SABATTUS – Lucille Laliberte spent Wednesday with hired help trying to fight the erosion at the edge of her lawn on Sabattus Pond.

Since 2002, on about 50 feet of frontage, she figures she’s lost an embankment 6 feet wide and 12 feet tall. On Wednesday, she also found out she had turned in enough signatures to trigger a vote on taking back the Sabattus dam and controlling the pond’s water levels.

She and a friend started circulating petitions about two weeks ago and needed to turn in 168 signatures. They collected 186 and had 172 certified at the town office.

Town Clerk Suzanne Adams said she’ll present the petition to selectmen at Tuesday’s meeting. The board has 60 days to schedule a special town meeting, or, if they decide it’s not an emergency, include the issue on the regular town meeting warrant in May, she said.

The vote, typically a show of hands, would need a turnout of at least 25 residents.

Laliberte wants Sabattus to secede from an interlocal agreement with Wales and Greene, two other towns bordering the water, and take over Sleeper Dam. The dam is owned by Sabattus. Water levels are controlled by the Sabattus Lake Dam Commission, with reps from all three towns. It gets raised, lowered and left alone by member consensus.

“Nobody wants to spend another winter and spring with more erosion and more damaging ice floes on their property,” Laliberte said, adding that the erosion also hurts the value of adjacent property and has led to issues with algae blooms in the water.

“I was riprapping up to my thighs often in pea soup-green water,” she said.

This summer, after several residents complained, Sabattus selectmen sent a letter to the other towns’ boards with concerns about the dam. Dam Commission Chairman Walter White said at the time that water levels were self-adjusting after heavy rains and voiced concern that opening the dam could devastate people downstream.

According to minutes from the last selectmen’s meeting, Town Manager Gregory Gill counted “seven properties along the Sabattus River that could be affected if the dam were to let go.”