ROXBURY — Voters at Monday night’s annual town meeting approved raising $3,000 for a watershed survey of Roxbury Pond.

Jim Wendt, president of the Silver Lake Camp Owners Association, said the last survey was in 1998.

Roxbury Pond is also known as Silver Lake and Ellis Pond.

“We want to look at all 26 square miles of the watershed to identify what sources are contributing to the lake’s contamination,” Wendt told voters. “We’ve had a number of large rain events this year that washed a lot of debris into the lake. This past fall, there was an algae bloom that is acting as a harbinger of poorer conditions.”

The survey needs to be done now, he said, “so we can figure out what needs to be done to keep the lake safe,” he said. The association has agreed to provide some money for the survey and the association is collecting donations.

Wendt said the association will ask residents of Byron at their March 10 annual town meeting if they will contribute $1,000.

Auburn resident Scott Williams, a marine biologist and executive director of the Maine Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program, said in a report that certified lake monitors Ross and Christine Swain of Andover recently observed and helped document “a brief, but intense, bloom that was initially detected by a colorful surface scum that persisted for several days in some areas of the pond.

“The bloom that occurred in October was the first known event of its kind in the pond,” Williams said in his report.

Later in the meeting, Wendt told residents, “We’re doing this project on a bare-bones budget, but we feel that the pond is in an urgent enough state that it warrants doing something.”

mdaigle@sunjournal.com

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