I have sent the following missive off to the Editor of the Lincoln County News with the expectation that it will be published in next week’s paper. I’m posting it here, now, because I don’t want to wait that long to get my opinion out in the open. I also want to get a few more of my thoughts down on paper, so to speak, while it’s all fresh in my mind.
The latest Lincoln County News article “Water Level Order Enacted for Clary Lake” is a great article, but a few things contained in it have been bugging me ever since I read it, especially this statement since it suggests a reason as to why Mr. Kelley has been loathe to offer up the dam to us despite all his posturing to the contrary:
“If it was clear what my company owned and who was likely to sue my company if we sold something that we don’t own, then I would be more inclined to have discussions with the lake association with their interest, their purported interest, in the property,” he said.
The Maine Lakes Society
David Chase has compiled a pretty cool video contrasting the water levels of Clary Lake between 1997 and 2013. He has posted it on the Clary Lake Association Google+ Community. He did it using a Google Earth flyover “tour.” Very impressive, and the comparison in water levels between then and now is stark. Thanks for sharing David!.jpg)
There is an article on the front page of this week’s Lincoln County News about the recently issued water level order for Clary Lake. I was interviewed at length yesterday morning by the reporter, Dominik Lobkowicz and I gather from statements in the article that he also subsequently interviewed Paul Kelley, who continues to posture and complain as if people still cared about what he thought:
Now that the State’s Water Level Order has been issued, the dam owner faces a number of daunting tasks and a challenging time line to complete the work of bringing the dam property into compliance with the Order. The Clary Lake Association has made it publicly known that we are ready and willing to assist the dam owner in completing this work but to date they have not expressed any interest in having us help them. It also remains to be seen just how willing the Membership really is to help Mr. Kelley with his problem. Nonetheless the Clary Lake Association is confident that sooner or later we will be asked for help or even asked to take over ownership of the dam completely and feel therefore that it is in our current best interests and long term goals to start acting like the stewards of Clary Lake that we claim to be.
There is an article in today’s Kennebec Journal about the issuance of the Final Clary Lake Water Level Order. While it contains a few mistakes, it’s pretty much factually accurate and contains a link to the actual ORDER document. I did speak briefly with KJ correspondent Paul Koenig about the order, shortly after it was issued. I gave him a few choice quotes which apparently he found not to be particularly quotable…
At a little before 2:30 PM this afternoon the Department of Environmental Protection issued the FINAL Clary Lake Water Level Order. I have scanned it quickly as have a couple of other people and we can’t see any changes between today’s final order and the Draft order issued back on December 19th. I will be reading it over carefully again shortly.
I have set up a 
With the lake level higher than it’s been in several years, it follows that outflows from the lake should also be at levels not seen for quite some time. Well I had occasion to measure the outflow from Clary Lake this morning, out of curiosity as much as anything and sure enough, based on my calculations the current outflows as of the time of this writing are on the order of 83 cfs (cubic feet per second). The raw figure I arrived at was 98 cfs but it is customary to scale that figure down by as much as 15% to allow for flow losses resulting from friction on the sides and bottom of the stream which inevitably result in uneven water velocity and a lower overall flow value.
It has come to my attention that a few people have been unable to register for this site because they are using one browser extension or another to block tracking code, cookies, malicious javascript, etc. One such extension which I myself use on some sites is 
information. This effectively thwarts the robots and is standard procedure on websites that want to restrict registrations to real people. I’m sure you’ve run across them before. A typical reCaptcha graphic from our site is shown at left. The solution is simple: disable your blocking systems temporarily, long enough to get registered; then you can turn it back on if you want and 
I’ve been a little busy this week so I’m just now getting around to posting about the latest article in this week’s Lincoln County News. This one covers the recently submitted final comments on the .jpg)
At my request, Beth Callahan has forwarded me a compilation of all the comments received by the Department on the DRAFT Clary Lake water level order. These include 3 emailed comments sent directly to Beth Callahan that, through understandable oversight, never made it to the Service List. These include emails from Senator Christopher Johnson, Steven Sheppard of the 
Paul Koenig of the Kennebec Journal has written yet another article that has appeared online today and should be in the print edition tomorrow. According to the article, Senator Christopher Johnson, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service also submitted comments. I was not aware of this. I’m looking into it. In the meantime, here’s the article:
Well Mr. Kelley did finally submit his written comments at 4:40 PM this afternoon, but only to a subset of the addresses on the Service List which incidentally didn’t include my address or the addresses of a number of other people. I’m sure this was a mistake and I would prefer to think that Mr. Kelley is just email-challenged rather than that he intentionally left a number of people off the distribution list.
I have submitted comments to the DEP On behalf of the Petitioners on the