Puddle Jumpers #1- Art Devlin

Puddle Jumpers is a podcast produced by the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Hosted by Stephanie Rock and Tom Collins. Edited by Stephanie Rock with assistance from Tom Collins and Kayla Beck.

Music: In the Forest by Lesfm from https://pixabay.com/

Transcript

Stephanie: Welcome to Puddle Jumpers, a podcast where we jump in the big puddles of the Adirondack lakes and ponds to learn more about science, stewardship, and community. My name is Stephanie, and I’m the Watershed Science Communication Fellow for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute with funding from the Lake Champlain Sea Grant.

Tom: I’m Tom, the Education and Outreach Manager for the AWI. For the 4th Annual Adirondack Water Week, we are creating a mini-series dedicated to highlighting communities in the Lake Champlain Basin that have done some major work in water conservation and protection.

Stephanie: Our first episode brings us to the village of Lake Placid in the AuSable Watershed. We sat down with Mayor Art Devlin to talk about sustainable work around the town and Mirror Lake.

Art: I was born and raised in Lake Placid. The property that we just sold, the family business, has been in our family for 100 years, 3 generations. I was a trustee for four years and then deputy mayor for eight, and then it fell to me to keep what we were doing going and here I am.

Stephanie: You mentioned a little bit that you were born and raised here in Lake Placid. So could you tell us a little bit more about the town and what its history is and what it's like today?

Mayor Art Devlin, Photo Credit: Inside the Games

Art: We get seven months of winter here and we, a lot of times, don't see the sun. If you love skiing and outdoor activities like that it's great, but if not, it can be quite a change for you. Somewhere down the road, the Lake Placid Club came in probably about 1901/1902, and that was all the New York City wealth, and they would send their families up here to escape the heat in the summertime. Then it grew and grew and grew. And a lot of it was the major employer in Lake Placid and a lot of people that live here now, their parents met through the club and married and stayed here. And then, as my father would say, the jet airplane and the air conditioner made it so that the people in New York City could stay there year-round and they could go anywhere they wanted at the drop of a hat. And the Lake Placid Club fell out of fashion. But that's kind of a quick short history. And of course, they started the 1932 Olympics and were the ones bringing it here. We carried on with 1980 and then recently the Children's Games and then the World University Games that were just here. Once again, my father growing up said we're the best kept secret, and I think somewhere in the last 10 years that secret got out. We're no longer the best kept secret.

Tom: So, focusing on, not only Adirondack Water Week, but the relation of all our communities in the Lake Champlain Basin, thinking about community efforts to protect clean water and protect the heritage of clean water. For those folks that have a connection to a lake or a body of water or river or stream and knowing that Lake Placid is situated on Mirror Lake, has that connection to both Mirror Lake and Lake Placid. Maybe, could you tell us a little bit about the significance of Mirror Lake to folks that live here and just talk a little bit about maybe the economic and recreational cultural value that Mirror Lake or Lake Placid have to this community.

Art: Mirror Lake is very important. It's important to the tourists and the locals that live here. The brick walkway or the walkway that goes around is used by both entities. It is something that if we lost would really be a detriment. It's right there in the middle of the village. And the biggest problem we have with it is that it's one of the few lakes in the Adirondack Park that's completely encased by a road all the way around, which means it gets attacked from 365 degrees. Which is also why we've worked so hard to preserve it and restore it.

Tom: So, thinking about kind of where we are now, but also like looking back to how that research got started, could you maybe talk about like your perspective about how you first heard about some issues that were occurring in Mirror Lake?

Art: Yeah, that was all of 10 or 12 years ago, and that was back when I was a trustee and then transitioned into deputy mayor, and became more involved in it. The first we had was a relationship with the Mirror Lake Watershed Association and Brendan Wiltse. He is what I call the voice of reason. He's probably the best thing that ever could have happened for us. There's a lot of people that say stop putting salt down. Well, that's easy to say, very hard to do when there's those times of the year, it's just outright dangerous for cars or people walking, and you have to do something, and Brendan was the type that found a solution where you kept yourself safe but you made the changes you had to make.

Stephanie: Dr. Brendan Wiltse is a Senior Research Scientist for the Adirondack Watershed Institute, but he previously worked at the Ausable River Association where he was tasked with developing a watershed scale monitoring program. In 2014, Larry Master, who was a volunteer for the Adirondack Lake Assessment Program, sampled Mirror Lake and discovered that it was heavily impacted by road salt. The following year, AsRA began monitoring the lake and observed a vertical gradient of salt which led to the hypothesis that salt was leading to a reduction in spring mixing. In 2016, the AWI joined forces with AsRA to study the lake further.

Art: What we were told was that Mirror Lake, let's for the sake of argument, say it's 90 feet deep, the bottom 30 feet, the bottom third, was a slurry mix, just like you'd have in a salad dressing, and it prevented the lake from turning over. And it also couldn't sustain life. And so that meant the trout that are in the lake in the winter time, they were fine. But then when the summer time would come and the water would heat up and they would normally dive to the bottom, they couldn't. So they're getting trapped in this layer in the middle and if we had kept letting the bottom get higher and the top getting warmer, then eventually we would have lost our fish.

Stephanie: Even with a strong voice like Brendan’s advocating for the lake, it took some time and understanding before major changes were implemented.

Art: And a lot of that comes down to educating the people on what they are because I guess the history of it, when you hear about it, started in 1980, people started putting salt down and they got used to the roads being completely bare and the sidewalks not a bit of ice. And then you get to the point now where with the conservation, we're finding out how the salt damage was wreaking havoc with everything you have where the state had a test zone where they stopped putting salt down, which included Main Street and all of a sudden the parking lanes are slushy and everyone's wondering why the village isn't cleaning. And it wasn't us, it was that the state stopped dumping salt, so it took a while there for people to understand why those lanes weren't as clean as they used to be. And for the most part, people have gotten used to it. Change is tough, but once you get used to it, it's a lot easier and you know there's a good cause. Once you realize that there's a little bit of ice, just be careful or slow down on the roads. Once people got used to that, that helped us to not have to put as much salt down. And yeah, it never got to the point where we had, let's say, a community hearing on it, and people, it more or less was feedback we started getting through the Business Association. You know, they're the ones that are boots on the ground, so to speak, on Main Street and they would start telling us what people were saying. We'd start telling them and we started trying to educate them. If someone calls and said my sidewalk is slippery in front of my store, we legally have to go up and salt it. But if it's just a tiny bit of ice, that's not a problem, If they report it, we have to do something. If they don't, and you live with it, we don’t. And that that was part of the education.

Tom: So, knowing that we have this problem, knowing that you took that community feedback you, you instituted some infrastructure changes, right and very, very large ones for a small village. Can you walk us through that process?

Art: The first thing that we did is we redid the sidewalks from the public beach to the club beach. And when we did that, we put infrastructure into the ground to take the water that was just dumping into the lake and bring it down here and divert it away from Mirror Lake. Then the next thing we did was to start where we finished off at the club beach and go around another halfway around the lake to the club condos and we had a choice between brick sidewalks or cement sidewalks, and one of the factors in not doing that in brick and going cement was that it takes half the salt to keep a cement sidewalk clear that it does a brick sidewalk. As we got into the Main Street project, we put in three big bioretention fields. They're scattered at both ends of Main Street and one in the middle. They don't eliminate the salt, but what they do is they slow it down and put the water into the ground and hopefully keep its mitigation from the lake in the years to come. The three hills, Saranac Ave, Hayes, and Olympic Drive, they are the three biggest polluters of the lake, and by putting in these big bioretention fields, that's really helped a lot. Other projects that happened on there, we did porous pavement on the NBT lot and on the lower part of the municipal lot, which helps keep the groundwater there, and all of us, all of our sidewalks are also porous, porous sidewalks, so they help retain the water as well.

Stephanie: On top of these bioretention units, the village of Lake Placid instituted some changes to traffic flow. Where Saranac Ave meets Main Street, a design change from a tee in the road to a banking turn allowed for a better flow of traffic and eliminated the opportunity for larger vehicles like buses to get stuck in the winter, therefore reducing the need for road salt in that section.

Art: If you look at the last 15 years, we are putting down half the amount of salt that we were before. So, with the all of the things that we've been doing, last talking to Brendan Wiltse, he says the lake actually turned over the last two springs, which now means that slurry mix is diminishing, and it puts oxygen in the water to help everything, not just the lake trout. And he said basically the salt levels that they're reading are going down steadily year by year. So it looks like our efforts are paying off.

Stephanie: How would you say that these improvements have impacted the Community regarding sustainability, recreation and economics?

Art: Well, the last two parts, the economics and the recreation, I don't think really anybody even knew there was a problem. So it didn't really change that, but the sustainability definitely did, because if we hadn't been alerted by the Mirror Lake Watershed Association that there was a problem and done something about it, it would have impacted both of those. But fortunately, we were proactive enough that we caught it before it was a problem and so the sustainability part answer is easy. We've done our job, and it seems to be working out, and luckily we did it soon enough that it didn't impact the other two.

Stephanie: What can other communities take away from these processes that you've described for us?

Art: The biggest thing that I think you can take away from it is the actions that you take do make a difference and that you basically just have to be patient, let people get used to the idea that things aren't going to be spotless and there is going to be some snow and ice and there's just that transition period.

Stephanie: What sustainability goals do you have for Lake Placid for the future?

Art: Some of the projects that are in the works, we have a housing development that we're getting ready to repave and we put provisions already in the work we did on Mirror Lake, the road around Mirror Lake to capture that water as well. So that will add to it. We're working on our street lights, all becoming LED and the LED lights are about 80% less power than they were with the old lights, so that will be huge. That will save the village about $14,000 a year. And we've been, we've put some car chargers in and we've put provisions for future car chargers in and we also have installation projects that we've been doing.

Tom: So, one thing we wanted to ask everybody that we interview for this is, what does clean water mean to you? How would you define that?

Art: Clean water, from a village standpoint, it is our water source on Lake Placid Lake. So that's extremely important. We are 80% tourism here and having the people be able to come here and enjoy crystal clear lakes and streams like they expect is very important. And it's very important for the quality of life for the locals.

Stephanie: The sustainable work that Mayor Art Devlin is working on in Lake Placid seems like a never-ending task, but it’s one that has been paying off and providing habitat for a species that otherwise would have been pushed out. He jumped on the work fast enough that the town wasn’t impacted economically or recreationally, which is an impressive feat. We look forward to seeing Mirror Lake continue to recover from road salt damage and watching the village of Lake Placid grow into a shining example of sustainability.

If you’d like to learn more about our work on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid, check out our website at adkwatershed.org. We hope you’ll join us next week when we jump over to another puddle in the next town over. We’ll be talking with Jay Federman, Vice President of Friends of Moody Pond in Saranac Lake.

Thank you for listening, and the next time you find yourself jumping from one of these big puddles in the Adirondacks to another, remember to do your part to protect our water by making sure your watercraft is clean, drained, and dry!

Puddle Jumpers is a podcast produced by the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Hosted by Stephanie Rock and Tom Collins. Edited by Stephanie Rock with assistance from Tom Collins and Kayla Beck.