Lily Lake Summerhaven Association  Lilly Lake, Wisconsin

Rev. 20-July-2010

Welcome Message from the President

Mike Adam, Acting President, Lily Lake Summerhaven Association, a voluntary organization of Lilly Lake residents whose purposes include community building, Neighborhood Watch, and communication and presentation of issues affecting the community to the proper authorities.

Note: The Association is most grateful to NCast Corporation for the donation of server space and technical support for this Web site.

Special Announcements:

• You may have noticed dead snails washing up on your beach. They are Chinese Mystery Snails, an exotic species from Asia. Many lakes have them. They are nowhere near as bad as Zebra mussels, but they can stink when they die off.
  Here is the DNR website on them: http://limnology.wisc.edu/personnel/jakevz/ais/mysterysnail.html
• If you would like to contact the property tax committee, email them at a special email address they set up: citizens4fairtaxes@gmail.com.
• If you would like to get a copy of the petition they created, click Property Tax Petition.
• Water quality test results (the Burlington Water Pollution Control Facility tests water samples taken near the public beach):
  June 7: 31 cfu / 100mls
  June 14: 0 cfu / 100mls
  June 21: 20 cfu / 100mls
  June 28: 13 cfu / 100mls
  July 5: no test
  July 12: 15 cfu / 100mls
  July 19: 291 cfu / 100mls - Beach advisory
  July 20: 13 cfu / 100mls
  
  WI DNR recommendations:
  On a reading >235, post a "Water Quality Poor" advisory at the beach.
  On a reading > 1000, close the beach.
  
• See the agenda for the next Town Board meeting.
• See Other local events for information on events in our area.
If your church or civic group is having a festival, rummage sale, or other public event, please tell Marilyn so that she can put it on the calendar.

Board Members

Acting President	Mike Adam 537-2413 balooadam@yahoo.com 7126 327th Ave
First Vice President	Marilyn Magnuski 537-4750 mjmagnuski@netwurx.net 7723 334th Avenue
Second Vice President	Vacant
Secretary	Pat Scannell 537-4408 33260 80th St
Treasurer	Jillian Verstrate (unlisted) 7634 Lily Lake Rd Mailing address: P.O. Box 763 New Munster, WI 53152

Block Captains

If you cannot reach your block captain and you want to discuss something urgent, please call one of the Board members.

Highlights of the May 22, 2010 Meeting

The following highlights present the main topics and issues covered during the meeting. The highlights summarize the main ideas and are not meant to be a complete verbatim transcript of the whole meeting.

Thank You, Lily Lake Resort
The Association extends its deep thanks to the Lily Lake Resort for allowing us to use their facility for our meeting free of charge. We appreciate their gracious hospitality.

Web site domain name
We recently reserved our lilylake.org domain name for another 9 years. Paying for that length of time cuts the price per year to roughly 1/2 of the usual rate.

Block Captain reports

• There was a burglary in Block 1 (327th Ave). A long-haired man with a slick hair-do was seen driving an unfamiliar van in the area.
• The tick population is big this year. Be careful if you're going into the hunting grounds.
  
• Some vacated and foreclosed houses are eyesores. The grass is long.
  If the grass reaches a foot high, you can call Sheila. She will contact the owner, who can either take care of it or let the Town mow it and add a charge to the property tax. Neglected maintenance is another story. Unless you can prove a health hazard, there's not much that can be done to force the homeowner to fix up the property.
  There's one house where the owner is elderly and can no longer keep up. The kids don't help much.
  In another case, the house was supposed to be burned down in a fire training exercise, but it's still there, and the door is open.
  Contact Sheila. The house has an owner: either the Town or some private party.

July 3, 2010 Parade and Kids Games
The food banks hurt for donations in summer. So we'd like to set up food barrels and take donations from July 2 to July 10. The donated items must be non-perishables with expiration dates in the future.

If this event is to happen, we need volunteers. All the work of Association events cannot fall onto just a handful of people.

What about adding to the parade, e.g., vintage cars, farm equipment, water balloon fights?
We'd welcome additional vehicles. One problem is that everyone is running a parade either Saturday or Sunday. So there's lots of competition for parade attractions.

We used to have fireworks long ago. How about doing that again?
Fireworks are a problem. Per WI law, you can buy them, but you can't set them off. Anything that shoots up into the air is illegal to fire off. Some municipalities have fireworks displays, but they have the financial resources and liability insurance to handle it. Even if we raised the money to buy the fireworks, the liability insurance for such an event would run us in the $8,000 to $10,000 range. Sadly, liability issues control a lot of what we can and can't do nowadays.

WE NEED A VOLUNTEER PHOTOGRAPHER FOR THIS YEAR'S EVENT.

Other events
- August 14 is probably the best date for the lakewide garage sale. Many schools start shortly after that and people are not around.
  WE NEED A VOLUNTEER TO RUN THIS EVENT.
- We'd like to contribute to a blood drive, e.g., St. John or Messiah Lutheran will probably have one this summer.
- Movie night: It would cost $900 to $1200 to run a movie night on the beach. Financially, that's out of reach for us.

Jennifer moving to Tampa
Rich Reed has been unemployed since last August. The good news is that he found a wonderful job. The bad news is that it's in Tampa. The good news is that most members of Jen's family are in Tampa. So the area is good for her and her family. Jen will be here until the end of July. Her family has owned their Lilly Lake home for 67 years. It's heartbreaking for her, her parents, and grandparents to have to part with it.

Mike Adam has agreed to fill out the remainder of Jen's term. We'll elect a new 2nd VP to take Mike's place at the fall meeting.

Property tax committee
The property tax committee (Jerry Dressler, Linda Gissell, Patty Kaplan, Robert Kissner, and Gail Schoch reachable at citizens4fairtaxes@gmail.com) distributed petitions. This year's open book session will be in late June; the Board of Review is July 29. In general, property owners gained very little from the open book sessions. The committee pushed for a Saturday date so that non-resident owners could attend without having to take a day off work. Committee members found the assessors to be unaccommodating. When asked which property sales formed the basis for the year's evaluations, the assessors said it was a secret. Also, foreclosures and sales to relatives do not count towards the sales database.

The current assessors have a contract that does not contain a non-performance clause. In theory, Appraisal Associates could do nothing and still get their $39,000/year. You can't fire them for non-performance. Next year is the last year of their contract. The Town is no longer issuing such loose contracts.

Note that even if your assessment goes down, your taxes may not follow. The Town (which has a $1 million budget) has to pay for certain things no matter what the value of the property in its borders is. So they have to collect the money regardless of property value dips. Also, school districts are the main contributors to the tax bills. All the schools in this area have passed expensive referenda in recent years. The only way to stop that trend is to pay attention to local elections and vote.

Fall meeting is August 28, 2010.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

DAN HIRCHERT (USDA WILDLIFE SERVICES): GUIDELINES FOR CANADA GOOSE DAMAGE MANAGEMENT IN WISCONSIN
Dan Hirchert from USDA Wildlife Services presented a slide show about management of goose problems. The USDA gets involved with geese because they, like deer, can damage crops.

Two populations of geese: migrants and residents (Giants)
Migrants pass through our area only for short time when they migrate from Hudson Bay to southern Illinois and back again. They do not breed here.

Residents (Giants) migrate very little (only when everything here freezes). They are very productive, averaging 5 eggs per nest. They live 20 years, are adaptable, don't have many native predators, and weigh up to 15 lbs.

Damage: crops, airplanes, park areas, landscapes, water bodies, attacks on people
Resident geese can produce major crop damage, and they threaten safety near airports. E.g., in 1995, an AWACS plane flew into a flock of geese; the resulting crash killed all 24 military personnel on board.

In urban areas, they can cause property damage, decimate vegetation, contaminate water bodies, and increase erosion. They can make such a mess that people stop using parks. They are also aggressive and will charge children who are holding food or adults who surprise them while they are nesting. During their molting period (late June) when they are unable to fly, they can cause traffic accidents because they walk everywhere, including in roadways. They may create predator-proof nests in high places such as roofs. If they succeed in raising a brood somewhere, they return to the same place, and their young learn to return to the same place.

Abatement: scare away and reduce populations, educate the public
You can manage goose concentrations with various techniques: propane cannons, pyrotechnics, flagging, fencing, and increased hunting. Most of these techniques are not usable in urban areas.

Hunting laws allow high bag limits (usually 5/day) before the migrants arrive. Hunting has helped manage the exploding resident goose population. Sixty to seventy years ago, it was thought that resident geese were extinct. In 1970, the DNR estimated there were 1600 resident geese in the state. Now there are probably 155,000. The breeding population is increasing.

Education is important. People should not feed the geese. Local ordinances can help enforce that idea. If you notice birds starting to congregate, try to disperse them because they act as decoys and attract more birds.

Non-lethal abatement methods include scare devices (like blow-up figures that inflate on a timer), trained dogs, pyrotechnics, repellents, and habitat alteration. If you discourage them in one place, they will go to another nearby area.

They like a smooth transition from water to grass. So anything you can do to break up that transition, like putting a band of rocks along the shoreline, can help discourage them. Fences (plain and electric), string grids, and big plants next to the shore are other methods. For small ponds, stringing fishing line at 20-ft intervals interferes with their ability to land in the water.

Because they are so adaptable, you may have to change your disruption techniques from time to time.

Predators: skunks, raccoons, foxes, coyotes
Skunks, raccoons, foxes, and coyotes normally don't take on an adult goose, but they disrupt nests and will kill juvenile birds for food. One area that had resident foxes stopped having any trouble with geese because the foxes took out all the young birds.

Protected by treaty
Geese are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. You need a federal permit to take eggs or birds.

Population management: reduce breeding, increase mortality
It is our local decision what we'd like to do about the geese. Then we apply for the permit.

Spraying 100% corn oil on the eggs suffocates the baby geese. However, you need a permit to do this, and you need to check for new eggs that the adults might produce. By adding dye to the spray and rechecking the nest, you can see any new unsprayed eggs. If you break the eggs during the adults' fertile period, they'll just produce replacement eggs. They sit on the nests for 28 days. They're fertile for roughly 25 days of that time.

Addling (shaking) the eggs is another option, but you have to shake for a long time, and you need a permit.

Nests are hard to find. Geese love islands (for their protection) and floating bogs. They can nest under bushes and trees. And you may be attacked as you approach the nest.

2-year process to remove geese: test for contaminants, then take birds away
Removing geese takes 2 years. The first year, the USDA collects 7 birds and tests them for PCBs, mercury, lead, and pesticides. The 25 contaminant tests take a long time. The collection takes place near the end of June when the geese are molting and can't fly.

If the birds test clean (so far, only one community has tested high for PCBs), the following year the USDA harvests the agreed-upon number of birds. It is wise to leave a few birds for goose lovers to enjoy so that the community does not become divided between goose lovers and goose haters.

The birds are handled, caged, and euthanized humanely. They are sent to a licensed poultry processor, who turns the meat into gooseburger for food pantries. Smaller birds are donated to animal sanctuaries for food. So far, 1600 geese have been pantried or given to Native Americans for food, and 1800 geese have been used for animal feed.

Effectiveness: manage the big adults to allow other options to work
If you reduce the number of big adults, other less drastic options may suffice to manage the geese in subsequent years. One community hasn't contacted the USDA in 5 years after their first removal. When you have a smaller population of geese, you attract fewer migrants because there are fewer decoys.

Summary of actions
1. Reduce food and habitat.
2. Time your actions: act when the geese are nesting and flightless. That's a roughly 3-week period in June.
3. Solicit neighborhood involvement.
4. Work with law enforcement.
5. Reduce geese to tolerable levels, but don't eliminate all geese.
6. Be proactive. Don't wait until the situation is out of control. If you have a few geese now, you'll have more later.

Costs: $2000 and $2000
Dan has found a lower-cost lab. So tests for contaminants now run $2000 instead of $4000. Next year, it will cost roughly $2000 to remove some birds. There is some grant money that may help defray the cost.

Disturb the nests right now
The geese are already nesting and probably sitting on eggs. This is the time to disturb the nests.

Dan Hirchert can be reached at 1-800-433-0663. He will collect the 7 geese to test for contaminants and apply for a grant. He'll also let Ron Vollmer know when he comes so that Ardie can take pictures for the web site.

Copyright © 2009 Lily Lake Summerhaven Association. All rights reserved.
Lilly Lake (Wisconsin)
Web master: Marilyn Magnuski, 262-537-4750, mjmagnuski@netwurx.net