Zoning Ruling

On August 29, 2007, Indian Lake Borough Council enacted Zoning Ordinance 144.

On September 26, 2007 Mary Jo Takacs and James L. Lyons, the Appellants, appealed this ordinance to the Zoning Hearing Board. After very lengthy hearings, which I attended, the Zoning Hearing Board ruled in favor of the ordinance.

The Appellants subsequently filed suit against Indian Lake Borough, the Zoning Hearing Board, and St. Clair Resort Development, LLC.

Each time the judge ruled in favor of the Borough, et al, the Appellants filed appeals.

Finally this week the court issued its ruling against the Appellants' appeals in a 14 page strongly worded ruling. One quote that I love "The Court does not accept Appellant's argument ----one that certainly is a slippery slope argument".

The entire ruling is of course Public Record available for you to read if you so desire.

The bottom line is, that due to these well financed Appellants, Indian Lake Borough and Sr. Clair Development have had to delay projects and spent excessive amount of private and tax money to defend themselves and the ordinance.

This tax money if your money.

Please if you know the Appellants or their financial backers, tell them enough is enough. Let's work together in harmony as a community to go forward.

Development

In the e-News of 16 June 2010 the Council President enumerated several exciting new developments at the Lake. This is great news, even if some of it may be a bit premature.

One thing that I think was overlooked was what St. Clair Development has already done.

They took an old building that needed to be torn down, at borough expense, and converted it in the Arrowhead Condominiums, tax generating residential units.

They took the Lodge and spent millions remodeling it into a very respectful restaurant and banquet facility. In all the years I have owned property here at the Lake never has the facility been better. It is now a pleasure to take guests to the Indian Lake Lodge for a meal, rather than running to Somerset, Windber, Richland, or Johnstown.

They took an overgrown hillside, the old ski slops, and have thus far built 2 condominiums, one private home, and a docking facility for the condo residents and others (as space is available).

If you haven't try the Lodge, look around, sample the food (the service is terrific). Take a look at the docks and the hillside from the Lake, what an improvement.

This is development in action, development that brings people and money into our community. The St. Clair's are to be commended, they are a true asset to our community.

Leaking Valve

If you do not follow the Somerset Daily American you may want to read this story:

http://www.dailyamerican.com/articles/2010/06/10/news/local/news095.txt

The story is basically factual, in fact I am impressed by the writer's ability to report happenings accurately.

One area where I feel amplification would help is on the history of "the valve".

The original valve was a sluice gate type and served the borough well for 40+ years.

Phase I of the Dam Remediation project included replacing this sluice gate with a new valve and adding a downstream valve to the other end of the pipe through the dam. The engineering firm chose to use duplicate gate valves for both applications. The upstream valve, normally under 50 feet of water, was a problem from day one. The downstream valve, which is not under water, has worked almost flawlessly from day one. One could conclude that either the upstream valve was a misapplication or that the valve itself has some kind of a flaw.

CME of Somerset was hired to review the situation, and has subsequently been hired to replace the original engineering firm. They recommended that the upstream valve be replaced with a new sluice gate valve. Extra precautions and money was spent to insure that the Borough got the best available. Representatives of the manufacture were here to inspect the sluice gate and supervise the installation of same. It was not until the lake returned to normal pool level that the final adjustments could be made on the sluice gate. That is when we observed, that even with the correct adjustments, the sluice gate leaked more than it should. Again, representatives of the manufacturer where here and supervised the entire operation.

It is the nature of a sluice gate to leak some, in this case, with this size sluice gate under 50 feet of water, it should leak less than a gallon per minute. The pressure of the water acting on the sluice gate helps seal it. Ours is leaking at the rate of 60 GPM.

Video of the actual situation shot on June 2nd is being sent to all parties this week. A teleconference is scheduled for next week. 60 GPM will not drain the lake, plenty of water is flowing over the spillway. The downstream valve is capable of containing the full flow, as it has done for many months. But we bought a sluice gate that should only leak about 1 GPM and all parties are working towards that result.

As Paul Harvey would say, now you know the rest of the story.

This morning I received our first telephone call from the Borough's new reverse 911 system. We all got a mailing about it asking for a preferred contact number, and it has been described in the Newsletters. But it caught me by surprise, and I almost did not accept the call. My caller ID read:

"UNKNOWN NAME

754-8161"

Glad I answered it, now I will know for the future. The message was simple and should not effect me at all. The peninsula water tank is being painted, hopefully there will be minimum water interruption for any of the Borough residents. If you do experience a problem please notify the office.

This painting was scheduled to start after the Memorial Day weekend and will be completed prion to the Forth of July Holiday.