Puddle Jumpers #3- Shaun Gillilland

Puddle Jumpers is a podcast produced by the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Hosted by Stephanie Rock and Tom Collins. Edited by Stephanie Rock with assistance from Tom Collins and Kayla Beck.

Music: In the Forest by Lesfm from https://pixabay.com/

Transcript

STEPHANIE: Welcome to Puddle Jumpers, a podcast where we jump in the big puddles of the Adirondack lakes and ponds to learn more about science, stewardship, and community. My name is Stephanie, and I’m the Watershed Science Communication Fellow for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute with funding from the Lake Champlain Sea Grant.

TOM: I’m Tom, the Education and Outreach Manager for the AWI. For the 4th Annual Adirondack Water Week, we are creating a mini-series dedicated to highlighting communities in the Lake Champlain Basin that have done some major work in water conservation and protection.

STEPHANIE: This episode, we’re headed over to Willsboro, NY in the Boquet Watershed, where we sat down with Shaun Gillilland, Town Supervisor for Willsboro.

SHAUN: I had a connection to Willsboro and this area and stuff when I was growing up, but I didn’t actually grow up here. So actually my parents, they had retired from the federal government and they moved up here and then I came up in between some duty stations in the Navy and fell in love, and decided this is where we want to go when I was retired from the Navy. So, I initially came up here and my parents moved here in 2000 and in 2005 I retired and we moved up here. Then somewhere around 2008 or so, somebody asked me to run for Fire Commissioner. So, I ran, and I guess I got the political bug and went after it and ran for town board and for the supervisor.

TOM: Can you tell us a little bit of the background of Willsboro? Can you tell us the history of Willsboro?

SHAUN: Willsboro is probably the oldest settlement in Essex County with the possible exception of Crown Point and Ticonderoga. But it was founded by William Gilliland after the French and Indian War. Incorporated in 1765. He came here and settled here and started the community essentially because of the river, and the mouth of the Boquet river and the mouth going into Lake Champlain. Rivers provided mode of force for mills and it was an ideal place for mills of different kind, you know, grain mills, lumber mills, and eventually later on electrical, electric power mills, paper mills, those kind of things. So, the community has been the consistent community since the middle of the late half of the 18th century. And always was centered around the river itself. The Boquet river comes down into Willsboro through the river valley which is a very heavily agricultural area, and so the town, through history, has had a pretty rich agricultural economy and a kind of industrial economy with the various mills through time here, and then with the logging and mining as well.

TOM: Do you know, Shaun, when the dam was put into place, what year that was and who did that?

SHAUN: There have been dams on the river from the late 18th century, all the way to 2015. The particular dam, which is called the Sawmill Dam, that we took out, the last one, I just can't off hand remember exactly what year it was, but it was close to 100 years old when we removed it. It was a wood dam, a lumber dam.

TOM: So, you have this dam, how did the conversation to remove the dam come up?

SHAUN: The dam there has always been problematic, and the New York State DEC has for many, many years, has been trying to establish or continue to reestablish a landlocked salmon population. So, they built a fish ladder somewhere around the 90s or so I believe. And the fish ladder unfortunately really didn’t work. Maybe they would have three or four fish actually go up the fish ladder.

STEPHANIE: About the time that Shaun came into office, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was looking for a way to reestablish a self-sustaining population of landlocked salmon. So, in working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, they coordinated to secure funding from the Lake Champlain Basin Program to do a study on the dam removal. Shaun was in support of this as he had been an advocate for the dam removal even before he went into office.

SHAUN: I said “the dam’s got to go” and here’s the reason. Because when I was in my last duty station Navy, I lived down near Fredericksburg, VA, and there was a dam on the Rappahannock River there that held back Shad. So they blew that dam and within a year, the Shad runs just blew up the Rappahannock River. A very, very popular fish and game fish. And when the shad runs go, now the hotels in Fredericksburg are just packed with fishermen. I had that in the back of my head. And I thought, you know, when I came in office, I said “we need to make Willsboro a salmon capital” and participate in the reestablishment of the naturally sustaining salmon population. All of this kind of fell into place. When I came into office, there was money there, and they were looking to do an engineering study on it. The board quickly approved it when we moved forward with the study and the study was done to what the effects of the dam removal would be. We take the results of that study and use it for public information to try to basically, in my mind, to win over the public’s confidence to take out the dam.

TOM: So, can you tell us a little bit about how the public responded initially to losing this historical figure in the community? What were people thinking?

SHAUN: Well, it was very- lots and lots of resistance to start. We had to have several public information sessions, and US Fish and Wildlife helped out a lot as well as the engineering firm. We had fluvial geomorphologist engineers, the modeling they did on the dam removal was fantastic. They were taking a look at all different types of outcomes or results of it, one which was reducing the flood threat, to reestablishing the salmon, to what the flows would look like, the ambience of the river. So, we had several meetings to talk through all that. There was a lot of resistance, but I think with showing the positive aspects of the dam removal, eventually people went over. There was one other one too, which was the financial and the liability portion of it, because the dam actually belonged to the town, and then the Lake Champlain Basin Program had said that there would be money available, federal money to remove the dam, but there was a time limit on that had to be used. Just before all of this happened, you know as these, these fell in to place, Hurricane Irene had come through. And I think the numbers were something like 16,000 cubic feet per second was the amount that was going over the dam. And it actually damaged the dam, it scoured out the bottom of it. So, it was like OK, it's already been damaged by one hurricane, others may come through. So, knowing that helped a lot. The estimates of the flood reduction were not insignificant and eventually they, you know, after removing the dam, it took several years, but FEMA actually came back to remap the floods and changed the flood zones which affected people’s flood insurance. It went down. And because during Irene, the water, you know, had come up over the road in several places and it really worried some of the property owners that were just upstream of the bridge. And so, they were rather concerned about the flood risk. There were concerns about lampreys and we had a lamprey specialist come from Fish and Wildlife and basically said, you know, based upon everything I know, he was a Fish and Wildlife national expert, said lamprey will not go up because they can't make it over the falls, and they have been testing this for actually a number of years. They’ve had lamprey traps in the dam and they never caught one. After all of these public information sessions and stuff, we had a public hearing before we decided and allowed the people to come in and go on the record and speak. This place was packed. I sat there and was ready for the onslaught and everybody got up and spoke either in support of or said I used to be against it, but now I’m for it. Then we proceeded to go to bid and go to the dam removal.

TOM: So, 2015, start removing the dam. Can you just walk us through that process a little bit? How long that took?

SHAUN: It didn’t take any time at all. Essentially it was rather easy. They did it in the summertime at low water. We had to put some equipment in the river to do it, but it was just kind of a, you know, Lincoln logs disassembling. And that was pretty quick. The water going down when it was removed, it was a public event. Everybody went to go see and they just swarmed down and started picking stuff out of upstream of the dam. But you know very quickly afterwards, people started to comment that they thought the river looked nicer than when it was the still water of the dam.

STEPHANIE: So, can you talk about the process of what it was like for the salmon to return, did they return immediately?

SHAUN: They did. The next runs afterwards, the fall run, the salmon started running up. And in the first year it was interesting because Fish and Wildlife was, you know, keeping track of these, you know, and they were there with cameras and everything going forward. They even had an underwater camera, and they actually caught some, a bunch of them going up. So, they counted the fish that were going. They even picked up some fish just in case, but they had a hard number of how many fish they saw. They found more nests than there should have been from what they counted. Which is interesting because the fish run night and day and they couldn’t see the ones running at night. So that was very successful, it was a lot of good news. Since that time there, I mean this is not an immediate you know, Cinderella story. The salmon, the lake salmon, they have challenges on their own. You know, first of all, the lampreys, but the other thing too is there’s a little fish, a game fish, or a feeder fish for the salmon or for the larger game fish, the trout and salmon and the others in the lake called alewife. And alewife is an invasive species, really a saltwater species. And they’ve lived in cycles with the naturally occurring feeder fish that are in there. When there’s lots of alewives, evidently, I’m not the expert, but I talked with the PhD who did it, evidently, in the gut of the alewife is an enzyme or bacteria or whatever they weren’t sure yet, that would deplete the salmon’s vitamin B6, which makes them weaker, so they don’t have that surge of strength to get up over the falls. The third, the other challenge is actually upriver and that and this is the bigger one, the nests, or the Reds, the salmon nests, need clear water. And when you have excess runoff from rain events and things like that out of farm fields and all those other stuff and makes brown water, they’ll kill the reds. So, you know, we're still struggling to, I mean Fish and Wildlife and DEC are still struggling, you know, to get on top of this and to rebuild a self-sustaining population.

STEPHANIE: What does the return of the spawning salmon mean for the community?

SHAUN: When it returns big, it will mean a lot. I mean we have already seen an increase in number of sport fishermen. The word is out there that the Boquet is the queen of salmon rivers and for landlocked salmon. So, there’s a lot more fisherman up and around out there. We just would love to be able to increase that sport fishery further upstream than what it is right now, just until we can get this population going again. I think it’s a long-term thing. I’m not a fisherman but these salmon are considered like, you know, the ultimate inland game fish. If you can fly rod a salmon, you reach the top level of fly fisherman.

STEPHANIE: Kind of bouncing off of that, how has the removing of the dam impacted the community in regard to sustainability, recreation, and economics?

SHAUN: It’s opened up, the river as more of a recreational asset. We have a lot of boaters, kayakers, canoeists, fishermen, they go access now more than we did before. And the beach and spit down at the mouth of the Boquet is, that’s probably the largest undeveloped beach there is on Lake Champlain, and it’s you know, it’s very very popular for people to stop in and go to.

STEPHANIE: So, kind of going back to what that whole process was like, both the conversation of the removal and then the actual removal, can you speak on the community connections that were created throughout that whole process?

SHAUN: I would say well, it really... I don't think people realize how much work was going on between Fish and Wildlife service and the university which was doing the work with the alewives, the B6 issue, with the New York State DEC. The church group, the fisherman, even the fire department. They got involved about what to do, about where they could put in dry hydrants or suck firefighting water out of the river and stuff. So, it involved all kinds of sectors in the whole process and mostly a lot of their questions and concerns, but it tied everything together.

STEPHANIE: What can other communities like Willsboro, if they have a dam that they maybe want to remove or want to learn more about it, what can they take away from this process?

SHAUN:  Engage early with the people. Public information sessions where people, you know, I guess just assess the concerns in the areas concern flooding, lampreys, ambiance. So yeah, just engage, engage all sectors of the community early, find out what their questions are.

STEPHANIE: What sustainability goals do you have for Willsboro for the future?

SHAUN: I think a lot of our, you know, our natural resources in this town, are particularly the gem of the river and the lake and the long-term strength. Visitors and tourism is, for this county, especially Essex County, is, the only county in the state that the largest economic sector is tourism. So, it’s very important economically for us and unless we have a community that is inviting visually and can compete with things like the high peaks or Fort Ticonderoga for the visitors attention, you know we have to steward this. And that’s what we’ve been trying to do. We have a very stringent zoning code, so that the beauty of the town and the ambience of the town are not going to be altered or made worse. In all other areas we’re upgrading our infrastructure for the long term. For water quality we put in a new wastewater treatment plant with more modern technology. We’re actually going to do an expansion on capacity of that wastewater treatment plant. We started a huge project of putting in the whole new municipal water production and distribution system because our infrastructure is aging and needs to be ready for the next 50-60 years. We do all kinds of energy smart type projects through NYSERDA with our charging stations and our LED lights in our municipal building. Training zoning officers, code officers, on solar and wind and other alternative energies. So, I think we’re trying to ride the wave of that.

STEPHANIE: So, a question that we have been asking all of our guests on a bit more of a personal note, what does clean water mean to you?

SHAUN: Vital! We are in the midst of a long-term study or community project that’s funded by the state called a local waterfront redevelopment project, where they take a look at the, you know, we’re a waterfront community so basically most of the town is within the study area. To take a look at development and redevelopment of the waterfront and things that affect the waterfront. As part of that, they did a survey of the town, as many people that we could get to fill out the survey. One of the questions was, what is the most important aspect of waterfront living? By and large, by almost two to one was clean water. Clean water because of consumption, clean water to avoid pollution. And the fact is, lake and the river are huge draws economically and if it gets nasty and dirty for whatever reason, that will be the end of it. So, within my community’s mind, clean water is a vital part of living here in the Adirondack Park.

Thanks for joining us on this adventure as we highlighted some communities in the Lake Champlain Basin. This brings us to the end of our series, and we hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed creating it. If you’d like to hear more stories like this or would like to see Puddle Jumpers continue, please consider reaching out to the Adirondack Watershed Institute on our website or email us at info@adkwatershed.org.

Thank you for listening, and the next time you find yourself jumping from one of these big puddles in the Adirondacks to another, remember to do your part to protect our water by making sure your watercraft is clean, drained, and dry!  

Puddle Jumpers is a podcast produced by the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Hosted by Stephanie Rock and Tom Collins. Edited by Stephanie Rock with assistance from Tom Collins and Kayla Beck.