While this year saw one of the highest number of visits to Vermont state parks, visits to Lake Champlain state beaches were down by over 10% this summer.Â
Environmental officials have one idea about what could be causing the decline: news articles about cyanobacteria blooms.
During a pre-session legislative briefing, Julie Moore, Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, said that visits to eight of the 13 state lakeside parks were down over 10% this year. That translated into more than 20,000 fewer visits this year — or an estimated quarter of a million dollar decline in associated tourist spending, she said.
Gesturing to a powerpoint slide with screenshots of articles from local news outlets from the past year about blue-green algae blooms, Moore said “it’s headlines like these that probably played no small part in discouraging people from heading to our parks.”
The comment was made during an overview of Vermont’s water cleanup laws and funding for lawmakers at the Statehouse in Montpelier. Over $48 million in state and federal funds will go toward clean water projects this fiscal year, she said.
Craig Whipple, state parks director, said that the parks seeing a double-digit visitor decline were: Button Bay, DAR, Kingsland Bay, Burton Island, Knight Point, Niquette Bay, Sandbar and Alburgh Dunes.
Both Moore and Whipple noted that part of the decline in visits was likely due to early season bad weather. In years past, with delayed spring openings, visits bounce back during the summer, said Whipple.
“We just didn’t see the rebound that we would normally have expected to see,” he said.
Whipple said none of the lakeside state parks had any E. coli related beach closures this summer and “very few” closures related to cyanobacteria blooms.
“I think there were other parks on Lake Champlain that had challenges of that nature,” he added. Among the local beaches that were closed this summer were Texaco Beach, North Beach and Leddy Beach.
“We noticed that when there’s sort of a broad exposure to that message at some part of the lake, we often see a bit of a ripple all along the lakeshore, despite the fact that state parks didn’t have” those problems this year.
Whipple said the estimated decline in park visitor revenue was based on a UVM study that had surveyed a wide range of state park goers to determine how much money they spent in the surrounding areas.
Jamie Fox, general manager of the Basin Harbor Resort, which sits on a harbor just north of Button Bay in Ferrisburgh, said that the resort had actually seen record revenue this past year.
“We’re certainly not seeing any decline in overnight stays, resort usage or waterfront usage,” he said.
When asked what he thought about state environmental officials’ thoughts that news stories could be fueling the decline in park visitation, Fox said he agreed.
“I think that’s certainly more of the issue than actually seeing or finding blooms — the media around it and the hype,” he said. “I noticed that being a resident of the area that the perception that one place has (blooms), suddenly becomes very reactive.”
Some Addison County residents who live south of the resort near the lake in Panton and Bridport showed up at multiple clean water board meetings with photos of preternaturally green water near their homes and choice words for state officials who they feel are not doing enough to address farm runoff. The turnout was in part in response to a video circulated of manure spread on snowy fields of a nearby dairy farm gushing into the lake last spring.
Moore said in an interview Wednesday that while many people think of the lake as a “monolith” in terms of water quality, there is actually significant variance in the large lake. For instance, the deeper main lake near Burlington has relatively low phosphorus concentrations, while shallower areas like Missisquoi Bay have much higher concentrations.
Moore and Whipple both said that they did not know whether there were more news stories about cyanobacteria blooms this year as opposed to years past. This year, Vermont had a record high number of early season cyanobacteria bloom reports from volunteer monitors, but state officials cautioned at the time against drawing conclusions that there were necessarily more blooms as there were also more people reporting blooms.
“My sense is that certainly the public is more acutely aware, more sensitive to more reports of cyanobacteria blooms,” said Moore.
She also noted that coverage of Lake Carmi algal blooms the last couple of years had possibly drowned out stories about blooms on the state’s largest lake.
Since the updated federal pollution reduction order for Lake Champlain was finalized in 2016, Vermont has reduced phosphorus going into the lake by an estimated 16.4 metric tons, with the vast majority of that reduction coming from on-farm water quality projects like cover cropping and installing fences to keep cows out of streams, said Moore.
“I don’t think we do enough to tell the positive stories of all the work we’re doing and draw an equal amount of attention to the good things taking place on the ground,” she said in an interview.
But Vermont still has a long way to go to meet its required clean water mandate: the state has until 2036 to reduce the amount of phosphorus going into the lake by just over 241 metric tons — almost 15 times the phosphorus reduction to date.
Moore stressed that the pollution reduction will take at least the two decades allotted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency due to the complex ecological processes at play; for example, trees planted along riverbanks to stabilize streambanks will take years to mature. And, further complicating matters, increased storms linked to climate change are leading to increased phosphorus surges into the lake, she said.Â
