Valley Lakes Marsh Land

Two board meetings ago John Gutknecht made a short presentation to the village board here was able to email to me the rough draft of the presentation and I will reproduce it below. John has been a guest blogger here in the past, but John has joined the blogosphere as well with a well written and well researched blog. By the way the village board agreed to John and the Valley Lakes HOA's request. He also has a PDF version of his slide here.

We’re here tonight asking for your support with a specific project but more importantly to lay the foundations for a partnership on this and similar projects in the future.

In order to understand this partnership, I think it will help if I explain why the Valley Lakes Community Association is involved in ecological restoration and maintenance. I’ll review our mission, our action plan, go over a couple examples of the work we’re doing and then review what a partnership with Round Lake will offer to our members and to the Village.

I know everyone is familiar with the basics of Valley Lakes, but did you know the Valley Lakes Community Association owns over 284 acres of property? And did you know that unlike most other HOA’s most of the property we own is undisturbed wetland? In comparison Nippersink Forest Preserve (right here in Round Lake) is about 300 acres with less than 200 acres of wetland.

The reason we’re involved in ecological restoration and maintenance is simple; as the owners of this much property, we owe it to our members and the Village to be responsible owners and ensure that this property is cared for and protected for generations to come.

I think everyone understands the environmental impact of wetlands on the local waterways and ground water, and I have no doubt everyone is aware of the global issues surrounding the environment, but there’s more to being environmentally responsible than just “being green.” There is a financial side to it as well. Having a HEALTHY wetland nearby can increase home values by as much as 20% - This in turn adds to EAV.

So whether it was because of the desire to be environmentally responsible, project their investment or some combination of the two - our members made it clear that PROPER management of our open spaces was a priority for them. We have committed to our members that we will maintain our property in a way that will both protect the investment of our members in their homes and protect the investment of the Village in Valley Lakes.

To fulfill this mission we have adopted an action plan that broken down into its basic parts consists of; ecological restoration, strategic partnerships and pursuing every funding opportunity available.

The first step in our restoration focuses on shoreline restoration. The single largest expense for our members in the future will be the dredging and maintenance of 22 detention ponds. The best way to reduce and delay those costs is by implementing an aggressive shoreline restoration program. This is one of 2 ponds done in 2006. All together we restored just over 62,000 square feet of grass into 62,000 square feet of high quality native plants. This is year one of a three year program and represents a $40K investment from our members in their community.

It has the potential for saving $200K in 20 years in dredging and dumping costs. In addition to the financial benefits, it also has the added bonus of improving water quality in these ponds, our wetlands and downstream into Long Lake and the Chain-o-Lakes. This program has been so successful that we plan to continue this program with 5 more ponds in 2007 and more in 2008.

The detention ponds in Valley Lakes all flow into one or more of our various wetlands and the next part of our plan focuses specifically on those areas. We commissioned a professional inventory and assessment of wetland areas this past summer and in line with our expectations received an overall grade of D. While not something to be happy about, in this case a D is about average with the rest of the Chicago region, so while it could be a lot better, it could actually be a lot worse.

Although most of the areas have been heavily disturbed and are rapidly degrading there are traces of some high quality remnants. These areas, even if small, are important reservoirs of genetic material for maintaining regional biodiversity and worth preserving. So with help from our experts we’ve developed a restoration plan that will kick off this spring.

The objective of the plan is to: Protect, Manage and Restore. Our goal is to stabilize first, then lay the ground work for recovery. We’ll be using the best scientific principles and management methods to implement this plan including biological control agents for control of one of the worst plants - purple loosestrife. We’ll also be doing controlled burns (something that is long overdue), and establishing new native plant communities and providing habitat for native wildlife such as the wood duck and the eastern blue bird.

We couldn’t possibly have done all of this on our own. Early on we knew that it would be important to develop strategic partnerships. We were fortunate enough to receive support from the Lake County Forest Preserve. Through Bonnie Carter, our County Board rep and President of the Forest Preserve Board, we’ve had access to some of the district’s key staff and resources. Our partnership was so strong that the Forest Preserve sponsored our application for membership in the Chicago Wilderness Consortium. We were awarded membership in this group in January and through their network of public and private land owners, now have access to technical and financial resources that are only available to members.

Finally we’ve partnered with the Fox River Ecosystem Partnership, a diverse group of landowners, businesses and non-profit organizations that work to fund an implement various projects throughout the Fox River watershed and hired Tallgrass Restoration, LLC. as our exclusive general contractor to develop and implement all of our plans. Tallgrass is one of the founding members of Chicago Wilderness and has a long history with not only the Lake County Forest Preserve, but the Chicago Botanical Gardens, the Morten Arboretum and other area leaders in ecological restoration projects.

Obviously there is a financial investment required in funding all of this work. To date the shoreline restoration projects have been 100% HOA funded. In an effort to offset some of those costs going forward, we’re in the process of applying for funding through the Illinois USDA Conservation 2000 program to cover shoreline restoration costs starting in 2008. The C2000 program has long recognized the benefits of shoreline restoration and it is our hope that grants will cover the cost of continuing the work we’ve already started.

We secured a $25,000 donation from Pritzker when we acquired the Mud Lake wetland and we’ve used some of that money to cover the costs of the wetland assessments and the development of our restoration plans. We expect that money to more than cover the costs of creating those plans and technical documents, but it won’t come close to covering the cost of implementing those plans. For that we’ve budgeted $25,000 to get started and have applied for matching funding through the USDA Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program (WHIP) program.

We were notified last week that not only did we receive that funding – guaranteed for the next 10 years – but we qualified for 100% funding due to the high priority given to Valley Lakes due to the number of endangered and threatened species in the area. While we’re still drawing up the detailed plans and reviewing the various costs, it’s hard to tell exactly how much money this could be, but it could be as much as $500,000.00 over the next 10 years!

So, as you can see there is a good reason we’re involved in this work, and we’ve already made a tremendous investment in getting these projects started. Tonight, the reason we’re seeking a partnership with the Village is to qualify for funding through the C2000 program. This program, which would cover the costs of various shoreline restoration works starting in 2008, requires applicants to establish partnerships local governments and agencies.

As I mentioned we’ve already established a partnership with the Fox River Ecosystem and The Lake County Forest Preserve, but we’d like to include the Village of Round Lake among our list of partners. This is an excellent opportunity for the Village because it will directly benefit one of our areas richest natural resources. It also speaks to the commitments already made by this board in its effort to receive Tree City USA designation and the designation of so much open space on the comprehensive plan.

At this time, we’re hoping for a commitment from the Village to provide a minimal investment of time and material of 2 days of work for 1 or 2 people, a wood chipper and disposal of debris (that can not be used on site.) This is for work to be done in 2008.

We hope that you’ll recognize the value of the work that we are doing to protect, maintain and restore our property and the impact that work will have on our community. We also hope that you’ll join us as a partner in these and other future programs so that together we can fulfill the promise of the original vision for Valley Lakes to provide a model for how a natural habitat can be successfully integrated into a residential community. I’d like to invite you to join us at the Police and Public Works building prior to our annual meeting on April 18th for a more detailed presentation on our shoreline and wetland restoration projects given by Tallgrass Restoration. If you know of anyone that would be interested in attending, please extend this invitation to them.

Thank you for your time this evening and I hope we can CONTINUE to count on your support.