The Lakewood Village Board has declined – again – to support the Chautauqua Lake Management Plan written by Dr. Rob Richardson of North Carolina State University.

At this point, no one should hold out any hope of the North Carolina State University plan, no matter Richardson’s qualifications. The plan has been publicly available, publicly debated and, at this point, largely publicly ignored for more than a year. That’s unfortunate. In our view Richardson’s plan is the sort of action plan that could have been a point of coalescence for Chautauqua Lake maintenance activities.

The Richardson plan doesn’t have to be formally adopted by any of the lakeside town and village boards in order for parts of the plan to be followed by lake maintenance organizations or the Chautauqua Lake Watershed and Management Alliance. While we believe the N.C. State University plan would work best if it is used in its entirety, there is nothing to stop bits and pieces of the plan from being implemented tomorrow.

The real issue is tracking what is being done.

We called recently for open meetings of the Chautauqua Lake Watershed and Management Alliance, especially with the shift in its board makeup to include more local elected officials from lakefront towns and villages. It is saying something that something as potentially important as a change in the alliance’s board had to be reported after the fact when board meeting minutes are posted online or through back-and-forth debate about the lake. If this change was done so quietly, how quietly are lake maintenance activities being done?

Too quietly, we would say.

We agree with something John Shedd says on today’s guest essays page (see Page A5). There is more coordination among lake agencies now than there has been in the past. That’s commendable. But the public doesn’t always see that – and that was readily apparent over the summer when lake conditions took a turn for the worse.

By not regularly reporting out what is being done on the lake in a coordinated fashion, the county, its lake organizations and the alliance create a perception vacuum that is easy to fill in this age of social media speculation. Opening alliance meetings would help. A coordinated effort to tell lake users and area residents what is being done would help too.

Ideally, we would be spreading the message that the North Carolina State University lake plan is being implemented. Since that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, in our view there should be a coordinated effort to show the reasoning and science behind what’s being done on the lake every year rather than relying on the current fragmented approach from lake maintenance organizations.