SABATTUS – After the last big rainstorm, Bob Boulette and his brother, Patrick, took a boat ride around Sabattus Pond to look at neighbors’ properties.

“Twenty-five percent of the docks were completely underwater and the rest were just barely above it,” Bob Boulette said.

Water was running almost a foot higher than normal. A member of the lake’s dam commission, he asked the group’s chairman to lower the dam. It stayed up. Boulette maintains there’s been a years-long issue with the water levels on the pond, leading to erosion and property damage.

“It’s taken time over the years to say, ‘OK, enough is enough.’ I lost three trees this winter (to soil erosion). The roots are getting so there’s nothing left to hold the trees,” he said.

Last week, after several people complained to selectmen, the board asked Town Manager Gregory Gill to send letters to the dam commission and its member towns – Sabattus, Greene and Wales – to convey that water levels aren’t being properly monitored.

Gill was drafting that letter Tuesday.

The lake touches all three towns. About 300 people live along its shores.

Gill said he was also asked to look into whether Sabattus, which owns the dam, can end its agreement with the other two towns and start monitoring water levels by itself. A legal answer is expected before next Tuesday’s meeting when the topic likely will come up again.

Lake water is getting close to town water and sewer lines, Gill said, and the erosion is most pronounced on the southeast shoreline.

“There are very explicit orders on how the level of the water should be kept,” Gill said. “(Some residents) want us to go up there, cut the chain and lower the dam, and of course, we’re not going to do that.”

Dam Commission Chairman Walter White said he had heard only one complaint, from Boulette. The commission has an agreed-upon water level order, which spells out height and flow. The dam is raised, lowered and left alone by member consensus and he concurred that it hadn’t been adjusted this summer.

Within 10 days of the end of the heavy rains, the water level adjusted on its own, he said. “Downstream, it would be devastating to people if you open that dam. I think we were in compliance.”

The dam controls water flowing out of the pond into the Sabattus River, which eventually flows into the Androscoggin River.

Dan Guerette, a commission member who has property on the pond, said Monday that the water level was an inch below the summer target. The pond has a large annual draw-down in the fall, in advance of the freeze in the winter.

“We do everything we can to minimize ice damage,” said Guerette. He said steps had been taken to stabilize stretches of the shoreline over the past several years. “It’s made a huge difference.”

Bob Boulette said more work had to be done to anticipate water levels and make more frequent adjustments.

Given the large watershed draining into it, “we get 2 inches of heavy rain, it can come up a foot. It’s critical you maintain that gate to keep the water level from becoming high,” he said.

Patrick Boulette said he’d like the town to secede from the agreement with Wales and Greene, in place since 2000, and put a Sabattus town employee in charge of maintaining the water level.

“We just want what they promised us as taxpayers,” he said.