The International Joint Commission continues to seek feedback about what’s important to local property owners.
A pair of public meetings were held earlier this week in Kenora.
Bev Clark is spearheading the effort and says they’re looking to update the system they now use.
“(We) tried to see whether there are common worries between the groups,” says Clark, “and see how we can feed the information that these people have given us into our process of developing water quality objectives and alert levels for the Rainy River basin. I think it’s been very good.”
Clark says one of the issues is a need to modernize a system of yellow alerts used on Rainy Lake and Rainy River and expand it to Lake of the Woods.
“There’s currently objectives and alert levels just for the Rainy River, and they’re mostly outdated because they relate to problems the river had in the past. We need to update those, and we need to expand them throughout the whole watershed.”
The IJC is also looking at monitoring phosphorus levels on the Lake the Woods to see if that is causing an increase presence of blue-green algae.
