New task force will review options for the future of Lake Accotink
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a motion May 23 to create a task force on the future of Lake Accotink.
The motion, proposed by Braddock Supervisor James Walkinshaw, calls for the task force to:
- Conduct a review and develop findings on the previous studies by environmental consulting groups Arcadis and WSSI to ensure that all possible options have been considered to preserve Lake Accotink “in the most sustainable, equitable, and cost-effective manner possible.”
- Identify relevant information needs and questions that should be addressed if the board proceeds with studying a managed wetland option. Develop findings on the potential impacts of a managed wetland option.
- Identify relevant information needs, questions, and impacts that should be addressed if the board considers a hybrid option involving some area of open water along with a managed wetland.
- Consider the impacts to the environment, surrounding communities, recreational uses of the park, and financing including ongoing maintenance.
Related story: Lake Accotink dredging project not likely to happen, due to increased cost
The task force will be chaired by former Board of Supervisors chair Sharon Bulova. Former Braddock supervisor John Cook would be a member, along with representatives of the community, environmental and nonprofit organizations, and the Park Authority.
The task force will be convened this summer and will work with staff from the Department of Public Works and Environmental Services to set a timeline to complete its work and report back to the BoS.
Because Lake Accotink is a manmade lake in the midst of a densely developed 30-square-mile watershed, it has required regular dredging in order to remove sediment and prevent it from returning to its natural state, Walkinshaw explained at the BoS meeting.
Sedimentation has accelerated in recent years. As a result, the county conducted an analysis and proposed a plan to spend $30.5 million in 2019 on a major dredging operation and envisioned a permanent infrastructure to facilitate future maintenance dredging.
A more recent study put the cost of the initial dredge at $95 million with the cost of subsequent dredges to maintain the lake estimated at $395 million over the next 25 years.
Related story: Dredging Lake Accotink is not financially or environmentally feasible
Following that report, Fairfax County staff recommended that Lake Accotink not be dredged and, instead, proposed restarting the Lake Accotink Park’s Master Planning process “with an emphasis on developing a sustainable vision for the lake and the park,” Walkinshaw said.
Without dredging, the lake would likely disappear as the sediment builds up. That outcome drew intense objections from community members, so Walkinshaw announced at the Board’s Environmental Committee meeting last month, his intentions to create a task force to review the previous studies.
Let’s use all the cheap labor (homeless and migrants) to just shovel out the silt…they just came here to do the jobs Americans don’t want…right?…better yet…give them our supervisors jobs and they will get the lake dredged out in no time.
Let it go back to its natural state. It’s too expensive to keep it as it is and would involve continual disruption to dredge it repeatedly. What happens to the dredged material?
Let’s the BoS out of office asap and take away the moron staff as well. What a display of incompetent – they want to install a muddy swamp in your backyard because it “costs too much” to do their jobs correctly. The developers in Tysons and all those businesses should be paying for their run off sediment to be dredged.
I couldn’t agree more. We need to vote these clowns out of office.
Swampattink. What a display of total political and administrative incompetence … and these morons gave themselves a raise. Previous post nailed it. They want to let the back fill-in and build cheap apartment blocks – similar to ones where people are getting stabbed and shot on a regular basis. Sad
I couldn’t agree with you more.