Decision On Lake's Fate Due Tuesday

Quagga mussels have been found in lakes in San Diego and Riverside counties and it is feared that the difficult-to-eradicate invader might show up in Lake Casitas

By Daryl Kelley
Officials who oversee Lake Casitas, the Ojai Valley’s main source of water, are set to decide Tuesday whether to shut down the popular fishing destination to outside boaters or to simply maintain current inspections to keep a destructive mussel from migrating here.
Because of high interest, the 5:30 p.m. meeting has been shifted from the Casitas Municipal Water District headquarters in Oak View to the Nordhoff High School cafeteria in Ojai.
General manager Steve Wickstrum said water district directors will consider two main options: closing the huge reservoir to outside boats to ensure that a mussel does not infest the lake, or continuing the status quo.
Since the quagga mussel threat surfaced last year in San Diego and Riverside counties, the district has been checking boats for water or vegetation that could carry the mussel’s microscopic larvae and asking boat operators if their craft have been in infested lakes and excluding those that had.
Casitas directors imposed the boat inspections in mid-November, and Wickstrum said 158 of about 2,800 screened boats have been excluded, usually because they still carried water from other lakes.
In a series of recent meetings, dozens of boaters have asked Casitas directors not to ban outside fishing craft, citing the economic harm that would do since Casitas is a premier bass fishing lake. District staffers have estimated such a ban would cost the water agency more than $600,000 a year in recreation revenue while also hurting nearby businesses.
But some community members have said an infestation would be much more expensive, clogging the lake’s waterworks and ravaging its ecosystem.
They’ve asked for an immediate ban on outside boats, citing the billions of dollars agencies have spent in the Great Lakes region since 1988 to combat the invasive zebra mussel, a close cousin of the quagga, which apparently migrated to the United States aboard freighters from the Ukraine.
“The question is how much protection should we provide for Lake Casitas,” Wickstrum said this week.
Reacting to the same perceived threat, managers of Lake Cachuma have proposed closing that scenic Santa Barbara County reservoir to outside fishing boats. The issue is set for hearing March 11 before Santa Barbara County supervisors.
Whatever action the Casitas board takes Tuesday — and it could defer a final decision again — would be viewed in the context of the actions that board has already taken.
Just last week, the board asked Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a statewide emergency because of the mussel infestation, so California could qualify for federal emergency money to fight the problem.
“We are urgently seeking your leadership to help prevent an impending catastrophe stemming from an invasive non-native species that could destroy the water quality and cause an unprecedented escalation in maintenance costs for virtually every California resident and business,” said a letter to Schwarzenegger, signed by board President Jim Word.
“The mussel threat is of extraordinary magnitude because these mussels have been found to consume most of the food chain upon which many other species depend for survival,” the letter added. “The quagga and zebra mussels also may clog pipes of almost any diameter.”
The most likely way a mussel may be transported is by trailered boats, the letter said.
One large utility in the East Bay of San Francisco has already responded by banning any boat from Southern California or outside the state from its reservoirs. That move came in late January after a zebra mussel was discovered near Gilroy in San Benito County, just south of the Bay Area.
That discovery was the first for a quagga or zebra mussel in the State Water Project, an elaborate set of dams, canals and reservoirs that provide most of the water in the state.
It was also the first zebra mussel found in the western United States, officials said.
Both the quagga and zebra mussels are suspected of traveling from lake to lake by boat, although the quagga mussel’s migration northward, after it was discovered at Lake Mead and Lake Havasu 14 months ago, has apparently occurred in the sprawling canal system of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
The infestation of the zebra mussel in the Great Lakes area, discovered two decades ago, now costs utilities about $140 million a year to try to control and to clean encrusted facilities, Casitas spokesman Ron Merkling has told the board.
But in hearings about the issue, boat owners have made impassioned pleas to Casitas directors to explore all options before considering a ban of fishing and pleasure craft at the lake.
After a pivotal hearing in January, the board ignored pleas to immediately ban outside boats, saying it would take several weeks to gather enough information to make an informed decision.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the board will have better estimates of how much money lake closure would cost the district and the community, and how much it would cost Casitas to fight the mussel if it does arrive.
In addition to the two primary options — lake closure or maintaining the status quo — the board may also consider, the hot-water spraying of all boats entering the lake, adding storage for boats to be used only at the lake and increasing the number of rental boats for fishing.
So far, Casitas has taken a statewide lead in highlighting the mussel problem. And Wickstrum said state and federal officials are finally beginning to seriously address it too.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation owns many of the infested lakes in California and Lake Casitas Dam and Reservoir. And the state Department of Fish and Game, the lead California agency, is trying to implement a computer tracking systems to red-flag boats that leave infested lakes before they enter clean ones.
Seven California lakes are infested with the quagga mussel. One lake near Escondido has been closed to boats to prevent infestation.
Casitas Recreation manager Brian Roney has said he favors a “passport” system under which a sticker would be attached to a boat when it enters an infested lake, and which rangers at Lake Casitas could easily see. But he said that suggestion has not been acted on. Also, infested lakes in Arizona and Nevada would not be required to follow a California passport system.
While officials have said it is impossible to eradicate the mussel once it reaches a lake, a Ventura marine biologist distributed to the board at a January hearing a research paper by state of New York scientists that suggests progress in the fight against the damaging mussels. That report concludes that dead bacteria may be safely spread in lakes to kill mussels, once the voracious mollusk eats it.
Now, Great Lakes power plants and water distribution agencies attempt to control the mussels with chlorine and other poisonous chemicals, the report noted. But that has been challenged by environmentalists as a long-term solution, the report said.
Casitas Director Russ Baggerly, who brought the mussel issue to the board’s attention in October, said he’s already convinced that the board has to take its most restrictive option, because infestation would be a catastrophe.
“The issue really is very clear in my mind,” Baggerly said in an interview this week. “Protecting our water source is our primary goal as elected officials, and recreational boating is secondary. I will recommend an immediate temporary ban on outside boats.”