Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere in the narrows of Chautauqua Lake, you’ve probably heard complaints about the condition of the lake this summer – particularly conditions in the southern portion of the lake.

We’ve gotten good at articulating the problems. Weed growth is making it difficult to impossible to get boats from docks to navigation channels cleared by the Chautauqua Lake Association. Algal blooms are again popping up. Weed masses earlier in the year required extensive cleanup efforts. To make things interesting a native species – elodea – is flourishing in the south basin of the lake and helping choke off access for homeowners and visitors. And, just so things didn’t get boring, we’ve now added in new Freshwater Wetlands Regulations that add a new wrinkle of complexity to lake maintenance efforts.

At the same time we haven’t gotten any better at articulating solutions. Too often we still focus on the search for one or two silver bullet solutions that will magically fix all of the lakes’ issues. Hire a lake manager. Dredge the lake. Use herbicides. Do more cutting. Install sewers around the lake. Dredge the lake. Do nothing and let the lake be a wetland. Do more studies. By themselves none of these “solutions” will improve conditions on the lake.

The Chautauqua Lake Association, the Chautauqua Lake Partnership, Chautauqua Institution, the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy, the Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance, Chautauqua County, lakefront towns and villages, the Army Corps of Engineers and, yes, the state DEC all have roles to play in preserving the ecology of the lake, keeping Chautauqua Lake both a world-class fishery and a world-class lake for boating and recreation.

We need to get past our simple silos of lake management and begin looking at Chautauqua Lake on two tracks – yearly work to make sure the lake is usable for all recreational uses, including those who fish on the lake, and longer-term work to deal with issues that have piled up over the decades. The Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance’s hiring of a lake manager should help, but only if the lake manager gets lake agencies using the same playbook. We think it would help if we had a yearly lake plan that can be taken to the state DEC in an effort to make permitting easier both for lake agencies and the DEC, which seems overrun with implementing new Freshwater Wetlands Act regulations (we’ll save a longer we told you so for later). A plan to deal with internal phosphorus loading simply must happen as we try to get our arms around the issues causing weed growth and algal blooms. A real plan is needed to make sure boaters in the south basin of Chautauqua Lake can get out onto the lake without tearing up boat motors. That, of course, means controlling elodea, which CLA and CLP officials say is a growing problem. There are dozens of issues not mentioned here – yet all are important. And all of the lake’s myriad of problems feed into each other.

The lake’s issues are complex, so we as a community need to stop looking for simple solutions. The sooner we do so the better. We don’t pretend to be ecologists here, nor do we play one on television. But we know that doing the same thing year after year is the very definition of insanity.