Paul Szmal: Good morning, it's 8.39, it's FLX Morning Wednesday, it's our regular Awasco Lake Watershed Management Council segment, OLWMC.org, Dr. Adam Effler is here, good morning.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Good morning, Ted, thanks for having me.
Paul Szmal: So tell us about your Watershed Inspector Program and the newest person who holds that title.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Right, so we have a division of the Awasco Lake Watershed Management Council called the Awasco Lake Watershed Inspection and Protection Division. This division is charged with identifying land use perturbations within the watershed, disturbances if you will, that may result in adverse water quality conditions for the lake. And so this division has been really important in addressing community concerns and also with implementing specifically our existing watershed rules and regulations.
Paul Szmal: So tell us about our new inspector.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: All right, well so we're thrilled to have Jesse Lloyd with us. He is our Watershed Inspector, he's been at it for several months now doing a fantastic job and he's with us this morning on the radio and I'd like to welcome Jesse to introduce himself too.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Yeah, good morning. Good morning, thank you.
Paul Szmal: So I read your piece in the Auburn Citizen, you've lived around the lake pretty much your whole life and you fish and you hike, so I guess it was kind of a natural thing to do.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Yeah, it's kind of a, it's kind of almost like a dream job, I worked as a geologist for a long time, spent many hours on the road, lots of nights in hotel rooms. Get older at, you know, you kind of want to move away from that and to actually find an environmental job in the area where I don't need to travel, doing something that I actually care about. I have, like you said, I have spent my whole life basically stomping around the streams and fishing the lake, so it's definitely something that I want to make sure is here and everybody can enjoy it for years to come.
Paul Szmal: So have you seen or noticed differences over the years?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Oh yeah, definitely, um, um, with the, it seems like the fishing has gone down over the years, but like, um, especially our resident trout, it's kind of not, but, um, I don't know, it's not really what I wanted to get into, but, uh, yeah, there has been some differences and you know, we're here just trying to shed light on that and make sure that it doesn't get any worse.
Paul Szmal: And I know, uh, we've talked about this in the past, one of the things with the Wasco Lake is, number one, it's not that big, and number two, it's pretty widely settled. I mean, some of the bigger Finger Lakes have some sections that are a little more wilderness, but the Wasco Lake's pretty much got people all around and it really does face a lot of pressure, doesn't it?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: That's correct there, Ted. Yeah, so we have a very large watershed ratio relative to the lake, in fact, the largest of any of the Finger Lakes, it's about 20 to 1. And so the watershed is very settled, has a dominant land use practice as agriculture, and of course, forested lands as well, and some residential land use activities. And so the lake, of course, having such a large watershed relative to lake size is vulnerable to land use activities and potential non-point source pollution sources.
Paul Szmal: So that's one of the things that we've been talking about this year, and I'll ask you about this, Jesse, is just the educational message seems to be getting out there. We've had Lake Friendly Living Month for a few years now, people are taking the Lake Friendly Pledge, living or farming, and do you believe that message is getting out there now, that this is everybody's concern, and that, like Adam said, with the big watershed, you don't have to live right on the lake to have a stake in this?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Yeah, I definitely think the message is getting out there. I have a son, Dorian, who's in eighth grade, goes to Moravia School, and when I talk with him about these kind of issues, even with his friends, they seem to really be into it, they want to do the right thing, they want to see the right things happening. I hope to be working with the school in the future to kind of get our message out there to the kids. I do have an open channel with the principal, we're going to be working, hopefully getting the kids up to our Fillmore Nature Preserve, to get them out there to do some field trips in the near future, and yeah, we'll get the message out there and get them out to the kids when they're young, and hopefully they'll grow up and they'll take that message to heart.
Paul Szmal: So we're about to have the grand opening of Fillmore Nature Preserve, it's been a long time coming, the Nature Conservancy, is that, that's, am I correct, is that who had the land before?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Yes, that's correct, yes, yes, so they acquired the property with a water quality improvement project grant from the state, and transferred the property to us as, in fact, a gift. And so we are now acting as the stewards for this nature preserve, and in fact the grand opening was already held, so we had that opening, it was endorsed and supported with advertising by the Kew County Chamber of Commerce, as well as the Kew County Water Quality Management Agency and some others, so it was great to see folks attend and support our efforts there.
Paul Szmal: And I know that, Jesse, you've known that area well for a long time.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: I really have, I've been up and down that road many times, and it's good to see that, you know, we have the, of course we have the Fillmore Glen for hiking, but now that we're going to be opening up these trails, there's approximately about four miles of hiking trails, I believe, give or take, we're going to be, so that is now open for hiking, we're going to post some additional signage up there to make it more clear where people can and can't go, but yeah, we really hope that people can get up there and enjoy that area. And there aren't very many properties like that left, really, on any of the Finger Lakes, I don't think, so that was a great acquisition to get.
Paul Szmal: Yes, yeah, we're thrilled.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: So that particular property is 161 acres, and what we're most interested in preserving are those ecosystem services that these land preserves provide. There are wetland features, there are forest features that all provide services for sediments and nutrient settling and cycling, habitat for animals, and so we're proud of that. There are some additional properties we'll be looking at acquiring, perhaps one next year and again in partnership with the Nature Conservancy.
Paul Szmal: All right, let's take a look at habs. We had a difficult season in a lot of areas this year. I know we're learning more and more about the causes. Weather can be a contributing factor, and we had that long stretch of calm weather, little precipitation, little wind, obviously those runoff sources are big, so is there a feeling that this year's season was kind of driven by that weather and doesn't necessarily mean a trend?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Right, so there are some temporally remote conditions that have a bearing, of course, as you mentioned. So when we have those calm, quiescent conditions for the lake, the habs tend to set up at the surface, and handling, first of all, observing the habs, where they occur, and then subsequently working towards mitigating those habs is a bit like playing a game of whack-a-mole, and I think we've used that euphemism in the past. As you mentioned, the drivers or the causes have been identified, but there are multiple of them. Of course, with our clean water plans, we are focused on nutrient reduction, primarily phosphorus reduction, for reducing the occurrences of these blooms, but yes, warming temperatures are important as well, as well as the dry-scinded mussels, so invasive species that have settled in the lake also have a bearing on the presence of habs in these lakes.
Paul Szmal: So one of the projects that's helping out in terms of the runoff is that Awasco Inlet stream restoration, because if you can restore the stream banks, you don't get so much erosion, and then when you get the erosion, you get the whatever chemicals or everything around the land that run in, and it's kind of a double whammy.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: That's correct, yeah. So that is one project type that we currently have underway that's considered an implementation project to reduce erosion, of course, erosion that would include sediment and adsorbed phosphorus, looking to address increasing resiliency in some of those areas, in particular for this project, the Awasco Inlet. And this is also a project type that the state tends to endorse at a high level. It's up to the local communities to get permissions among adjacent landowners, but I think it's a little bit easier to move this sort of project forward than some others that we've proposed in the past.
Paul Szmal: So Jesse, talk a little bit about the specific duties of watershed inspector and what you hope to accomplish, say, in 2025.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: So my job is to basically make thorough and regular inspections of the lake and its water courses. Also, with that, there's an educational part, and I'm also just working with residents around the lake and in the watershed. After hab season, it seemed like a big issue around the lake with the lakeside residents was foam. They had noticed that there had been more foam than they'd ever seen. So one thing I did is I started working with a company called Global Eclotic Research that had done some research with foam on Canandaigua, brought them in, got a really good email chain going with about 29 lakeside residents to get out there, get the foam sampled, because they just want to know what's in there, why it's increasing. So we are setting up to hopefully get more monies to get a more extensive sampling program for next year. And so I felt like that was a real big win with the community. And yeah, I'm just out there making sure that there's not anything adversely affecting the water quality.
Paul Szmal: One of the differences we've talked about with the Wasco Lake Watershed Management Council is its members are in a direct position to do something, because it's the communities, the legislative bodies that can act. And it must be encouraging to see how the membership has grown and how just about every community and governmental body along the watershed has joined.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Yeah, yeah. It's been great. Yeah, we're thrilled, Ted. We have 100% buy-in now for our financial commitments that provide baseline funding for what we do. And there's certainly growing concern among the community, and the directorship has grown as well. So we now have the Town of Lansing that has recently joined with directorship on our board. And as an intermunicipal organization, we're able to provide project programming and funding opportunities to the municipalities, and then also provide a forum for them to come to us with their concerns so we can help them address those concerns.
Paul Szmal: All right, what's the best way for people to support the work that you do?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Right, I encourage the public to join our meetings. We do have a remote option for joining. The monthly meetings are also always held in a physical space in Auburn at Memorial City Hall in the main chambers. Please check out our website. We have projects and programs, operational. We welcome the community to join us for various public events that we hold from time to time on Saturdays where volunteers can come out, get engaged, help us with rain garden installations, with building out gardens. We've had partnership opportunities with the building of rain barrels. There are some other hands-on projects that really can make everyone feel like stewards and help everyone feel that they can get involved.
Paul Szmal: I think I've had my rain barrel for about 15 years now, and it came from an interview on the show with one of the... Actually, I think it was Hobart and William Smith that was doing a workshop on those. But it's amazing how much... I mean, my house is mid-sized, and a good thunderstorm will just about fill that up. Isn't that interesting? And what fascinates me, too, is that I think there are some who may perceive, hey, what's the benefit there? And albeit perhaps a small action that any one person could take, could you imagine if folks across the board started adopting these practices, how much we could reduce some of the runoff that we experience from these impervious surfaces within these watersheds?
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: The website is olwmc.org. Adam, great to see you. We don't usually get to see you in person, and Jesse, terrific to meet you, and I know we'll talk again. Yes. Thank you. It's our pleasure, Ted. Thanks so much.
Paul Szmal: Thank you both for what you do.
Adam Effler, Jesse Lloyd: Thank you.
