Amidst Controversy, Borough Will Continue Review of Crystal Lake Flood Management

Facing some controversy surrounding it’s adoption of flood control protocols at Crystal Lake, the borough told residents at a special meeting Wednesday night that it would continue to review the procedures as more information becomes available.

Last month, a meeting between the mayor and borough professionals hammered out a protocol, based on a 1975 settlement with residents around the lake, to open overflow gates anytime weather forecasts predicted an inch or more of rain within a 24 hour period.

“The next morning,” Mayor Linda Schwager said, “I was bombarded with emails, threats and nasty comments.”

Since the protocol was adopted, it has been used in five rain storms, though four of them exceeded two inches of rain, leaving the borough with little data on which to test the effectiveness of the policy.

“We’re trying to get enough of a sample size to make decisions going forward,” said Kevin Boswell, the borough’s engineer, explaining that the borough would have to review the impact of more one-inch storms to determine whether the protocol needed tweaking.

While Lakeshore Drive residents that have seen the water edge onto their properties in recent storms had pushed for the borough’s action, others saw the move as an unnecessary procedure that diminished the recreation value of the lake.

The audience at the special meeting with borough officials Wednesday night to review the protocol was largely Lakeshore Drive residents that implored the borough to keep opening the gates to alleviate flooding in their neighborhood.

“I bought a house on a hundred-year flood plain,” Lakeshore resident James Vulgaris said, underscoring the impact the floodwaters have had on insurance rates and property values on the street. “I’ve flooded 13 times in 15 years.”

“I stood there and cried at that meeting when you guys said you were going to go through with it,” neighbor Constance Webb said, referring to her joy at the announcement of the protocol for the overflow gates at the May 8 council meeting.

Under the 1975 agreement cited by the borough, which Schwager admitted was “ambiguous” and up for interpretation, borough DPW will continue to open the gates and Ramapo Mountain Lakes, the property owner of the lake, will close them.

RML president Janet Leogrande said that the company has opened and closed the gates for eight years, and disputed the necessity of the one-inch rule adopted by the borough.

“We still don’t agree with that, because we feel it’s lowering [the water] way too often and the health of the lake could be disturbed,” she said Wednesday.

Some of the residents present contended that RML’s procedure had been ineffective and slow to respond to flooding concerns, but Leogrande cited maintenance of the gates and environmental concerns in maintaining a more conservative policy.

“We don’t know what the protocol is,” Schwager said. “All we have is one document from 1975 that we have to base our decision on.”

That protocol, Boswell said, will be reviewed as additional one-inch rain storms gave the borough more comprehensive to judge its policy on, to accommodate both residents affected by the flooding and those that want to preserve the lake as a recreation area.

But as many of the Lakeshore residents in the room said, such as Cecilia Cataldo, the flood dangers should be the first priotity of the borough in determining its policy at the lake.

"I cannot believe that people in Oakland, being neighborly as we're supposed to be, would vilify the mayor for opening the gate."