Tag Archives: lake mitchell

Drawing up Mitchell’s wards

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Dive in. Mitchell’s population is headed to the lake.

There are four wards in the city and Ward 4, the one that surrounds Lake Mitchell, is growing, which means it needs to shrink. I’ll explain.

The city is required to keep the four wards as close in population as possible and the Mitchell City Council is working to ensure that happens. Monday night, the council approved an option to take nine blocks from Ward 4 and shift it to Ward 3.

Here’s the story on Monday night’s meeting.

According to the census count from April 2010, there are/were 15,254 people in the city. Each ward has between 3,700 and 3,900 people in it and each ward is represented by two members of the eight-member council.

While Ward 4 is gaining people, Wards 1 and 2 in the southern end of the city remain largely unchanged in population while Ward 3, in northeast Mitchell, is losing population. It seems people want to live by the lake and who can blame them?

City Planner Neil Putnam worked with Mayor Lou Sebert and Finance Officer Marilyn Wilson to draft two options for the revised ward boundaries. Putnam and Wilson also worked on the lines in 2001 after the 2000 census, since it’s that 10-year count that sparks the effort each decade.

Putnam said it seems very likely Ward 4 will continue to gain people as more dwellings, from houses to multi-family units to apartments are constructed in the north end of Mitchell. That means as Ward 4 grows in people, it must get smaller in size.

“So see you in 10 years,” the ever-cheerful Putnam told me after the council meeting. “Mark it down.”

If the Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee needs a project, here’s an idea …

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I picked up the glass shards and the rusty nail pictured here during a recent visit to Mitchell's Sandy Beach.

My wife and two kids and I visited Lake Mitchell’s Sandy Beach on Saturday.

Immediately upon our arrival, I noticed glass shards in the sand. That was concerning, because we were all barefoot. Looking around a little more, I realized the shards were not isolated to where we were standing. They were everywhere.

In a span of about five minutes, I collected all of the glass shards pictured above — plus the rusty nail — in an area no bigger than 10 feet in diameter.

Not wanting our kids to end up with cuts in their feet, we left right away.

The Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee has been very active and has done some great things since its creation a few years ago. I hope the committee will see this post and take some action to clean up Sandy Beach.

How high’s the water?

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Weather continues to be a major story in southeast South Dakota. According to the National Weather Service, Thursday night’s storm means this is the wettest July on record in Mitchell.

The forecast calls for rain on and off for the next two weeks. There a lot of reasons, but basically it’s a soggy summer.

This will mean flooding along the James River, Firesteel Creek and Lake Mitchell this weekend. We will see crests Sunday morning as some of the rain that fell north of Mitchell flows here.

Got your short pants, hip waders and boots handy? Tied up the boat on the lake? Sump pump handy? Here it comes … again. 

Park land or preserving trees

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A petition submitted to the city Monday calls for voting on converting three pieces of city-owned land deemed surplus property near Lake Mitchell into park land. Right now, it looks headed to the Nov. 2 ballot.

‘This would cap development by the lake and also save a stand of trees that were at the center of a fiery public debate in late 2009 and early 2010. How do you feel about this proposal?
 

Could this ‘bee’ the solution to Lake Mitchell’s algae problem?

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The Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee is scheduled to hear a presentation from the makers of the SolarBee at 4 p.m. Wednesday in the Council Chambers at City Hall. The SolarBee is a water circulator that is supposed to be very effective in reducing algae.

Here’s an excerpt from the portion of the SolarBee Web site that explains the product’s benefits in regard to algae:

The combination of horizontal and vertical mixing sufficiently disrupts the cyanobacteria’s preferred quiescent habitat, negating their competitive advantage over beneficial algae and preventing unwanted blooms, even in nutrient-rich waters such as secondary wastewater effluent and storm water drainage. These benefits of enhanced circulation have been well documented in the scientific literature for many decades, and there is no controversy within the limnological community. For a more detailed discussion, please see the SolarBee White Paper titled: Paradigm shift for blue-green algae control through long-distance circulation: Empirical experience with SolarBee® circulation since 2000.

I plan to cover the meeting, which will be the second SolarBee presentation for me. You can click here to see a story from a SolarBee presentation that I covered in 2007 (no action resulted from the 2007 meeting; if I recall correctly, city officials decided they wanted to be cautious and watch some other lakes to see how various algae-reducing methods were working before doing anything further after Mitchell’s aluminum sulfate experiment).