This spring the Thompson Lake Environmental Association will ask the four towns bordering Thompson Lake — Oxford, Otisfield, Casco and Poland — to provide partial funding to continue the Thompson Lake Youth Conservation Corps.
The YCC is a summer program in which students perform low-tech, low-cost erosion controls in the watershed to combat soil erosion. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and Maine’s DEP consider erosion the greatest threat to any lake’s water.
Over the past nine years, the EPA has provided TLEA with $243,000 in grants to combat this threat. In the same period TLEA has invested $30,000 of its own funds. The grant establishing the YCC runs out in September. TLEA needs the towns’ support to continue.
Water pollution problems must be attacked where they begin. Much of TLEA’s grant funds have gone directly to towns to correct problems of town roads eroding into the lake. In Otisfield, for example, grant funds supported repairs to Cobb Hill and Bonney Hill roads.
Town roads are only part of the problem. Equally bad are poorly designed private camp roads and improperly graded house lots. No law requires property owners to correct these problems. A Youth Conservation Corps is one of the best ways the DEP and Soil and Water Conservation Services have found to do so.
The YCC works because it gives property owners information, and then loans crews to carry out solutions. Perhaps most important, the YCC demonstrates to property owners and their neighbors that lake erosion problems are solvable.
The towns have an vital interest in the water quality of Thompson Lake.
The lake is a public resource that generates significant tax dollars. In Otisfield, nearly 20 percent of the total property tax comes from shoreline property owners on Thompson Lake. Right now Thompson is one of the cleanest lakes in the state, but it is also on the DEP’s list of Maine lakes most at risk.
When water quality declines, so does the property value that supports our tax base. Protecting Thompson is an investment in our future.
Jim Bishop,
David Hankins,
YCC Steering Committee,
TLEA, Otisfield
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