New Haven Independent

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Over in the Beaver Hills neighborhood, the Friends of Beaver Pond Park (FOBPP), which Bartow coordinates, are an optimistic lot. They deserve to be, and they have to be. Through community organizing, they have on their own created scenic walking trails, cut down the phragmites obscuring the beautiful views around their ponds, and worked, often successfully with City Parks and, with neighboring educational institutions, which crave expansion, to keep the water’s edges free of structures.
They have begun eliminating invasive species and have begun planting instead crabapple trees, blueberries, and Virginia sweet spire, among other plants to help secure this great urban resource, the largest manmade lake in the state. This makes Bartow, along with the Canada geese, ducks, herons, and egrets with which they share the natural space happy, much of the time.
However, after rain, especially of the downpour variety that occurred over the past few days, this urban jewel is defaced by a heavy run-off of garbage from the aging — and badly in need of repair — city sewer system.
“It particularly accumulates as floatables,” Bartow said, “bottles, cans, plastic bags, balls, all kinds of trash dropped on the streets throughout the area that are than whooshed, unfiltered, unsieved into the pond. After heavy rains, the floatables gather here, for example, in backwaters at the north end of the south pond.
“We’ve been working with the city for more than three years to do something about this, but except for a few officials, such as Mike Piscitelli of [the] City Plan [Department] who has been responsive, we have not gotten very far.”
On Wednesday night, Bartow and other members of FOBPP were putting their heads together again, presenting their case once more before the Environmental Advisory Council, which was having one of its four mandated annual meetings at City Hall.
The Council, which is comprised of representatives of all city departments that have environmental impact, is led by Brian McGrath, a long-time city official, who retired two years ago as Director of Traffic and Parking, but who is retained as a consultant by the city to lend his expertise to, in part, bodies such as the council.
The only item on the council’s agenda was how to address the perennial and increasingly serious accumulation of garbage in Beaver Pond.
McGrath began by reminding the assembled group of the past glories of Beaver Pond. “It was created in 1924 out of a malarial swamp, and it was one of the city’s great recreational habitats. The water was ten feet deep — now it’s silted up so there’s barely three feet — and there was fishing, and even a lifeguard up to the 1950s. But little by little, eutrifaction occurred, the loss of dissolved oxygen, and the fish died, and the muskrats left.
“But then the neighbors, the community got active, ” added a long-time former resident of the area, Lowell Levin, now emeritus professor of public health at Yale and a consultant to the World Health Organizations, “and things improved.”
“In the 1980s, when we moved in,” added Bartow, “many of us didn’t even know there was water there.”
There were huge, resident-inspired clean-ups, vegetation was cut down, and the area was restored, in part. Funds were raised, added McGrath, for a limnological survey, which is how to restore lakes and ponds. “In time, all manmade bodies silt up and need to be dredged, restored, and restocked with fish over a period of time, say 50 or 75 years.”
Beaver Pond lost out of the limited money available for dredging to Edgewood Pond, which was dredged and restored last year. “That’s because Edgewood is one acre, and Beaver Pond is ten acres and would require $4 million for dredging,” said McGrath.
“In the meantime,” said Rhoda Zahler, another FOBPP member and former city employee, who knows about money, “we need an interim cost effective plan to put in sieves at the many sewers or catch basins to address the massive floatable garbage problem in the short term.”
The man on the hot seat to answer the questions was Ian Juden, project manager of the city’s Engineering Department. He began by saying that garbage accumulation and silting up of the sewage system was a citywide problem. “We have an estimated 8,000 catch basins in the city, each one requiring a specialized sieve or netting device costing about $3,000, for a total of $20 million. And I have this fiscal year a total budget of $400,000 and an undermanned crew.”
“Insurmountable obstacles will kill our project,” said McGrath. “Let’s focus on Beaver Pond.”
After intense discussions of floatables and silting, and the wisdom of placing catchment devices upstream of the sewers, or at the six outlets, or pipes, each of which drains 40 to 50 water run off lines directly into Beaver Pond, Rhoda Zahler made a motion for Juden to prepare a plan that would be a pilot project for the city to be situated at Beaver Pond.
“It should be cost effective,” she motioned, “designed to remove trash and silt from the pond in the short term, and it should be effective and doable with city staff available.”
Motion passed, Juden agreed to prepare the design, with several options, and to include an additional design for an improvement of the dam between the north and south ponds to improve water level, especially in summer.
“It will be a good place to start,” said Mike Piscitelli
The design will be presented in two months, and the Friends of Beaver Pond Park will be there. Stay tuned.