Hayden Lake ‘more polluted’

Gerry House’s ancestors homesteaded on Hayden Lake, back when houses around North Idaho lakes were few and far between.

During a short slideshow of images from the time, House showed natural resource professionals and environmental activists miles of shoreline with only trees. The point was to show how much things have changed.

House, chairman of the Hayden Lake Recreational Water and Sewer District, is leading the charge for stricter enforcement of laws mandating 25-foot setbacks from the lake.

Many property owners don’t take the rules seriously, House explained as he gave a virtual boat tour of home after home built right up against a newly constructed retaining wall.

The end result is more runoff of soil and phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers into the lake.

“Hayden Lake is becoming more polluted,” House said, adding that he and other board members in his sewer district would like to see the Idaho Department of Lands and Kootenai County develop a memorandum of understanding to better police lakeside development.

The Idaho Department of Lands issues permits to build the retaining walls because it has jurisdiction for everything in the lake below the high water mark. Kootenai County is responsible for the rest.

“I agree there are a lot of bad ones out there,” said Idaho Department of Lands’ Coeur d’Alene supervisor Mike Denney.

But Denney said the rules are improving and that more walls are being built with native plants amongst the boulders and woody debris along the water’s edge for fisheries.

The setbacks are more of a county issue than a state issue, Denney explained.

“I think we’ve done a better job in the last few years of regulating it,” said Kootenai County Commissioner Rick Currie. “Can we do better? I think we can.”

Currie said that the county recently hired an additional permit inspector to help and that officials have been cracking down on those who break setback rules.

One contributing factor to property owners ignoring the law is that fines for violating the setback have been too low, House said. “If you’re building a million-dollar house, what’s a $300 fine?”