By RYAN LANCASTER
Staff Reporter
Aside from some invasive weeds, erosion and an unfortunate abundance of goose poop, the three miles of Medical Lake shoreline are in pretty good shape.
But in order to further improve these areas, and to comply with Washington state law, the city of Medical Lake is developing a restoration plan for all lakeshores within its boundaries, including its namesake and portions of West Medical and Silver lakes.
The Shoreline Management Act of 1971 required cities and counties to create a Shoreline Master Program (SMP), which regulates the area 200 feet within the ordinary high water mark on any large bodies of water inside their jurisdictions. A 1975 Spokane County SMP included Medical Lake until the city drafted its own version three years ago.
Medical Lake city planner Glenn Scholten said the city's SMP was forwarded to the Washington State Department of Ecology for final approval but the agency didn't give it a full review until a few months ago. He's now sorting through the results, which found that the SMP is missing a few elements, including a restoration plan that pinpoints degraded areas and outlines specific benchmarks for dealing with them.
Ecology shoreline planner Jaime Short said developing a restoration plan should go fairly quickly for Medical Lake because the city has already done much of the planning work in their SMP.
“There's no need to get into the technical aspects, they just need to pull out and prioritize the specific restoration opportunities,” she said.
The city's SMP suggests several shoreline restoration policies, such as limiting further development, restoring native plants and putting up signage that warns against feeding geese – the birds' waste can cloud the lake's chemistry. The SMP also recommends improvements to the cliffs at the south end of the lake in order to prevent further erosion and increase safety, an idea Scholten believes should be a priority.
“What I want to see is some kind of city project that will go in and clean this area up and put some landscaping in there with a bench or picnic area – something nice that is fenced off near the cliff,” he said.
The SMP encourages lakefront property owners to plant native vegetation near shorelines that can act as buffers from adjacent land disturbances. Existing docks should be in good repair for safety and aesthetics purposes and new docks should blend in as much as possible to their surroundings.
But other items are more than suggestions – they're policies enforceable through the city code. If a property owner wants to complete a landscaping or building project of any substance within the 200 foot buffer area they must first submit plans to the city that show how shoreline vegetation will be preserved and erosion will be controlled during and after construction. Larger projects are forwarded to Ecology for final approval.
Scholten said dictating what people can and can't do on their own land sometimes creates conflict. “There's this clash sometimes of property rights versus Department of Ecology requirements,” he said. “What are your property rights, what can you do, versus what the state requires you to do?”
Short said Ecology is continually working to answer this question through education. “The agency is trying to take all this technical information and break it down into pieces that everybody can understand,” she said.
Scholten is preparing to do the same over the coming months by inviting shoreline property owners and other residents to ask questions and submit their own suggestions on what restoration is needed around the lake. While no public hearing date is scheduled at this time, Scholten said he plans to have at least one meeting over the next few months that will deal with restoration of Medical Lake, West Medical Lake and the slim portion of Silver Lake that falls within the city limits.
For more information on Shoreline Master Programs visit http://www.ecy.wa.gov.
Ryan Lancaster can be reached at ryan@cheneyfreepress.com.
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