The city of Mexico’s Parks and Recreation Department is looking at more than $600,000 to clean up Kiwanis Lake with the fix being only temporary.

Parks Director Chad Shoemaker presented the information to the park board last week after an engineering study reviewed the project’s scale and costs. The study was paid for by a grant from the Allen B. and Josephine P. Green Foundation. The potential project would include plans for dredging, nutrient mitigation, and stormwater planning.

The lake has about one to 3.5 feet of sediment that needs to be removed which can be done a couple of different ways. Shoemaker said the lake can be dredged or it can be drawn down but the latter option comes with its issues.

“If we draw it down it’s going to stink and we’ve been through that before,” Shoemaker told the Ledger.

Shoemaker said the city is looking at different options for dredging including buying the equipment to do the job versus hiring someone to do it. One good news is that the sediment contains no heavy metals and can be repurposed to land surfaces. The study estimates that more than 12,000 cubic yards of sediment must be removed.

The other big problem at the lake is the phosphorus levels which lead to algae blooms in the spring and summer that consume the lake’s surface.

“Think about the move, The Thing,” Shoemaker said jokingly. “We get a lot of complaints from the neighborhood and the fishermen hate it.”

According to the study, the levels of phosphorus in the lake are more than four times the levels of a body of water considered supercharged with algae growth and more than 20 times greater than a healthy lake.

Shoemaker said the big challenge for the city is figuring out where the phosphorus is coming from to stop it from entering the lake.

“It’s not coming from a single points source,” Shoemaker said. “It could be yards with too high of fertilizers. There’s probably a thousand places it’s coming from.”

Shoemaker said fixing the lake is a lot easier than fixing the cause of the lake’s problems.

“It would cost you way more to track down each of those sources and fix it than to fix the lake,” Shoemaker said.

Shoemaker said fixing the lake would get the city between eight and 12 years of a clear lake before the problems start to resurface. Shoemaker said the process may go slower than people would like because of the costs involved.

“We can’t spend $600,000 every 10 years so we’re going to have to figure something out before we spend the money to fix the situation,” Shoemaker said. “It’s a lot of engineering. We’re piecing out parts as we can to get the answers.”

Shoemaker said with a park inventory the size of what Mexico has it’s going to be tough coming up with sources for the lake. Many of the completed park projects are done with the help of private funds. Shoemaker said it can be hard to fundraise for maintenance projects.

“We don’t generate enough money in the city of Mexico to be wasting taxpayer money,” Shoemaker said. “We’re very careful about specifying things and we don’t just grab things off a shelf. It’s a big number and you don’t have anything after you’ve spent it that you had before and that’s hard to swallow.”