Note from BLAI President, Rand Griffin                                               March 18, 2026

I spoke today with Mike Harris, Director of Public Works for the City of Ellsworth.  He was responding to an email that I had sent him regarding concerns about the Lake in a number of areas.

His comments were as follows:

1. He confirmed that Reggie, head of the water works, left in November 2025 and that the remainder of his staff left with him.  He also confirmed that John Wedin retired in late December.
2. For the interim last 2 1/2 months they used Maine Rural Water Management Company to fill in the various roles of the water works and John Wedin's role.  This fill in was able to keep the water works running and perform some other tasks but it was only a temporary fix and left a number of items not addressed adequately.
3. He has now hired a complete team to take over the responsibilities.  The new superintendent is Peter Austin, who previously was a 30-year employee with the City Water Dept, left for another responsibility and is now back to run the department. In addition, they have a new chief operator and a watershed protection employee.  He said that they are figuring out the various allocation of responsibilities and would get back to me once sorted out in the next few weeks.  We discussed our preference for a specific person to be assigned to our needs rather than having it spread among a lot of people. I told him we need someone to be "owning the responsibilities and who we can call as needed."
4. A full-time lake resident indicated to me after an inspection last month, the lake is down 38" which is low for this time of the year.  The City usually drops it in early winter to be ready for the spring runoff and storms.  Unfortunately, one of the flues was stuck open and with no one to check it, we lost more water than we should have.  After I was alerted me to this problem, I reached out to the City and they did close the flue.  Mike acknowledged the problem.  Hopefully now we get some significant runoff from the melting snow and some major spring storms.  We'll have to monitor it closely and just hope the water comes up rapidly.
5. We discussed the need to immediately hire the boat launch inspectors and they are working on this with an April 15th deadline.
6. Mike asked for the 319 grant information since they need to respond to my email on the costs for the grant review.  They are in the 2026 - 2028 grant for repair and improvement of the boat launch road in the amount of a $12,500 grant and an equal amount of match.  I sent him the information and gave him the new contact at HCSWCD who will be overseeing the implementation of the grants.
7. He admitted that nothing was being done on the dam design for repair of the leak. Once they get everything sorted out, they will get back on this as a high priority.  I told him we were happy to help and that Tim Smart, Rick Maeder and I were on the advisory committee and happy to meet anytime.

We will continue to push on these issues over the next few weeks and see what develops.