Saving The Lake Eloika Lake Residents Are Searching Physically And Fiscally For A Way To Keep Their Lake Alive

Residents at Eloika Lake are trying to put the brakes on aging.

It’s not their own mortality that worries members of the Eloika Lake Community Association. Rather, it’s the alarming speed at which the lake is becoming a marsh.

Association members hope a small dam will slow the aging. Future steps, such as limited dredging and stocking the lake with plant-eating carp, could reverse it.

“The group out here has been trying to save the lake for 40 years now and I think we’ve finally found the right direction,” said association president Vic Soules. “We’re at the crossroads.”

The dam would flood some land on the south end of Eloika Lake, and some community association members who live there aren’t sure they like the idea. Others worry that tax increases to pay for the $400,000 project might be more than some landowners could afford.

“We stand to lose property and bear a pretty good share of the cost of the dam,” said Jim Ferguson, who owns 28 acres on the south end of the lake.

Ten acres of Ferguson’s land already floods in the spring. If the dam is installed, that land would be flooded in the summer, as well, preventing him from grazing livestock on it.

“Everybody wants to see something done with the lake,” Ferguson said. “I guess what I’m looking for is some options or some negotiations.”

Dredging large areas of the lake probably would do more to save it than installing the dam. And dredging wouldn’t flood Ferguson’s land.

“But dredging is so incredibly expensive,” said Soules, who has seen a noticeable decline in the lake in the four years he’s lived there.

The dam is a good start, said Tim King, a conservationist who is working with the association. Without it, or some other action, the lake will only continue the decline that started nearly 100 years ago.

State-funded studies since the mid-1980s have proved what lake lovers already knew: Eloika Lake is choking itself to death.

Silt lies 8 to 15 feet deep over most of the lake floor, and weeds grow so thick that most boaters give up by midsummer. Perch and other fish, which find abundant cover in the aquatic weeds, crowd the lake but are stunted from lack of food.

Only a channel formed by the Little Spokane River remains clear of weeds most summers. There, the lake is still 12 to 15 feet deep, compared with 4 or 5 feet over most of its 639 acres.

“The lake is so shallow now that it’s approaching the end” of its life, King said.

Like living organisms, lakes start dying the moment they’re formed. Silt gradually turns them into marshes, then meadows, and finally into forests.

The process normally takes thousands of years, said King. Humans sped things up at Eloika Lake.

Loggers used the lake as a mill pond at the turn of the century. Debris from their logs littered the lake floor, and soil from skid trails washed into the lake each spring.

The water level dropped 2 feet in 1952, when a farmer knocked out a natural dam at the outlet so he could grow alfalfa on more land. Neighbors lost a court battle trying to force Finis Riddle to restore the dam.

Since then, land on the south end of the lake that once was submerged year around is under water only in the spring. The state taxes landowners for that property, which includes Ferguson’s 10 wet acres and similar parts of his neighbors’ land.

The community association wants to restore the dam. The deeper water would allow less light to reach the lake bottom and limit plant growth.

The plan calls for lowering the dam late each fall, leaving aquatic plants exposed to winter temperatures that would kill them.

The state Department of Ecology has offered an interest-free $400,000 loan for the work. To get the money, Eloika Lake neighbors must form a lake management district, which would repay the loan by taxing district residents.

Boundaries for the proposed district haven’t been drawn. Most likely, it would include between 100 and 200 landowners, said King.

Nor have organizers written a formula for determining tax rates within the district. Resorts and other commercial property might have to pay more than residential or agricultural land, for instance, or landowners might be charged for each foot of shoreline.

To form the district, lake residents must solve the issues of district size and tax formulas and then put the matter to a vote.

Lake residents must take the first step - presenting the idea to Spokane County commissioners - this month so commissioners can let the state know the residents are interested in the loan.

“If county commissioners don’t say, `We’re interested,’ the money goes back into the pool, and some other project can have it,” said King.