues at an acceptable level against keeping our community in good repair. While we are still awaiting the report from the roads study that was commissioned several years ago (it was just completed within the last couple of months), we can only speculate what the information will tell us about the entire lake road system, as well as the signage, culverts and guardrails. I do have concerns that the past estimate for road repair costs may not be adequate, including what we have been through in the past two years regarding price increases. I suspect the roads report will depict that a large portion of our roads will come back with a rating of less than good, and more disheartening will be the unacceptable condition of our culverts throughout the lake. Little has been done over the past ten years to systematically repair or replace them so we can expect to play catchup in their maintenance in the coming years. If you think about it, infrastructure such as culverts should be repaired or replaced before a new overlay of roads is constructed if the culverts cannot be lined. I am hopeful we receive the report in the next few months. On another note, there are areas that trees and brush need to be cut along the shoulder of our roads. This warrants our focus in the coming years as well. Of course, all of this takes time, material, equipment, money and personnel. Rest assured we will assess these matters and come up with a plan to deal with it; whatever the constraints are that we encounter.
Please call us at 816.578.4272 if we can be of service to you. Please call me with any concerns or comments at 913.305.7181 or email me at haroldmitts@lakelotawana.net. Continue to be safe while at the Lake and elsewhere as the fall and winter months come upon us! Harold