After talking with City Council candidate and best-neighbor-in-history, Rocky Waite, yesterday, I learned there are two issues up for grabs concerning our abused lake. First is an issue Rocky has been working on for a couple of years; renaming the lake to something less racially abusive. Rocky has collected enough city and lake shore owner names to petition the state to rename the lake, but the petition has stalled in the state bureaucracy. The proposed name for our lake would be "Métis Lake," obviously substantially less racist than the current name. According to a brief conversation my wife and I had with our state representative, Jason Isaacson, there are a couple of missing hoops needed for the renaming proposal to be properly presented to whoever the Powers That Be might be for this to happen. According to Rocky, the petition is all the state needs to get moving on this issue. There is, apparently, some resistance to making this harmless, historically accurate, and politically simple change and it's probably up to lake shore owners to get it done. Rocky can't do this one by himself.
The second issue is more of the usual lame crap from the perfectly useless and massively bureaucratic inept and inert bozos from the DNR. MNDOT has, apparently, agreed to dredge up "some" of the freeway silt deposited by their poorly designed southbound freeway entrance drainage (the "island" created on the northeast corner of the west lake). The DNR refuses to grant MNDOT permission to do that work more than a few feet into the lake. As usual, the DNR is claiming authority to prevent action while doing its best to ignore any responsibility for doing nothing to protect our natural resources. This has to be the perfect situation for a bureaucrat, but is once again proves that the DNR would be the easiest place for the state to save billions of taxpayer dollars. If the whole department were eliminated, it might be decades before any of us noticed. Even a DNR simpleton should recognize that ALL of the silt dumped into the lake by the freeway drain should be removed at this opportunity. Once the noise barrier is constructed, the lake will be inaccessible to the kind of equipment required to dredge the lake. Not only should the northeast side of the lake be dredged, but the southeast side has also been improperly used as a catch-basin for the freeway and should be dredged, too.
Whoever we elect today for city council ought to be on board with getting the damage to our lake undone. For the hundreds of residents affected by Savage Lake, there are few issues more pressing.
