Birch Lake water levels plunge after culvert replacement

Read the entire article and see if you don't think this sounds eerily similiar to the illegal dyke/dam/culvert on Thibeau...

Lakeland Times

...More than a few of those documents indicate town officials believed that the DNR's insistence that the project could not affect lake levels referred to current lake levels, when, as a matter of fact, the DNR was actually referring to natural lake levels as they existed before the original culvert placement created an impounding effect.

To the DNR, not affecting lake levels meant removing the impoundment effect; to town officials, not affecting lake levels translated into sustaining the impoundment effect, a communications' gulf aptly framed by Lake Tomahawk supervisor Jack Dunbar at the Aug. 13 town meeting.

"If dropping the lake an entire foot and leaving all this lake unusable isn't adverse, I don't know what is," Dunbar said to Simonsen that night. "You mean to tell me that dropping this lake the way you did wasn't affecting the lake levels?"

That remains a big question today. To ask it another way, did the DNR know the town was misinterpreting its position on future lake levels? Did it really pose the dam permit option to officials, or did it camouflage the outcome of the project in an attempt to remove what Simonsen has since called "an unauthorized dam"?