Lake George residents in ProcellaCOR pilot bays raise health concerns over herbicide use

Adirondack Park Agency faces stout opposition to Lake George plan as it considers herbicide permits 

By Zachary Matson

Every day, Mike Maginnis takes a dip off his dock in Lake George’s northern basin. He swims alongside Meadow Point, passing over a bed of Eurasian watermilfoil. The invasive plant doesn’t bother him even at its zenith of annual growth. 

If the Lake George Park Commission carries out its goal to release an herbicide, ProcellaCOR, in that bay this month, the milfoil will likely be gone, and Maginnis says so will his swimming. He and his wife Jillian aren’t swayed by government safety assurances. 

“There’s no magic fix in a chemical, it doesn’t exist,” said Jillian, who worked as a cancer immunologist in California. “This hasn’t been around long enough to understand the health and environmental impacts.”

RELATED READING: What is ProcellaCOR and how does it target milfoil?

The park commission on Thursday is seeking a pair of Adirondack Park Agency permits to test ProcellaCOR in its long running battle against invasive milfoil rooted in scores of sites in the lake’s shallow near-shore waters. 

The board will also consider herbicide permits for the Chateaugay Lake Foundation to treat the northern Adirondack lake and for Highland Forests, LLC to treat Highlands Forge Lake in Willsboro.

A handful of other property owners share the shoreline of Sheep Meadow Bay, also known as Jelliffe-Knight bay, with the Maginnises, who purchased their camp four years ago. To many of those owners, as well as residents in the Glenburnie neighborhood in Blair’s Bay, the commission’s other pilot site, the herbicide plan will disrupt how they have long enjoyed the lake. They do not view the milfoil as a problem meriting chemical control. 

Some of those residents expressed their concerns and frustrations with the park commissioners at their May meeting after the commission approved a contractor licensed to apply the herbicide as early as this month.

“Their minds were made up, they wouldn’t even hear us,” Jillian said. “And these were the people in the treatment zones talking.”

A map showing the two bays where the Lake George Park Commission is seeking approval to pilot the use of the herbicide ProcellaCOR to treat invasive Eurasian watermilfoil and the approximate boundaries of the four-acre treatment zones. Map by Zachary Matson

The treatment zones — each roughly 4 acres —  include milfoil beds that in the past were harvested by hand but were abandoned nearly a decade ago as not worth the cost and manpower. 

Now, the park commission is eyeing them as a pair of pilots that, if proven as effective at killing off milfoil as in other lakes, could lead to broader treatments in Lake George. 

Dave Wick, executive director of the park commission, has said the concerns of shoreline residents are based in a “misunderstanding regarding the behavior, environmental fate and safety profile” of the herbicide and exacerbated by messaging from the Lake George Association. 

Wick has highlighted the numerous government safety reviews and approvals from 49 states, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and numerous other nations, as proof the herbicide’s potential risks have been exhaustively evaluated. 

“All of these extensive reviews document zero public health impacts from its labeled use, and exceedingly limited impacts upon native plants and organisms,” Wick wrote in a letter responding to public comments submitted to APA.

RELATED READING: Lake George Park Commission Executive Director Dave Wick addresses concerns over ProcellaCOR use

Visiting the two bays last week, Lake George Waterkeeper Chris Navitsky said the park commission hasn’t made its case for using the herbicide.

He dismissed other Adirondack lakes as poor comparisons to sprawling Lake George and argued that in other lakes the herbicide was welcomed by lake associations and residents, unlike the response of Lake George property owners. He said the milfoil growth hasn’t risen to an urgent level and that the park commission can wait for more data from other ProcellaCOR applications and to work through local concerns. 

“It’s a problem, but I don’t think it’s a crisis,” Navitsky said. “There are no areas of the lake that are infested enough to get in the way of people’s enjoyment.” 

A handful of milfoil fragments floated near a concentrated site in Blair’s Bay, where emerging milfoil reached toward the surface. The areas haven’t been harvested in years, Navistky said, but the beds have done little to swamp the large bay.

He suggested that smaller and shallower lakes are more affected by milfoil growth than Lake George, which in many places drops precipitously to depths the milfoil won’t grow.

“If it was out of control and this bed hasn’t been treated in 10 years, it would take over the whole bay,” Navitsky said.

In objecting to the plan, residents of the two bays worry about impacts on drinking lake water and swimming. They question whether it’s possible to understand the long-term effects of an herbicide in use for seven years.

They say it will harm rental income and threaten organic gardens — all for milfoil patches that have never interfered with their boating, paddling or swimming. Some of the lakeshore residents have said they will not drink the lake water or even allow their children to swim if the herbicide is used— regardless of government assurances that it is safe to do so.

Scott Engler, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, said he was frustrated by the park commission moving ahead with its plan despite a “groundswell of people locally who are against it.” 

Finding out that Minnesota had listed ProcellaCOR’s active ingredient as meeting the state’s broad definition of PFAS didn’t help him feel any better about the herbicide. 

“I don’t know that there is a long-term study that addresses the concern about my kids being exposed to it,” Engler said. “I think I would not have my kids swim in the lake and will have to have some bottled water for the rest of the summer.” 

His 7-year-old son Kasper learned about activism in school this year, writing persuasive essays about the importance of climate change. Engler said he and Kasper had discussed the ProcellaCOR plan and the concerns. 

“If you put it in then we can’t drink the water,” Kasper said. 

Engler said he and his wife got used to packing their kids in the car and heading away from California wildfire smoke. 

“I feel like this is an unnecessary version of that type of parenting,” he said of accounting for ProcellaCOR in Blair’s Bay. Just how will he keep a 7-year-old out of the pristine lake in his backyard on warm summer days? “It’s not a scenario you really want to encounter.”

Top photo: Residents around Lake George are fighting back against a plan to use an herbicide against invasive milfoil. Photo by Zachary Matson