James Lynch, MBA, PhD, JD
154 Hollyhock Lane
Edwardsville, Illinois 62025-4227
618-830--9925
[email protected]
March 6, 2016
The Honorable _________________
City of Edwardsville
118 Hillsboro Avenue
Edwardsville, Illinois 62025
Dear Council Member ___________:
The Dunlap Lake Board recently declared the public interest to be served by the proposed Special Service
Area for the Dunlap Lake Subdivision (Copy attached). Now referred to as the Mayor’s Plan, the specific
public interest to be served by the proposed SSA is the management of storm water within the Mooney Creek
watershed. A public interest must be served by an SSA, along with other requirements, in order justify using
an SSA to fund improvements on private property.
You would have to find a judge who flunked high school physics to prevail with the supposition that the depth
of a constant level lake has any impact on amount of storm waters such a lake can retain. This is easy to
demonstrate. Take two water glasses of different heights, but with identical circumferences, and fill them both
brim-full with water. Now, empty one tablespoon of water into each glass. What spills out of each glass, of
course, is exactly one tablespoon of water. Likewise, deepening the bottom of constant-level Dunlap Lake by
dredging (i.e., the tall glass) does not add so much as a tablespoon of new flood storage capacity to the lake.
The same volume of water that flows into any constant-level lake is always equal to the amount of water that
flow out the other end. Attempting to use flood management as the necessary public service that justifies
using an SSA to pay for dredging a lake on private property is a convenient rationalization rather than an actual
reality. It is a justification that is based neither on fact, nor common sense, nor physics, nor basic
hydrodynamics. Making any part of the lake deeper simply has no consequences with regard to storm water
management within the watershed.
The preceding should not be taken to suggest that Dunlap Lake has no mitigating effect on storm surges from
its upstream watershed. To the contrary, storm water entering the lake is presented with the extensive flat
plain of surface water on which to spread out. Deeping the lake by dredging or other means, however, would
not add a square inch of additional surface for storm waters to overlay or an addition cubic inch for storm
waters to occupy. This existing mitigating effect, however, raises another issue with regard to the proposed
SSA. It is well-settled that the parcels that are to be encumbered by any SSA-related tax lien must receive
some benefit from the SSA-funded improvements. The temporary retention of storm waters until they drain
from the lake is not a benefit to the property parcels within the subdivision but rather only to the property in the
remainder of the watershed below the dam. For example, if an SSA is created to install street lights in a
subdivision it is the properties benefitted by the elimination of public places that are taxed and not the distant
power plant that supplies the energy to do so. Likewise, it is the downstream properties in the watershed, and
not Dunlap Lake homeowners, that receive the benefit of the lake’s temporary retention of storm water.
Dunlap Lake provides this benefit to downstream riparian property owners while the individual Dunlap Lake
property owners bear a burden rather than a benefit. The burden is easy to see when a storm surge into the
lake top shoreline walls and floods over lawns and other lakefront enhancements. Picking up the flotsam and
jetsam left behind by the receding water does not constitute a benefit.
It might seem obvious that the lake could provide flood control and actual storm-water management if the
lake’s level were kept permanently lower. There would be, however, several problems in doing so. Foremost,
once again, any benefit from lowering the constant level of the lake would accrue to property owners
downstream from the spillway and not to residents in the Dunlap Lake subdivision. Another consequence
would be that all the lake’s coves would become mudflats, leaving many docks high and dry. Most serious
would be the damage to the shoreline walls that protect most lakefront lots. Residents have for decades built
their shoreline walls on the presumption that the lake’s present constant level would be maintained. When the
lake is lowered, as it is every five years for the purpose of shoreline wall repair and maintenance, the bottoms
of most shoreline walls are exposed. If the lake were kept permanently lowered, waves from boats and the
wind would break not against the shoreline walls per se but against the materials upon which those walls were
constructed. This material is usually crushed stone and it would quickly be eroded away by exposure to
continual wave action. Catastrophic collapse of hundreds of feet of shoreline walls would be easy to
anticipate. This would be aggravated by the pressure of the hillsides pushing against the inland side of the
shoreline walls not being countered by the mass of lake water that presses against the opposite side when the
lake is returned to its normal level.
Nothing heretofore should be taken to suggest that the Mooney Creek cove at East Lake Drive and Gerber
Road does not need attention, only that removing the silt accumulation within the cove does not provide the
published public purpose used to legitimize the proposed SSA. In addition, it is a problem the consequences
of which do not extend beyond the boundaries of the subdivision. Any sediments that wash into the lake from
Mooney Creek are going to precipitated out, if not in Mooney Creek cove proper, but to the same extent before
any storm surge reaches the spillway and enters the creek below. It is a very long lake giving the natural
mechanics of sediment suspension plenty of time to work. The Mooney Creek cove represents a tiny fraction
of the surface area of lake and even smaller percentage of its total water volume.
Over the years, the Mooney Creek cove had become so overburdened with silt that it was commonly referred
to as “the wetlands.” Lakefront lots adjacent to the wetlands were made exempt from the shoreline-wall
requirement because waterfront residents could not get boats to their waterfronts (a fact probably reflected in
the purchase prices of the homes). The wetlands were higher than the constant level of the lake, and the
creek itself, from successive overlays of silt during storms. Most of this changed in September 2008 when the
remnants of Hurricane Ike washed out the fill that carried East Lake over the creek. In December of that year,
the City began the reconstruction and upgrading of East Lake Drive at Gerber Road. At the same time, the
wetlands were removed and the shoreline of the lake was reconfigured in the cove. This reconfiguration was
very ingenious and created a silt retention basin that has clearly worked over the years as intended. It has
taken over eight years before dredging the Mooney Creek cove appears to be needed in the future. As now
designed, the shape of the shoreline causes the waters of the creek to slow sufficiently to drop in the cove the
bulk of the dissolved sediment. The current situation is worthy of consideration but it is not critical. Residents
in the cove can still reach their property with pontoon boats and there have been no published reports of boats
going aground. While most of the other coves have significant silt buildup – although only one other cove is
planned to be dredged under the Mayor’s Plan – the main body of the lake remains surprising silt free. This
appears to be true even in the main pool behind the dam, a testimony to the engineer who designed the lake in
1939 and to the residents who have constructed shoreline walls at their own expense to prevent erosion of the
hillsides surrounding the lake.
The reconfiguration of the shoreline in the Mooney Creek has been so successful that the cove will eventually
need the resulting accumulated silt removed. But why not just use the same methods that was used in
December of 2008 rather than venture into the unknown? Surely the removal of the wetlands, which would
have contained much more material than presently exists in the cove today, did not cost anything in the
neighborhood of $4.5 million. Why not just use the same approach again? Using the same methods does
away with two expensive items in the current plan: the need for a dewatering facility perched atop a hill and for
free shoreline walls for the adjacent parcels seemingly to be constructed of innumerable numbers of concrete
blocks (based on the illustration published by the Board). If the 2008-approach is used, and result in another
nine or ten years of silt retention, it is difficult to understand why a more complicated approach is even being
considered. Based on the current rate of silt deposit in the cove the proposed SSA bonds would not even be
paid off before the need and expense of excavating the cove arises again. Since both approaches would
collect approximately the same amount of silt and, therefore, would have equivalent effects on water quality if
any, the only difference is the disparity in price. [Part of the complexity of the current plan is the dewatering
facility with its up pumps and down drains. I appear to be the only person struck by the similarity between the
proposed dredging/dewatering plan and Ameren’s Taum Sauk pumped storage plant in the St. Francois
mountain region of the Missouri Ozarks. Search “Taum Sauk Disaster” online and you might also be reluctant
to build a similar facility behind existing homes as proposed or in your own neighborhood.]
Since not-for-profit organizations can issue tax-exempt bonds directly, why does the city need to be involved at
all? (See Publication 4077 - Tax-Exempt Bonds for 501(c)(3) Organizations.)
A final note: Please do not be misled by any statistic generated by a double-barrel question, known in courts of
law as compound-questions: (e.g., “Do you love your country and did you murder your wife?”). The definition
of a double-barrel question from Wikipedia is “… an informal fallacy. It is committed when someone asks a
question that touches upon more than one issue, yet allows only for one answer. This may result in
inaccuracies in the attitudes being measured for the question, as the respondent can answer only one of the
two questions, and cannot indicate which one is being answered.”
In summary: (1) Deepening a constant-level lake by dredging or any other means adds zero additional capacity
to store or manage storm surges. (2) Any use of the lake to store storm water is not a benefit to the properties
within the subdivision but rather accrues only to those properties below the dam. (3) The method used for the
removal of the wetlands at East Lake Drive and Gerber Road and the creation of the silt basin has been
remarkedly successful. Repeating this approach would likely require the expenditure of several hundreds of
thousands of dollars rather than costing a few million. And (4) The silt in the Mooney Creek cove is a
reoccurring problem but it a private problem on private land. It does not impact any part of the watershed
except for the lake itself.
With Regards,
James Lynch
cc: Members of Edwardsville City Council
Attachment