Dear Lady of the Lake,

The lake is really gross in some places right now. What happened to the “Blue Ribbon Committee” that was formed a few years ago? Wasn’t that supposed to “fix the lake?” This lake is the livelihood of Lake County and I am wondering what that committee has been doing to help solve some of the lake issues.

— Bemused and Confused about the Blue Ribbon Committee

Dear Bemused and Confused,

This is a great and timely question! In fact, the Blue Ribbon Committee for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake, or BRC, has a meeting scheduled on Sept. 23 at 1 p.m.

That meeting will include a review of significant funding decisions that would have a large impact on Clear Lake quality, economy, and tributary health and habitat.

If you want to attend that meeting, all the BRC meetings and sub committee meetings are publicly accessible online and the meetings agendas and minutes are also always available and accessible at the Natural Resources Agency Blue Ribbon for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake website.

But let’s back up and start from the beginning.

Where to find Blue Ribbon Committee formation and history information

While some of the history is complicated, there is quite a bit of BRC information. If you want more details then I provide in the column today, please visit the Natural Resources Agency Blue Ribbon for the Rehabilitation of Clear Lake website linked above.

Likewise, Lake County News has also covered milestones with the BRC over the years and you can find links to all those articles here.

The BRC is not just focused on the ecology of Clear Lake, but also on the rehabilitation of the lake-dependent socio-economy of the area around the lake. The idea is that if the economy around the lake can improve, this would create more tax-driven resources for lake quality improvements, and likewise, if the lake quality improved, this would result in more economic improvements and socio economic opportunities.

My column today won’t cover the details of the specific socioeconomic effort, but the UC Davis Center for Regional Change included their research, findings, and recommendations in the BRC “2020 Report to the Governor of California and the California State Legislature” and you can find out about that effort there.

The BRC committee also supports two subcommittees — the technical subcommittee and the socioeconomic committee.

Sub committees are charged with providing an avenue for stakeholders, experts, researchers, and managers to have in-depth conversations on the issues impacting Clear Lake and potential solutions.

These subcommittees provide the narrow focus that helps to address and answer specific questions and concerns that arise by the whole BRC. The members on the sub committees do include some BRC voting members, but are mostly local experts, agency staff, concerned citizens, researchers, business owners, and more.

For example, the technical subcommittee might view presentations on new technologies in lake management that might be of interest and value to pass along to the whole BRC for consideration. The socioeconomic subcommittee might review BRC proposals that could impact local communities and businesses — such as the development of an education center or water lab, for example.

There is a real need for the Blue Ribbon Committee

In general you should know that in 2017 the BRC was approved by the State Legislature in Assembly Bill 707 (Ch. 842, Statutes of 2017) thanks to Assemblymember Cecilia M. Aguiar-Curry (Fourth District).

When approved, the BRC (in parallel with CDFW) included $2 million for immediate research by UC Davis for both ecologic and economic investigations and allocated $5 million in Proposition 68 bond funds to be used for capital projects to improve lake water quality.

However, the Assembly member didn’t work alone on the idea and need for the BRC. Letters and pressure from county officials (like former District 3 Supervisor Jim Steele), local tribes, Lake County Water Resources Staff and Managers, conversations with the Water Board, and others within the community really pushed to get some help for the lake. The Natural Resources Agency is credited with continuing this effort having picked up the administration and financing of this committee in 2020.

The concept behind the BRC is that it will help direct some much needed resources into the county to address lake quality issues that are able to be addressed in any other way. This effort is very much appreciated by lake managers and stewards, especially after several attempts to impose a County tax and fee for water quality improvements between 2012 to 2014 all failed.

The BRC is really well-positioned to provide a lasting, positive impact for Clear Lake and Lake County. Figuring out how that money is spent, based on the most credible and recent science, and in a way that will truly result in a positive improvement, is the role of the 15-member BRC and subcommittees. And that role is taken very seriously.

BRC research accomplishments

The key to the success of the BRC is credible, recent, relevant, and comprehensive science and evidence. Without the most recent knowledge of what is going on in the system, any management “fixes” would be addressing the wrong thing, and expensive outcomes would not result in water quality improvements. How would we feel if $5 million was spent on some management technique that didn’t result in better water quality? Or conditions got worse? Science is necessary to guide us through what really needs to be addressed.

To date, through Assembly Bill 707 direct and indirect funds (initially administered by California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, and now administered through the Natural Resources Agency), the BRC has dedicated and allocated significant research-specific funding for both lake and stream monitoring to produce comprehensive lake and watershed models.

The total cost contracted to be spent on these scientific endeavors is about $5.4 million with research expected to be completed by 2023.

This is not all the amount of money being funded through the BRC (see my next column), but because the success of large management projects depend heavily on sound scientific research, this massive scientific undertaking is very much needed.

The in-lake model (i.e. within the lake) is being produced by UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, or TERC, led by Dr. Geoff Schladow and his lab.

The watershed model (i.e. the landscape around the lake that all drains into it) is being produced by the United State Geological Survey, or USGS, and being led by Dr. Charlie Alpers and his team. TERC and USGS are working together to make sure their models fit together and complement each other.

The information these models can provide will be very important for identifying very specific, relevant and effective management actions. Funds allocated to UC Davis TERC to conduct the in-lake monitoring needed to create these sophisticated mathematical models, will revolutionize the way we understand the processes occurring in Clear Lake, from understanding and predicting daily temperature and dissolved oxygen patterns to demonstrating how different management strategies would impact these processes and impact the lake — for good or worse.

During 2020 during the start of COVID, funding for this research had an uncertain future, but thankfully in April in 2021, the Governor and California Department of Finance did agree to fully fund continuation of the in-lake and landscape / watershed monitoring and models, in addition to some other research and management to be conducted by local agencies and tribes.

This would not have been possible without the dedication and hard work of the BRC and the ability to get support for these projects to be funded.

Now, you are probably thinking that $5.4 million is an incredibly large amount of money and are surprised why some sampling costs so much. But there is some really sophisticated research going on in the lake and on the landscape that costs quite a bit, both in equipment, installation, maintenance, operations, staffing, software, training, and of course to support the team conducting this research — including skilled investigators, students, graduate students, post docs, and specialists.

If you want to learn more about the team doing the research and the current products, TERC has created a website specifically for the Clear Lake study. You can find it here at “TERC Clear Lake Research.”

To get an idea of the type of research being conducted, and the sophistication of some of the tools and techniques being used, I would suggest checking out the Blog post shared by one of TERC’s lead researchers, Dr. Alicia Cortes. The post called “What Controls Water Quality in Clear Lake” (July 2020) describes some of the monitoring and sampling the TERC team is conducting and some of their results, including stream turbidity monitoring, time-depth oxygen profiling in the lake, and how satellite can be used for predicting and observing cyanobacteria blooms in the Lake.

Why do we need new research?

Now you might be thinking, “Don’t we have enough research on Clear Lake? Isn’t this just a huge waste of money?”

In reality, there hasn’t been much research conducted on Clear Lake in the last 20 to 25 years.

The last big plethora of Clear Lake research was during the 1980s to 1990s, when there was a UC Davis Field station located at Carnegie Library at Library Park in Lakeport. That field station was shut down due to budget cutbacks in 2001, and research in and on Clear Lake basically halted.

Most of the research coming out at that time was focused on water quality trends and mercury impacts from the Sulphur Bank Mercury Mine Site (Don’t worry, I will talk about this Superfund Site in a future column, as I have received questions from many citizens!).

Since that time, there have been a lot of changes in Clear Lake and Lake County. We have had fires, two of our worst droughts, large and frequent floods, climate change has increased air and water temperatures, and we have increased the development footprint around the basin.

However, some good things have happened too; we have a stormwater management program (some control over external sources of nutrients), we installed grading ordinances, and we have implemented more protections for shoreline development and construction.

The way that land managers have improved environmental protections in Lake County is not insignificant and people are more aware of the issues impacting the lake. Yet lake quality is still an issue, caused by things we yet don’t know or don’t understand — hence a need for the BRC.

Sure, there have been some very important monitoring programs that have started, most notably the Clear Lake Cyanotoxin Monitoring Project led by the Big Valley EPA and Sarah Ryan (Follow them on Facebook @Clear Lake Water Quality).

In 2010 UC Davis completed a data compilations study, to identify major trends in the physical, chemical, and biological data collected over time in Clear Lake. Clear Lake drinking water purveyors are also some of the best in the world for monitoring and treating cyanobacteria in drinking water systems.

The California Department of Water Resources, and now the County Water Resources Department, have conducted monthly water and sediment samples. But most of this research and monitoring is isolated, and not combined together to determine large-scale trends and patterns about what is going on in the lake under local conditions and global climate and weather conditions.

Part of BRC-funded research from UC Davis TERC team, includes a suite of work conducted on understanding the contribution of sediments in the lake to the nutrient dynamics in the water column. Remember from my column “Concerned about Cyanobacteria” (July 11, 2021) that nutrient phosphorus in the water column drives the horrible algae and cyanobacteria blooms that we see in the lake. So it’s very logical that to get to the bottom of the blooms, UC Davis is focusing on studying this particular nutrient.

If you ever followed historical work conducted on Clear Lake, you might recognize or remember a publication called “The Causes and Control of Algal Blooms in Clear Lake.” This publication was written way back in 1994 by Richerson, Suchanek, and Why and produced by UC Davis. This document demonstrated the relationship between phosphorus, blooms, and Clear Lake water quality.

Basically the study determined that most of the conditions in the lake were driven or resulted from poor land management that allowed external phosphorus to flow into the lake. While that is indeed true, the report also indicated that lake sediment is a source of nutrients driving the blooms observed in the lake during summer and fall, and that drought conditions cause these observations (or increases in phosphorus in the water column to increase blooms) to be more severe.

Basically, when less water comes into the lake in winter, we are seeing more phosphorus in the water column, but the source of that phosphorus is from the sediment. What remains unknown is what conditions in the lake cause what amount of phosphorus to escape from the sediments and be available in the water column for algae and cyanobacteria.

In case you are wondering, the tumultuous TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) requirements the Lake is under because of her 303(d) Impaired Water-Body Listed status by the US EPA, also concluded that little is known about the contribution of “internal” loading of phosphorus on the overall condition of the lake. In fact, the TMDL model and report did not even include considerations of internal sources, making real, effective management very difficult.

Thankfully, the BRC-funded TERC team is able to address these unknowns. UC Davis graduate student Nick Framsead, conducted his graduate work on answering the question: What is the contribution of “internal” loading of phosphorus to water quality conditions in Clear Lake?

He summarizes his work nicely in this blog post titled “Getting to the Bottom of what Fuels Algal Blooms in Clear Lake” (N. Farmstead 2020). Farmstead collected sediment core samples from Clear Lake and manipulated them in the laboratory to identify what exactly the contribution of Phosphorus is to the water column under different scenarios (i.e. like high / low oxygen and cool / warm temperature).

Farmstead discovered that 40% phosphorus is sourced from inside the lake’s sediments, while 60% comes from external sources. And this relationship was more pronounced under low oxygen and warmer temperatures -something that is becoming more and more common during our long, warm summer and fall seasons especially compared to 20-25 years ago!

This finding means that successful management has to consider in-lake strategies and methods, and not just reduce external phosphorus inputs — which really changes traditional management strategies used for water quality management in Clear Lake. This is the type of relevant and current information needed to help better manage the lake, and what the BRC is well-suited to providing.

Fixing the lake

Also, I hate to break it to you, but “fixing the lake” is not something that will happen, at least not in the way you expect. Clear Lake is very, very old (580,000 years!), much older than most if not all the other “natural” lakes in the entire United States.

Clear lake will never look or function like a reservoir, especially considering that most California reservoirs are 60 to 80 years old — mere babies in lake years! Additionally, Clear Lake never fully drains, and some of the water and sediment in this lake has been here for thousands of years.

Reservoirs are constantly drained and refilled with fresh rain water. Case in point, look at all the current water levels of reservoirs around the State, they are all really low. When the next storm season is upon us and water fills up the reservoirs, those reservoirs will have completely brand-new, fresh water. What will Clear Lake have? Some fresh water of course, but also a lot of the same water -and sediments, nutrients, algae — that is there now.

Clear Lake also has a very rich sediment bottom (see sediment core research from UC Davis mentioned above), from the half a million years of accumulation of inputs (from the nearby slopes and hills) and no full cycle of emptying and draining. No amount of management or activity will ever change the shape, size, and physics of this lake and how it fills and flows with water.

So, part of our “lake fixing” needs to include more informed and current research, more targeted and effective management, and a shift in our perceptions about what a healthy and “fixed” Clear Lake would really actually look like. The Blue Ribbon Committee is dedicated to achieving all these things, but they want to accomplish them in the right way — which does take time.

How can you be involved and learn more?

If you want to receive emails from the BRC, sign up for the BRC Listserv here.

I also highly encourage you to attend BRC meetings or subcommittee meetings. They always leave time for public comment. Likewise, it’s a great way to see how many people can come together, collaboratively, and discuss complex, yet important topics that will impact Clear Lake — and how to solve them!

Stay tuned for the next “Lady of the Lake” column for part two about the Blue Ribbon Committee.

In that column we will breakdown the currently funded BRC projects from the governor's 2021 approved budget, and the upcoming proposed projects being reviewed for funding at the next BRC meeting on Sept 23.

Sincerely,
Lady of the Lake

Angela De Palma-Dow is a limnologist (limnology = study of fresh inland waters) who lives and works in Lake County. Born in Northern California, she has a Master of Science from Michigan State University. She is a Certified Lake Manager from the North American Lake Management Society, or NALMS, and she is the current president/chair of the California chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..