Istokpoga Residents May See Their Waterways Dredged

LAKE PLACID - Highlands County Lakes Manager Clell Ford said he hopes to begin dredging and cleaning up several residential canals feeding into Lake Istokpoga by November.

The county already did some testing on 17 residential canals, including some of the canals located in Mossy Cove, Palms Estates and near the Istokpoga Marina. Ford said he also needed to choose a dump site for an estimated 25,000 cubic feet of sand and muck that would be taken out of the canals.
The state budget has $800,000 slated for the maintenance work, and he said he'll try to get some of the needed permits for the projects next month if the county commissioners approve the project in today's meeting.

"You just got to hope that Gov. (Charlie) Crist doesn't see this," Ford told the Friends of Istokpoga Lake Association members Thursday in Lorida. He was referring to the chance of a line-item veto by Crist, who has not signed the 2008 state budget yet.

Mike and Mary Cash, who live on the Bald Cypress canal northeast of Lake Placid, were happy to hear that their canal will be one of the 17. The past two weeks, they said, they couldn't get their boat into the water and they decided to pull it out until they head to Pennsylvania for the summer. Mike added that the canal's water level dropped 15 to 20 inches the past two weeks.

On windy days, he said the canal shows a "bath tub effect," where the water could go down six inches in a few hours since it's literally getting pushed away.

"I can get out but I can't get it back in," Mike Cash said.

Bill Dwinell, the Cashs' neighbor across the canal and a Friends of Istokpoga member, said he remembered taking out a lot of sand and muck under his boat slip during the 2001 drawdown of the lake. Just behind the slip, he can see the mud and lily pads sticking out of the water.

"I'm only two or three inches up against the wall," he said. "I'm guessing it's four to five feet deep in the center."
Lake Istokpoga's water level was just below 38 feet Monday. South Florida Water Management District had a drawdown approved for Istokpoga that allows them to take its water to customers downstream until it reaches a level of 36 feet, even though that hasn't been necessary to this point.

Cash kept the drawdown in mind.

"That's good news," he said of the pending project. "If they can give me back those 20 inches, I'd be perfectly happy, but I'd be happier if they didn't use it (Lake Istokpoga) as a reservoir."