Milfoil treatments will be balancing act

SANDPOINT — The Bonner County Aquatic Invasive Species Task Force is narrowing down a list of Eurasian milfoil treatment sites in the Pend Oreille, but it’s still unclear when the treatments will occur or which herbicides will be used.

Tom Woolf, aquatic plants manager for the Idaho State Department of Agriculture, said there will be about $1.6 million available for milfoil treatment and boat inspection programs this summer.

The task force is considering more than a dozen potential treatment sites, nearly all of which are frequented heavily by the public. The sites include City Beach, Memorial Field, boat launches in Hope, Laclede, Dover, Springy Point, Sunnyside, Bonner Park West and Albeni Cove. Bottle, Garfield and Glengary bays are also possible treatment sites.

The county is recommending that the treatments not coincide with the summer swimming season, a goal which is clashing with the lake’s finalized designation as critical bull trout habitat by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

“They want us to treat when the water is warm and when people will be swimming,” said Woolf.

That recommendation could mean treatments occur early or late in the season.

Woolf said early treatment would mean less biomass to assault, although a prodigious runoff period is expected, which has the potential to blunt the effectiveness of the treatments. Treating later, meanwhile, will likely lead to complaints from the public.

“They’ll probably be a couple, three, four, five weeks of people chopping up a lot of weeds trying to get out and recreate,” said Woolf.

Task force member John Monks advocated for a treatment schedule that is the most scientifically justifiable, regardless of the flak the county will receive from competing lake user groups.

“People are going to be unhappy. Period. People are already unhappy and we haven’t done anything (yet),” he said.

Task force member Diane Williams agreed, but urged her colleagues to consider the comparative size of the competing user groups.

“We have to be realistic about the Bonner County economy and culture, and folks that have boats versus folks that can’t afford boats and their only source of recreation is City Beach and swimming,” said Williams.