On Lake George: Why ProcellaCOR? Why now?

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

By Zachary Matson

Lake George Park Commission Executive Director Dave Wick hoped that a new herbicide, ProcellaCOR, with state and federal approval and a successful track record would be welcomed in the battle against Eurasian watermilfoil in Lake George.

He proposed piloting the product in a pair of northeastern bays where milfoil has been left to grow for nearly a decade, thinking it would be welcomed by residents before spreading its use to other trouble spots.

Instead, the Lake George Association (LGA) and nearby property owners have fought the project, in the courts, in the media and at every public meeting.

The Explorer sat down with Wick in his office to discuss the project and his responses to the criticisms. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: What did you make of the public comments you heard at the park commission meeting last month?

The people that spoke, we think, spoke from their understanding of what the project is and what the product is, and the frustration that I’ve noted before is it is not an accurate one. So when there’s people saying, ‘we’re concerned for our health, we don’t want to drink the water.’ There is not one lake management expert, aquatic toxicologist that has that assessment that there is anything unsafe or anything harmful in any way about ProcellaCOR related to drinking water, related to public swimming, fishing, it just doesn’t exist in the record. The LGA, now that they’ve lost the legal challenge and there’s not much recourse left for them to stop the project, [their strategy] is to scare the public It’s a tactic of, if you’re not going to win on the basis of the facts and the science, then rally the public with information that is not scientifically accurate. And people will respond because they believe, or they believed, that the LGA was a trusted source of information. 

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

Q: When you hear people talking about being worried for their children’s safety, how do you assuage these concerns?

I don’t disagree that our communication is limited. We have me and a cell phone, that’s our entire media outreach team. And we’re fighting the $20 million Lake George Association. They are geared for outreach.  

The problem is we don’t have an outreach machine, and our agency isn’t the arbiter of the science on this. This is the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the state Department of Environmental Conservation. This is the Department of Health. And every single state in the union. Canada, the most environmentally-protective country in the world, has reviewed and approved this.

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

Q: When people hear PFAS, they get concerned about this idea that it could cause cancer or other health problems and that it breaks down slowly in the environment. Are you saying that if ProcellaCOR had these traits, it would have been identified in the review process of the EPA and DEC and never been allowed?

The idea that an aquatic herbicide would be a forever chemical and never break down in the water column, that would have never been accepted. You can’t just put chemicals in water that are going to stay there forever. The product breakdown of ProcellaCOR is incredibly rapid, and it disintegrates down into three primary metabolites that are not seen as carcinogenic or anything else. We’re not aquatic toxicologists, but the people that have gone through this whole process and stand by their work say that. That’s what the scientific literature says about it. 

Q: At the meeting, someone said this Minnesota report found that “ProcellaCOR causes cancer.” What did you think of that?

It’s a great soundbite, but it’s absolutely wrong.

Q: If you leave the June 20 APA meeting with both the APA and DEC approvals in hand, you’ll have 10 days to get ProcellaCOR in the water?

Once we have the permits, the project is eligible to be applied in the lake, depending on whatever the licensed applicator decides is a good time to do it. It can’t be windy, it can’t be rainy. It’s best if it’s not cloudy, just because it breaks down immediately through photolysis. But I can’t imagine that we’re gonna have weather that bad for 10 days that they can’t apply it.

Q: The LGA already has a new lawsuit prepared and have said they’ll ask for an injunction. Given the condensed time frame, why not wait another year?

No, I don’t think that we need yet another year. We’ve been doing this for almost four years now. Brant Lake just did a 164-acre application. Paradox Lake did between 30 and 60 acres. Caroga Lake is next week. So these things are happening all around us, and you don’t see public opposition. Are they less concerned for their children? Do they somehow think that their lake is less important? No, they don’t.

Q: Why these bays? Why not another area? Somewhere surrounded by state land?

If you look at the 2016 report that’s put together by our milfoil harvesting contractor, and he says we’ve been harvesting Blair’s Bay every year that they’ve been on the lake, and it just gets bigger every time we harvest. Do we want to continue to spend $30,000 to $40,000 every year harvesting the milfoil for it to come back as robust as it was the year before? We’re doing that to the detriment of all the other sites. 

The idea behind the two bays is straight out of basic management 101. If you have solely one pilot site, then whatever may or not happened in that pilot site, you can’t confirm with a second site. So Blair’s Bay is about a 4-acre treatment and Sheep Meadow Bay, which is a site that we hadn’t harvested since 2014 primarily because it’s not in the main causeway of boats going in and out, so it wasn’t getting chopped up constantly. And remember, this is before we thought there was going to be any opposition to this. We thought this was a good thing.

Q: You thought people in these bays would welcome this?

Absolutely. Look at Sunset Bay. I have a letter that is a sign off from every homeowner in Sunset Bay, saying please come to Sunset Bay to do this, because we’re tired of the milfoil.  Maybe I was naive.

Q: Why not pivot to Sunset Bay? 

Because of the lawsuit. If you pivot to another bay, then that is an entirely different project. That would be more open to legal challenges than doing the two sites that have been fully vetted, fully approved. I wanted to add Sunset Bay this year, because they want it, and it’s a good project, and we have the resources to do it. So why can’t we? Our lawyers said at this stage, just do the two, what we call the pilot sites, demonstration sites.

Q: The LGA says, and you might agree with this, that there’s no milfoil crisis on the lake, so what’s the urgency? 

I don’t disagree. Milfoil is not a crisis in Lake George, but why does something need to reach crisis level before you use all the tools available to manage for the long term benefit of the lake? Every year we spend $400,000 to $500,000 on Eurasian watermilfoil control. At some point you say, if you have a better solution for a fraction of the cost. 

Q: Some people hold this position: no chemicals, period. How do you think through that and decide what’s right?

The idea of not in my backyard, or we don’t know what we don’t know, you can never overcome those, right? In talking with all the people from EPA and DEC and Department of Health and everybody else, the gauntlet that any product has to go through to come to market is absolutely staggering. And the product is undetectable 24 hours after application.

Photo at top: David Wick, executive director of the Lake George Park Commission, drives a crew of swimmers looking for milfoil on Lake George. Explorer file photo